NCIS Searches for an Enemy on the Hill

A man runs into traffic and is hit by a car as he tries to avoid a TV news crew. The crew rushes over to help the man, and we see he has a gun in a shoulder holster. DC Metro Detective Sportelli (Jack Conley) comes into NCIS headquarters with news he’s arrested the man, who is actually a wanted professional killer known as The Cooler. Furthermore, The Cooler’s next target was apparently Navy Lt. Cmdr. Geoffrey Brett (Brett Tucker), a Top Gun aviator turned advisor to the House Armed Services Committee.

Advised of the threat on his life, Brett was reluctant to accept NCIS’s protection, but Gibbs assigned Ziva as his bodyguard while the rest of the team looked into who might have hired The Cooler.

Over the years, there have been a handful of NCIS episodes like “Enemy on the Hill,” ambitious hunts for anonymous masterminds. They are fine in concept, but they all fall victim to the 42-minute limit of a single episode. Only so many suspects can be presented to viewers within this time. The screenwriters have to play fair with viewers, so one of the suspects, no matter how unlikely, has to be the mastermind.

NCIS’s time to find the mastermind was further shortened by the subplot of Abby volunteering to donate a kidney and discovering she had a long-lost brother. This distracted her from work most of the episode and conveniently delayed the search for “George Kaplan,” in whose name a large sum of money had been wired to The Cooler’s bank account.

Gibbs, McGee, and DiNozzo visited an apartment rented in Kaplan’s name, but it didn’t seem as anyone actually lived there. Next, they visited Kaplan’s accountant, Drew Turner (Melissa Ponzio), but she claimed not to know where he was, either.

Very late, Tony recognized “George Kaplan” as an alias used in the Hitchcock film North By Northwest. This coincided with Abby focusing and analyzing the signatures that opened Kaplan’s brokerage account, which revealed that Brett and Drew Turner had opened the account. When NCIS informed Brett that The Cooler had been paid by Kaplan, Brett knew Drew Turner was making a play for all the money in the account. When questioned by NCIS, however, Brett and Turner had claimed not to know each other.

I went along with the episode for the most part, but I’m not much a fan of family drama, and while I didn’t recognize the George Kaplan film reference, film buff Tony should have caught it sooner. I guess we can chalk one more thing up to his concussion.

I’m left wondering why Drew Turner didn’t simply skip town as soon as NCIS asked about Kaplan. Instead, she stayed right at her home office where Brett found her and killed her. It probably has something to do with the fair play principle, presenting enough clues and suspects so viewers can solve the case themselves, but also wrapping up the mystery neatly in forty-two minutes.