Wednesday, January 7, 2009

NCIS - Recap & Review - Caged

NCIS
Caged

Original Air Date: 6 Jan 2009

Nicola - TheTwoCents Reviewer
nicola@thetwocentscorp.com


There are no cheerleaders in the navy, right? That’s why the “murder” at the beginning of this episode looks a little misleading. Instead of a violent crime, what we’re actually witnessing is the filming of a low-budget slasher film, a film that becomes a little too real when the actress playing the cheerleader falls into a half buried tomb and meets her newest coworker – a skeleton with multiple stab wounds, no middle fingers, and a naval uniform.

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[photo: CBS.com]

1 comment:

  1. There are no cheerleaders in the navy, right? That’s why the “murder” at the beginning of this episode looks a little misleading. Instead of a violent crime, what we’re actually witnessing is the filming of a low-budget slasher film, a film that becomes a little too real when the actress playing the cheerleader falls into a half buried tomb and meets her newest coworker – a skeleton with multiple stab wounds, no middle fingers, and a naval uniform.

    Enter stage right: Gibbs and his team come in to investigate the death of Lt. Neil Puletto, an officer missing for many years. Gibbs already has a lead on the case – eleven years ago he put away a hooker named Celia Roberts for murdering two sailors, stabbing them in the same manner that Puletto’s been stabbed. Ducky confirms that the knife that killed Puletto is the same knife that killed the other two sailors. So now all that’s left to do is go talk to Celia Roberts in prison and get her confession. Wait, let me check my TV Guide… is this episode only ten minutes long?

    Gibbs sends McGee to obtain the confession from Roberts, partly in an attempt to prove his manliness to DiNozzo and Ziva. McGee heads to the big house and meets Roberts in an interview room. She’s a tough customer, not giving much away at first. Unfortunately, their interview is cut short by a ruckus outside in the common meeting area. The prisoners are yelling and a guard is slammed against the door. When McGee leaves the interview room he’s taken captive by the prisoners along with the other guards present. One guard is dead on the floor.

    Gibbs and his team are instantly there, eager to burst in and save McGee. But the warden and the prisoners have other ideas. The prisoners are tempted to send McGee’s finger out to prove their seriousness, but McGee convinces them that his whole self will be more persuasive, so he goes out to negotiate with the warden. The prisoners are willing to let their visiting families and the guards go for the assurance that only the murderer will be punished, not the rest of them. That leaves it to McGee to find out who killed the guard Trimble. The warden agrees and true to their word, the prisoners let the hostages go. Apart from McGee, that is.

    McGee goes about investigating with a dozen prison inmates helping him walk the crime scene (I use the word “helping” quite loosely). It looks like Trimble died from a single stab wound to the chest, though he looks like he took a blow to the back of the head. McGee isn’t able to find the murder weapon on any of the prisoners. He does, however, find the primary scene of the crime in the guard’s bathroom across the hall. There’s a dent in the wall above the toilet where Trimble’s head was bashed, and a blood trail leads from the bathroom to the visitation center. The warden provides a bit of a back-story on Trimble – evidently he was the warden’s head honcho when it came to tracking down how heroin was getting into the prison and into prisoners’ hands. Sounds like motive for a lot of people.

    Abby does a bit of digging of her own and finds out that Trimble had antifreeze in his blood, which was slowly poisoning him. If he hadn’t died from the stab wound, he would have died from that. DiNozzo examines footage from the riot in the visitation room and finds chunks of it cut out – the warden’s doing. It looks like he doesn’t want them to see the full story of what happened. Of course, he also probably doesn’t want them to know that he’s been faking his mandatory drug test for the past few months, but they find out anyway. He claims it’s because he’s on some heart medicine that he doesn’t want his employers to know about because they’d think he couldn’t cut it, but that remains to be seen.

    Either way, something fishy is going on with Trimble’s death, and McGee is pretty sure it has to do with drugs. One of the prisoners is going through withdrawal symptoms, and with a little coaxing McGee gets them to give up their drug supplier. His name is Lambro, and he’s one of the guards that was set free earlier. Lambro claims that Trimble is also in on the drug deals, and his step brother is a drug dealer. McGee thinks that this gives him enough cause to dive into Trimble’s e-mail, and he finds something pretty interesting - a picture of Trimble with Zoe Bellows, one of the prisoners’ daughter. Her DNA is also all over Trimble’s sheets.

    Gibbs talks to Zoe and finds out that Trimble was forcing her to have sex with him, telling her that he’d hurt her mom Sharon if she didn’t do it. And that’s why Zoe poisoned him. Of course, that still doesn’t solve who really killed him. But they’re on the right track. McGee figures out that Sharon is the murderer, though she refuses to turn herself in. All the prisoners are about to pay unless someone confesses, so Celia Roberts takes responsibility for the crime, as well as confessing to Puletto’s murder. As she’s already serving 125 years, adding a couple more murders to the list won’t hurt her much.

    The twist of a crime-within-a-crime in this episode kept things interesting, taking you one way before steering you another. Also, McGee’s personal involvement definitely took the intensity up a notch. Of course, Abby’s worrying over McGee was adorable, and it was nice to see him prove himself in the center of a case for once. Seems like DiNozzo learned his lesson not to tease, now that we know that McGee’s such a badass!

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