This episode opens with Special Agent Kensi Blye visiting Certified National Bank to open a safe deposit box. While she is being helped, gunmen break into the bank. Kensi acts to stop them and gets shot for her trouble. The episode then flashes back twenty-four hours to show what led up to the shooting.
The OSP team was tapped to investigate Chad Jeffcoate, the L.A. connection to the robbery of $5 million in U.S. currency from a Marine convoy in Iraq. Jeffcoate had access to confidential convoy routes, and Callen and Sam hoped to catch him before he reported for work that morning. Instead, they find his body in a Dumpster near his house.
Just as Jeffcoate was paid off by the terrorist group Jihadist Raiders Front, Callen and the team learned that the group intended the $5 million to pay a heist crew that would break into Certified National Bank and oversee the transfer of $50 million in frozen terror assets back to the Jihadist Raiders.
With the recent disappearance of Agent Vail (Adam Jamal Craig), I didn’t think the series would be so quick to put another series regular in peril. Reading that an NCIS agent would be shot, I thought it would be a guest character, like Mike Renko (Brian Avers), not Kensi. The fact that it was Kensi gave the episode good tension. We saw some of Kensi’s treasured knickknacks. She opened up to Nate about what happened to her father. (He went out drinking with some buddies and told her to stay home. She disobeyed him, went to the movies, and learned of his murder the next morning.) All of this was designed to make me care more about Kensi, and it worked.
Not to spoil a surprise twist, I’ll just say I never saw the twist coming. The flashback structure was used to great effect. This is another episode that proves no matter how clever we think we are as viewers, we can only work with what the writers give us. When a plot is executed well enough, writers have viewers hanging on every moment.
