NCIS: “Endgame” – Review

Joggers find a murdered surgeon linked to Director Vance’s nemesis, North Korean assassin Lee Wuan Kai (Kelly Hu), last seen critically injured in her encounter with the OSP team in Los Angeles.

Vance uncharacteristically headed the investigation into why Kai had resurfaced in DC. This gave viewers a chance to learn Vance first tangled with Kai seventeen years earlier. After Kai assassinated a politician, Vance landed a shot in her chest, but this didn’t stop her from shooting him and killing his partner.

Kai next called Vance from right outside his house. This may have been meant to scare viewers into thinking she was carrying out a personal vendetta against Vance, but if she really wanted to kill him or his wife, she could have done it right then. I never felt any of the team’s lives were in danger, and with that went a lot of my interest.

Aside from Vance’s past, there wasn’t much intrigue to this episode. There was a suspect other than Kai in the doctor’s death, but Gibbs quickly intuited she wasn’t the killer. There was a side plot of McGee meeting and falling for an attractive grad student named Amanda. At first, this struck me as oddly out of place next to the hunt for Kai. Things between McGee and Amanda moved very quickly—the first hint she was too good to be true—and indeed she turned out to be a South African mercenary hired by North Korea to eliminate Kai, who had become a dangerous wild card.

It turned out Kai was on a personal mission of vengeance, not against Vance but against the doctor and a former North Korean soldier, both of whom contributed to her becoming an assassin for the state. In a conversation with Gibbs, Ducky predicted that Kai saw Vance as a confidante and she would turn to him for help. I found this prediction unnecessary, as it was followed shortly by a final showdown between Kai and Vance at his house. There, Kai explained she only wanted Vance to kill her, to end a life with which she’d become disgusted. Vance was reluctant, wanting to bring Kai in. I was rooting for this, too, and was let down when Mrs. Vance abruptly shot and killed Kai.

“Endgame,” like last week’s “Outlaws and In-Laws,” ended with a character’s voice-over narration. To me, voice-overs are the weakest storytelling technique, the writer’s attempt to impose a theme because the rest of the story may not have shown that theme well enough. Several episodes this season have been personal (to Ziva, to Gibbs, to Vance, to McGee). I didn’t think they were too personal until “Endgame.” And now I’d like NCIS to get back to the topical, twisty mysteries that made it a hit.