NCIS’s 16th season — 16! Old enough to drive a car! — wastes no time in dropping us back into a world of action, plots and counterplots, quips, and Gibbs’ stoicism. Let’s do this.
Vance, last seen at the mercy of Sloane’s tormenter, Hakim, is being held captive in a tastefully appointed house. Hakim is in favor of torture, but his mother, Zaiyema, believes Vance can be incentivized to come around to their way of thinking. As Vance killed her sons in Afghanistan years ago, I suspect those incentives won’t be of the “cash back” variety.
Four weeks later, a dusty and dispirited Torres checks in via video chat to say that his month in Afghanistan convinced him that Vance isn’t overseas. This hypothesis is confirmed when a breaking news report about a local bank heist shows that one of the robbers is Vancey Hearst himself.
Kasie (Hi, Kasie! Welcome to the lab full time!) suggests a perfect Vance clone, but McGee and Bishop check out the bank in case the clone thing doesn’t pan out. The irritated bank manager explains that Vance had ordered all of Hakim’s charity assets frozen and consolidated at this branch. That’s what Hakim stole, along with a good portion of gold bullion. So did Hakim snatch Vance because he knew where the money was? And why did he trust Vance with a gun during the robbery?
At a strategy session with Gibbs, Sloane, and Vice Admiral Halsey, we learn that all the security codes were changed after Vance’s kidnapping. We also learn that Sloane’s spent the last four weeks blaming herself for not keeping her cool with Hakim. His former colleague, British Deputy Ambassador Rigg, speaks calmly and slowly to Sloane, and I kind of hate her.
Speaking of Gibbs, the world’s most reluctant acting director of NCIS has his meal of skillet sausages interrupted by the arrival of Kayla Vance. Despite the fact that she’s been assigned a protective detail, she’s still attending college because her dad didn’t raise her to be a quitter. And then an explosion rocks Chez Gibbs.
The target was a Navy recruitment center at a nearby strip mall, and a second one in Salt Lake City was also bombed. And then a robe-wearing Vance turns up on television, speechifying about “Brother Hakim” and “American oppressors.”
Kasie quickly sorts the situation out. First, she notices that Vance fired three warnings shots in the bank, and they each hit the eyeballs of people pictured on bank posters. Next, she determines that Vance only blinked five times during his hostage message, on the words “avalanche,” “apple,” “lifeless,” “karma,” and “yearning.” What’s that mean? She and Gibbs aren’t sure — yet.
At Vance’s luxury prison, Hakim gloats about the chaos their attacks have caused, but his threats against Vance’s children fall flat. “You missed the window, Chuck,” Vance says, tipping them off about his video blinking code. Zaiyema’s furious and orders her henchmen to kill Kayla, who’s currently on campus chattering about her Sociology of Taylor Swift class with her bodyguard. (For the record, I’d sign up for that class.)
Then an armed man charges them and kills her guard; poor guy dies with the word “Taylor” on his lips. Quick-thinking Kayla grabs the gun off his body and returns fire. She misses, but Gibbs and McGee, having successfully unscrambled Vance’s on-the-fly acrostic to spell “Kayla,” pop up and save her life.
Morgue time! Palmer chats with the shooter’s body, and when Gibbs arrives, Ducky declares, “We already know the cause of death: You.” Blunt, but true. Also, we didn’t have nearly enough time with this duo in the premiere.
Just as Kacie discovers that the shooter was an Iowan named Rafi Paiz who worked in the custodial department at a local tech firm, a Hakim-connected suicide bomber attacks an Ohio movie theater. (Next page: Torres smash)
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