New characters don't always work out, especially when they're stepping into the vacancy left by fan favorites.
The departure of Michael Weatherly and Tony DiNozzo left many wondering if the new guys would work out, or just feel shoehorned in.
Fortunately, NCIS Season 14 Episode 2 continues where the season premiere left off in terms of team bonding. There's a lot to like about the new additions to the cast, as well as a much happier, more cheerful tone than I can remember in years.
Both Torres and Quinn got to bond with their new teammates. Quinn is still something of a cipher to me, I have to confess; she is clearly a senior agent, and apparently content (happy, even) to leave her job as a FLETC instructor to serve in a junior capacity on a field investigatory team.
I did appreciate that Quinn got scenes with pretty much everyone on the cast, and her first meeting with the "world famous" Abby Sciuto was amusing, if a little bit creepy if you start to think about it.
And the hair slowly went up on Agent Quinn's neck!
Quinn [meeting Abby]
Torres got to demonstrate his lighter side with the music scene at the end, which the entire team got well into. Plus, he got down to business in interrogation, bonding with the fence over a bit of food and then getting her to talk.
It's significant that they establish Torres as having a unique and distinctive interrogation style that differentiates him from, particularly, Gibbs and DiNozzo. The mix of soft and hard certainly set him apart.
The case itself was pretty by-the-numbers. I pegged the substitute teacher's "batty old lady" routine as exactly that – a routine – right off the bat (and the only reason for such a thing is if she's the killer).
That said, the case did provide some intriguing insights into a couple of our characters.
- Jimmy Palmer once spent a night in jail (!) over an unspecified incident.
- Bishop was unpopular in high school and was voted prom queen as a mean joke. She also liked "bad boys." (One could argue that she ended up marrying a bad boy, given how things turned out...)
- Gibbs wanted to be a painter. With watercolors. (Say what, now?!)
I did find it more than a little strange that Gibbs actually confessed to his love of watercolors to a guy he was interrogating. This is Gibbs, the man who kept the fact that he had a dead wife and daughter secret for years. And now he's telling a murder suspect his childhood dream of being a painter?
There was an undercurrent of something that NCIS has visited before with high school, being defined by it (and refusing to be defined by it). The "popular" kids, Katrina Cooper and her husband, got married but were clearly unhappy. Bruno, the troublemaker, meanwhile, was trying to go straight and turn them all over to the police!
High school reunions can be tricky, emotionally. Have you been to one and felt that your success in life was being compared to everyone else there?
There were a number of fun moments in this episode, such as that scene with McGee and Bishop explaining the remote to Torres. Yeah, like Gibbs is totally ignorant of what you're doing. Yep. Keep dreaming, Bishop! And then there was Torres later in the episode:
Let's go back to what we know -- he's dead. I'm pretty confident about that.
Torres
Be sure to check out our NCIS quotes page for a rundown of some notable lines from this episode!
A few final notes before I turn the discussion over to you:
- Why did Bruno have the display mounts for all that jewelry in his room? Did he steal them, too? Why would he bother?
- It was revealed in a previous episode that McGee was very popular in high school. (DiNozzo, for the record, was bullied rather spectacularly.)
- McGee is still working up to figuring out the right moment to propose to Delilah.
- How did the substitute teacher plan on selling the $1,000,000 painting? It's not like she could put it up on Sotheby's or even eBay!
If you missed this episode, or if you want to relive all the quippy one-liners, be sure to watch NCIS online! And don't miss NCIS Season 14 Episode 3, "Privileged Information," when it premieres on CBS on Tuesday, October 4, 2016 at 8/7c.
So, what did you think of "Being Bad"? Were you surprised at the identity of the murderer? What did you think of Gibbs's childhood dream to be a watercolor painter? What did Jimmy Palmer do to land in jail? Let us know in the comments below!
