Walking in the park, a couple overhears gunshots and finds a woman kneeling over the body of a Navy captain. Arriving on scene, NCIS discovers the woman is Joanne Fielding (Gena Rowlands), mother of Gibbs’s first wife Shannon, grandmother of his daughter Kelly.
Joanne’s involvement called into question whether Gibbs could objectively work the case. Gibbs and Vance’s discussion of this was mostly for show, as Gibbs ended up staying on the case. Joanne claimed that she and the Navy captain were attacked in the park and that she was standing behind the captain when he was shot. To the contrary, forensic evidence indicated Joanne must have been facing the captain and may very well have been his killer.
Looking into the captain’s life, NCIS found he’d made millions of dollars working with a Mexican drug cartel, the same cartel with ties to Shannon and Kelly’s killer. From there, Gibbs pieced together that Joanne targeted and seduced the captain looking to take some revenge for Shannon and Kelly’s deaths–very similar to what Gibbs did, hunting down their actual killer.
The only other suspect was an associate of the captain’s, whose gun was the murder weapon. Having been stonewalled in past episodes by crusading attorney M. Allison Hart (Rena Sofer), Gibbs actually brought her in himself this time to represent Joanne. He then proceeded to elicit a murder confession from Joanne illegally, in effect letting Joanne off the hook. Meanwhile Vance seemed happy enough to have the captain’s drug-dealing associate in custody. Vance himself has used NCIS for personal cases in the past, so he didn’t have much room to criticize Gibbs’s actions.
Summing up, this episode showed some good tension between Gibbs and Joanne as it brought up more of Gibbs’s past. I gladly watched as the team uncovered the captain’s backstory and how he really died, but I didn’t like how Gibbs and Vance got around the law for Joanne’s sake. It’s the kind of disregard for the law that reminds me this is a TV drama. Sometimes that’s the last thing I want to remember. I want to be fully invested in the realism of what’s going on. Instead, I was thinking (and hoping) authorities work around the law a lot less in reality than in fiction.
