NCIS: LOS ANGELES Pursues a Lone Wolf

The NCIS: Los Angeles team investigates when former Naval Intelligence agent Stephanie Walters is gunned down on a sidewalk. At the time of her death, Walters had been involved with efforts to bring clean drinking water to developing regions of the world, but she was also keeping a double life from her boyfriend.

Walters’s double life may have been planned as this episode’s first twist, but it was no surprise to me that an intelligence agent would be leading a double life; that’s what spies do, after all.

Some of Walters’s last known work was for Larry Basser (Scott Paulin), an ex-Army officer, NSA agent, and friend of Hetty’s who now ran a private intelligence firm. While Hetty interviewed Basser directly, Callen and Sam took the opportunity to sneak into his house. I had a hard time believing Callen and Sam could carry out this secret mission while Hetty was talking with Basser in the same house. One of Basser’s young sons caught Sam, but Sam was able to distract the boy with magic tricks. This was a cute scene, but again, a stretch.

From all the information collected, NCIS discovered that Basser was planning to force an oil company to build a pipeline through land owned by one of his shell corporations in Afghanistan. Walters had also found this out and was going to blow the whistle on Basser.

I enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game between Hetty and Basser, but I had to wonder why a veteran operator like Basser would have thugs machine-gun Walters in broad daylight. Perhaps this was to obscure his connection to Walters’s murder, but I would think Basser could’ve found a cleaner way to neutralize Walters, possibly without killing her–a way that may not have attracted NCIS’s attention. Ultimately, I have to say lone wolf Larry Basser did not live up to his hype.