NCIS – “A Man Walks Into a Bar…” – review

The body of Cmdr. Vincent Reynolds, executive officer aboard the U.S.S. Colonial, is found just as the ship receives orders to monitor activity off the coast of North Korea. While investigating Reynolds’s death, the team undergoes mandatory psych evaluations by Dr. Rachel Cranston (Wendy Makkena).

Early on, a bullet casing found with Reynolds’s body was traced to a gun commonly used by Russian and Korean forces. This threw suspicion on a South Korean reporter who was missing at the estimated time of Reynolds’s death. The reporter turned out to be a North Korean spy, but those same spy activities ruled him out of killing Reynolds.

Much of the episode was taken up by flashbacks as Dr. Cranston tried to get at each team member’s motivation. I tend to dislike this sort of direct analysis. I prefer to get to know characters more by what they do than by what they say or what others say about them. It was interesting, though, to hear Ziva say she wanted “something permanent, something that can’t be taken away.”

The others mostly flashed back to their memories of Kate Todd, who happened to be my favorite character after Gibbs in the early days of NCIS. These clips of Kate alone would have been enough to honor Sasha Alexander’s two seasons on the show, but Dr. Cranston was also revealed to be Kate’s older sister.

The revelation was especially poignant for DiNozzo, who had begun to see himself in Reynolds, a man with no family, no real life outside the Navy, who ultimately killed himself with his own gun. Tony and Kate spent so much time bickering or flirting that I was never sure how she really felt about him. Rachel told Tony that Kate treated him that way because she saw his potential.

Finally, Gibbs gave Rachel some closure by showing her the spot in his basement where Ziva shot Kate’s killer, Ari Haswari, dead. After watching the episode, I had a feeling Gibbs knew who Rachel really was all along. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have agreed to let Rachel observe the team at all.