Callen leaves his rooming house one morning and spots a man tailing him. He doubles back on the man and chases him until the man is hit by a car. Callen checks on the man, who calls him “Callen,” not his apparent alias, “Tom.” With his cover blown, Callen must stay away from the rest of the OSP team while they deal with a computer attack that jeopardizes the files on every NCIS agent worldwide.
Callen learned the man tailing him was a private investigator hired by a man calling himself Eugene Keelson (Welsh actor Peter Wingfield, doing a decent Australian accent). In exchange for handing a flash drive to some Bulgarians for cash, Keelson offers to tell Callen more about his real identity–for example, what the G in “G. Callen” stands for. Meanwhile, Keelson ran the assault on the servers at OSP headquarters, forcing Hetty and the others to retreat to a back-up location.
Callen’s meeting with the Bulgarians went sour and ended in a shoot-out. Callen retrieved Keelson’s flash drive and decided to use Keelson’s computer attack to set up a meeting with him. In the end, Callen did catch up with Keelson, and order was restored at headquarters, but there was still the question of who hired Keelson. We’ll apparently find that out in next week’s season finale.
I know the OSP is supposed to be an undercover high-tech branch of NCIS, but Callen has identified himself to people as “Callen” often enough this season. The others have used their apparent real names as well. Are they still considered undercover? I also don’t much care about Callen’s “mysterious” past. It seems like something deliberately added to make his character cooler. I suppose it does help him immerse himself in the roles he plays, but otherwise he seems like a regular guy. The fact he doesn’t know his birth name doesn’t matter.
I look forward to what we’ll learn next week, but, being practical, it’s too early to learn much about Callen’s real self–if that’s something the show plans to stretch out over several seasons. In general, though, I care more about a character’s present than his past.
