Admittedly my own viewing has been quite erratic, but that’s mostly because of scheduling issues. I saw about two-thirds of last night’s episode and have made a note to catch the season finale next week.
It was obvious to me going in that
Mike Franks was toast
but I didn’t expect
the second NCIS Major Case team to get offed quite this early; I thought the big death fest would come in the finale.
I enjoyed the reactions of
the four younger members of Team Gibbs to Franks’ death; it reinforced the idea that they’re basically a slightly dysfunctional but overall loving family. And the Gibbs-Vance argument was good too, if somewhat jarring. I mean, hell, Gibbs was actually admitting having feelings to someone other than Abby & Ducky, and Vance flat-out called Gibbs his friend.
The second half of the season has surprised me. I thought we were building towards a Tony needs to fly out of the nest, or maybe he doesn’t. Ziva needs to find love, or maybe she doesn’t, this town ain’t big enough for Gibbs and Vance type crescendo, but especially the first two petered out a couple weeks ago.
They seem to have eliminated most of that angst already and the only one who is hanging in the balance, based on the previews, is Ziva. Who, if I am guessing right, hadn’t signed her contract extension when they were writing the end of season episodes.
I’m watching it out of habit, nostalgia, and loyalty.
I NEVER liked Mike Franks, and Franks-ly
wasn’t sorry to see him go.
Didn’t like the new team AT ALL, especially the woman. She’s about 1/100th as attractive as Ziva. I want the series to go back to the way it was when it was GOOD.
They had to kill the second team to avoid “Mary Sue” criticism.
I think Team Gibbs is about due for some new blood. I’m gaining new respect for Tony, but Abby and “Proby” have been milked for about all they’re worth.
Well, I liked the interaction between Gibbs and Franks, I did not like the new team, and I sort of wish that DiNozzo and Ziva would end up together. I do not like Vance at all.
What was with the CIA dude that was undercover with the frog and that thing on his left eye? Obviously I missed something …
I prefer Vance over Jenny by a large measure. That said they need to decide what they’re going to do with Vance. His role can’t be just to get mad at Gibbs not listening to him.
The CIA turned some sailors into assassins. One of them went off the deep end and became the Port to Port killer. The CIA dude tried to stop him. Managed to disrupt the killing but lost his eye in the process.
Or so he says. I wouldn’t trust Trent Kort to tell the truth even if he provided a video of the experience.
Any guesses as to what the season-ending shocker is going to be?
Franks was dying already. They made a real point of him coughing. So he might have prodded Mr. P2P (what was his name? Jonas Cobb or something like that?) because he was dying anyway, so what the hell. He might even have figured he had even odds, since, as has often been said, age and experience will win out over youth and enthusiasm. Except not always. I guess I’m glad Franks is gone, he was getting a bit overused, but I do wonder what happened to his grandson and the boy’s mother.
I predict one of the new team lingers. There’s an unanswered question of whose decision it was to assign that team to the case since Vance said it wasn’t his decision.
Ziva gets abducted. My first reaction is to say liff hanger as Tony and Gibbs race to see who gets to put P2P down first.
But since they’ve already done that maybe they’ll go with the rescued, Tony’ holds her and she says she wants to quit NCIS. Of course they’ve done that too. Either way I think they do need to shake things up a little next year. Maybe give Tony the reconstituted new team or something.
Right cause if that happened then 20 years from now while she was director Ziva would die in a ghost town bar shoot out with a retired Gibbs next to her. And then Tony and Gibbs would have to avenge her death. Why can’t they come up with story lines like that?
I think it’s valid that TV & movie coughs are generally significant. It would be too distracting to have people coughing repeatedly for a mundane ailment.
Vance is such a terrific character. Most procedurals have the one-dimensional boss, who always makes dumb, by-the-book decisions. Vance is human and fallible, but also smart. He is constantly weighing Gibbs’s skill and need to operate on the edge with the demands of his superiors and the letter of the law. There is so much that goes on in the background, unspoken, and Vance is our conduit to see the shadows of all that.
This is very well said and I entirely agree. Oh, I miss Jenny Shepherd, but that’s only because she was so freaking hot. Vance is a more interesting character. Among the reasons is that he’s actually more competent than Gibbs. That is, he could do Gibbs’ job reasonably well (admittedly not as well as Gibbs), but Gibbs could not survive in his job long. (And Jenny, of course, was clearly a casualty of the Peter Principle; even if she hadn’t had the problem of Gibbs, she’d not have been well-suited for the job: too much baggage.)
I don’t know. I got the distinct impression during the show about Vance’s boxing coach buddy who got killed that “Vance” and the buddy had exchanged identities at some point.
That being said, yeah, Vance is a MUCH more interesting character than Jenny, although I’d still love to know what *really *happened to her dad, or at least what was up with all those clues that maybe he wasn’t as dead as she thought.
I’m not sure where you are all getting the idea that
the new team is dead.
One probably is, but the other two we have no idea.
Also, the whole “Franks Ghost” thing made me think of *Magnum PI *and his buddy “Mac” who was killed in one episode, but still appeared periodically in ghostly form to give Magnum tips and clues. Since NCIS is from basically the same production team, we might have a similar situation going on here.
I didn’t think of it as Franks’ ghost. I thought of it as a visual representation of how Gibbs was thinking things through and trying to figure out what happened. Instead of talking to himself, he’s talking to Mike. I do that all the time.
And it’s the same thing that happened after Kate died. If you recall, the image of Kate suggested that Gibbs in particular might need to kill himself to save Abby & Ducky from Ari. I can’t say that being meant to be coming from Kate’s spirit; it came from Gibbs’ self-loathing, which is well-hidden but still part of him.