NCIS “Recoil”
Original Air Date: May 6th, 2008
Angelique – TwoCents Reviewer
angelique@thetwocentscorp.com
A man washes the blood off his hands in the bathroom sink when he receives a phone call by someone waiting outside to pick him up. On his way to the waiting car you can see that he passes the body of a female placed on the living room floor. The jagged cuts indicate that her death was violent, her belongings along with her clothes and a bloody knife are placed next to her on a plastic sheet. The man closes the door behind him and gets into a waiting car, he leans over and kisses Ziva.
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NCIS
ReplyDelete“Recoil”
Original Air Date: May 6th, 2008
Angelique – TwoCents Reviewer
angelique@thetwocentscorp.com
A man washes the blood off his hands in the bathroom sink when he receives a phone call by someone waiting outside to pick him up. On his way to the waiting car you can see that he passes the body of a female placed on the living room floor. The jagged cuts indicate that her death was violent, her belongings along with her clothes and a bloody knife are placed next to her on a plastic sheet. The man closes the door behind him and gets into a waiting car, he leans over and kisses Ziva.
I personally love the episodes that lean heavy on a certain character. In which case that person has to carry the entire episode. And that is exactly what Ziva did, this particular episode was more focused on drama and contain less laughter but still it had the usual NCIS chemistry.
Tony is undercover as a ‘cable guy’ he enters the house of the suspect and finds the death woman. Gibbs and McGee follow Ziva in a car and Gibbs tells McGee to call Ziva and give her the distress call, which tells her that they are going to take Andrew Hoffman down. McGee is known as the man with the gadgets but when he calls Ziva he apparently uses Gibbs’ phone since that is what Ziva’s caller id says when Andrew grabs her phone to confirm his suspicions about Ziva being a cop.
He pulls a gun on her and because of her undercover mission Ziva doesn’t have her side arm with her. He forces her out of the car into and abandoned warehouse. Where a struggle for the possession of the gun ensues, at one point Ziva is being held at gun point with her back towards Andrew. The struggle ends with gun shots.
For a character which is usually represented as a strong, independent female Ziva looked very fragile this episode. Of course shooting a man in cold blood to defend your own life is not something that you do easily but on the other hand Ziva is the ‘Mossad assassin’. On the other hand she is only human and this episode showed that she is not the same Ziva she was when she started working with NCIS. Back then she would have never reacted the way she did now and if this had been an early season three episode it would have been completely different. Ziva would have shrugged the whole incident off as if nothing had happened.
It was refreshing to see that for once instead of Ziva being jealous of Tony - or rather of the women that he seems to be interested in - that it was now Tony who seemed to be the jealous one. He was unable to hide it, and though he covered it as being worried about her it was pretty obvious in the way that he watched her when they where in the bar and she was talking to Michael. Added to that all the jealous sounding comments that he made referring to her going out with Michael the suspected second killer.
I wonder what my boss would do to me if I ‘rage against the machine’ (that would be my computer at work) the way Ziva attacked the copier, Mossad style. And judging by the shoe prints on that copier that was not the first time she kicked against it. Though Ziva for the first time denied being an assassin later when she was in bed with Locke when he assumed that she had killed before. When she told him that she was an Israeli Mossad officer not a cop. We all know of course that she has killed before. This episode also marks the second time, if we don’t count Tony, that she invests time and shows feelings towards a man and looses him.
There was one little detail that annoyed me. If one of the NCIS team gets hurt you can always expect sympathy from your team members, though in Ziva’s case that was not really what happened. Usually the first thing you see when they arrive back at the NCIS navy yard is Abby sprinting through the room and launching into a hug. There was no scene with Abby and Ziva together, there was no hug. Not even a question from Abby about Ziva, that surprised me. Why do they still after all this time act as if Abby and Ziva can’t be friends? You would expect them to be at the very least be concerned about each others well fare.
I watch a lot of crime shows, both television shows as well as documentaries but this episode there was one scene that really annoyed me. Do all cops who come to drop off evidence park their car in the evidence garage? I found that a rather peculiar scene. I mean, Abby was right there processing a car with possible evidence in an evidence garage with the doors open and an other car comes driving inside? I don’t know it struck me as a strange scene.
In my opinion the plot in this episode was well written, true to the characters and we finally saw a little more of Ziva’s personality. As I said before I love the episodes that show us the depths of a character. Exploring them further then they would in a normal episode, when the focus is on the case and none of the team are directly involved with the case.
The ending of the episode was good, that last scene especially, that trademark Ziva smile on her face when she handed him the phone number. It was her way of showing Locke that she wasn’t such a bad person after all. It was obvious in his voice that he was hurt by Ziva for suspecting him to be the second killer. Her finding his ex girlfriend for him was a way of saying sorry.
Did this episode live up to the expectations that you had? For me it certainly did. Are you looking forward to the last couple of episodes that we have left this season?