Marines marching on the beach find a decomposed body in a Navy diver’s wetsuit. Cooperating, NCIS and the Coast Guard Investigative Service uncover several people hunting for treasure said to have gone down with a fabled Spanish vessel.
This was something of a gimmick episode in that the CGIS’s lead agent, Abigail Borin (Diane Neal), was a tough, go-with-her-gut investigator similar to Gibbs. She supervised another agent, Kyle Omagi (Eddie Shin), with mannerisms similar to McGee. The final doppelganger character was FBI lab tech Molly Choi, a match for NCIS’s Abby Sciuto. The premise might have been more intriguing to me if I didn’t remember a Season 2 episode of NCIS called “Doppelganger,” in which Gibbs’s team worked with a unit of DC Metro police officers very similar to themselves.
Gibbs and Agent Borin had good chemistry, but I knew it wouldn’t lead to romance, because Gibbs is already intrigued this season with M. Allison Port. Therefore, the only character nuance that interested me this episode was Abby’s acting unusually cranky and “off her game.” Later in the episode, we learn the reason for this is an experimental change to the formula for Caf-Pow, a la New Coke.
As for the plot, it turned out the body in the wetsuit wasn’t a Navy diver, but a beleaguered surgeon searching for sunken treasure. He was killed along with the boat captain who brought him out to sea. For most of the episode, the best suspect was the surgeon’s wife, but she didn’t seem like the one who directly killed two men. While Gibbs and Borin leaned on her, there were a number of red herrings to run down. None of them turned up better suspects, and the episode’s viewpoint shifted too abruptly to the surgeon’s wife plotting her getaway with the previously-unseen, supposedly-dead Navy diver, who faked the treasure to bilk the surgeon for money.
Viewers who haven’t seen or don’t remember “Doppelganger” might well enjoy “Jurisdiction.” For me, it was one of the few episodes in seven seasons of NCIS that was clearly repetitive.
