NCIS 6×02: Agent Afloat

A better episode of NCIS, and while this does seem similar to the season 1 episode “The Immortals” (1×04), it was finally good to see Tony come home. A character episode, mostly, and one that made few discernable errors.

<Overview from tv.com>

With the rest of the team still missing Tony, who is still an agent afloat on the USS Seahawk, Tony finds that a sailor, Lieutenant Brad Evans, has committed suicide by way of jumping overboard. As McGee and Ziva go to inform the victim’s wife, Linda, in Washington about her husband’s death, they discover that she has been beaten to death – with some blows delivered post-mortem and with snot in her hair.

The team finds out that Evans was actually killed before he had boarded the ship and that someone who pretended to be him had entered the ship. McGee cracks his computer to find that the imposter is believed to be carrying an anthrax vaccine to protect himself from an attack. As Evans was a computer specialist in charge of the ship’s defence system, a biological attack could be lethal. The man that was reported to have contacted the imposter is Lieutenant Jason Kaplan and he soon becomes a suspect as Evans’s imposter.

Later Kaplan suffers from a drug overdose and is found to have left DC before Evans’s wife died, eliminating him as a suspect. McGee finds that the ship’s system was hacked to steal cases of anthrax vaccine to sell on the black market, and Abby finds that the snot contained a Samoan flu strain. A cross-check finds that the doctor’s assistant is the murderer.

Evans had owed the assistant, Taylor Henley, money and Henley made Evans order more anthrax to sell via the black market. Evan’s wife found out about the entire thing and Henley killed both of them to make sure that he wouldn’t be found out. Then he drugged up Kaplan to try to escape. As Henley tried to hijack the plane to escape, Gibbs enters and saves the day.

In the end, Tony goes back to NCIS and is reunited with his team – permanently.

Surprisingly, not many errors tonight. Just a few things:

1. McGee’s hacking skills must be almost magical. While an entire team of computer techs on the ship takes days to try to find out if anything was wrong with the computer network, McGee takes way shorter time to find that it was the shipping that was affected. I know that they were looking for a flaw in the defence system, but McGee should have been too.
2. Gibbs is kinda like Dr. House. He’s good at what he does, but you have to cater to his every whim. Why else would Director Vance put Tony back? That guy needs to stick to a decision.
3. The bad guy did seem a little fake and nervous when he appeared on the screen. Too obvious.
4. And I know this is a little petty, but Ziva keeps changing her hairstyle. In DC, it was mostly straight, in Cartagena it was permed, and then on the ship, it was straight. Is that something ALL women do?

Good Crime, interesting premise, though it stunk a little of Season 1: B+. Bringing back Tony into the team was nice, though expected, and the bad guy was a little too obvious. B. Overall, this was kind of a character episode (as far as NCIS character episodes go), and good to see Tony get back on his feet, and the team together again. B+

Quote of the episode: “Maybe you’ll get lucky, Doc, and your little dope dispensing caper will stay locked up tight like a Samsonite!” – Anthony “Tony” DiNozzo