NCIS: “Jet Lag” – review

While Tony and Ziva escort an accountant from Paris to Washington on her way to testify against her company for bilking the Navy of millions in unneeded repair costs, Gibbs and McGee investigate a dead Marine who was one of many killers to accept the contract on the accountant’s life.

After watching this episode, I logged onto Twitter and saw that Leverage and Eureka writer/producer Amy Berg had mentioned how often writers use the confined-on-a-plane scenario, including Berg’s own Season 1 Leverage episode, “The Mile High Job,” the Season 4 Bones episode “The Woman in the Oven,” and the second episode of Human Target this season, “Rewind.” Nevertheless, making the killer’s identity random is a sure way to draw interest. The episode was a shell game with two good suspects and one very clever attempt to kill the accountant.

My first suspect was a federal air marshal who changed his schedule to be on the same flight with Tony, Ziva, and the accountant. As often as I’ve seen it on television, I just can’t tell when a villain is masquerading as a lawman or other heroic type. My next suspect was a man who’d been behaving erratically the whole flight. When the killer struck, exposing the allergic accountant to a lethal dose of peanut dust, the man offered an injection he claimed was epinephrine, but Tony, Ziva, and I couldn’t be certain he was telling the truth. They didn’t have time to try anything else. They had to take the chance, a great climax.

The two main female guest characters in this episode weren’t very nuanced, in my opinion. The accountant was annoyingly optimistic, as Tony pointed out, almost too good to be true. Dina Meyer played a madame who facilitated all sorts of transactions from prostitution to contract killing. More than anything it was her character’s name that bothered me: Holly Snow. Abby said her name as if Gibbs and I should have known it. Then I realized it was a flimsy take on Heidi Fleiss. Still I enjoyed Gibbs and Vance breaking her down in interrogation, as always.

Though this episode’s plot elements were familiar, some of them really work, which is why so many writers use them. The revelation of who took the contract out on the accountant was a letdown, but the shell game getting there was well executed. And of course, no other series has NCIS‘s characters. I wonder what really happened when Tony and Ziva had to share a hotel room in Paris.