“I’m telling you, it’s empty nest syndrome. First Jess leaves for California. Then Torres volunteers to go deep under cover. And now McGee is applying for the Deputy Director position. Poor Parker. The man is alone.”
Mark Harmon as Gibbs was the soul of the NCIS franchise. When he finally called it quits after nearly 20 years, I have to admit I wasn’t sure how much longer the show could go on. I mean, there has to be a reason for this kind of longevity. All of the spin-offs have now come and gone. NCIS: Hawaii has now ended. NCIS: New Orleans shuttered its doors three years ago now after a mere seven years. The longest-running of the spin-offs was L.A., but even they have gone now after only 10 years. I say only 10 years. For most shows a 10-year run is rarefied air. So how about 22 years and counting? Only Dick Wolf’s Law & Order franchise has accomplished more. Yes, Harmon might have been the franchise’s soul. But Gary Cole came in and has taken up that slack far better than anyone could have imagined. Now CBS is releasing NCIS The Complete 22nd Season on DVD, and that short run of episodes puts the franchise past the 1000-episode mark. It’s an unbelievable run, and it doesn’t look like it’s close to ending now.
In Season 22 we’re back to a full load of episodes. The various industry strikes made the last season of most shows a truncated 10 episodes. We’re back up to a full 20 episodes, so there’s time to take little humorous side steps and to add some more depth to these characters, and that kicks off right from the start. As the opening quote implies, the season starts with the team scattered all over the place. Jess (Knight) has been offered a chance to train her own REACT team, and her relationship with Jimmy started hitting the skids, so she took the chance to head out to California where she is training the next wave of NCIS agents.
McGee, who is our final link to that first season of the show, is up for Deputy Director of NCIS, but he ends up losing it to a guy who ends up becoming a big part of this season’s arc. Seamus Deaver plays new Deputy Director Gabriel LaRoche. And if the name sounds like a character out of Charles Dickens, you’re not too far off. McGee is obsessed with the fact that he thinks LaRoche is up to no good, and their confrontations are a highlight of the season. I think McGee has always been one of the backbones of the serie,s and his character is most often the voice of reason. It’s a nice changeup to see him be the somewhat unhinged character.
Torres (Valderrama) is deep under cover, and it turns out there is a leak and his cover is blown. McGee believes it was LaRoche, but one thing is true. There is a rat, and it came close to getting Torres killed. He sends an SOS to the team and ends up part of an interesting cat-and-mouse game.
Parker is starting to see the “ghost” of the little girl this season, and it causes him to question himself and leads to concern from the team, but we get some closure here, as you’re going to find out who that girl is and why Parker keeps seeing her. He’s dealing with his elder father’s growing dementia and learns something huge about how his mother died. Cole has been a huge addition here. He’s still stepping into some heavy footprints, and he’s completely won me over. We learn more of his past when his own White Whale obsession comes to the front. The Butcher was a killer he never caught, and now he has a chance to correct that. We have a lot of killers this year with names like The Butcher, The Ghost and The Poet. Parker’s well-established love of pastry is the center of an episode when a woman baker he has feelings for ends up involved in a murder plot. You do get some neat cooking tips that you wouldn’t have gotten from the likes of Julia Child. Like how to make cocaine cookies. Talk about your Cookie Monster.
Jimmy (Dietzen) is pretty much the same, and it gets awkward when Jess returns to the team. We do get a better look at the life of Kasie (Reasonover). She hosts a weekly Dungeons & Dragons game at her place, but it’s really a giant thinktank of really smart forensic people. When one of them gets killed, we discover that a government AI program is loose, and the bad guys might have been using the gamers to get away with the crime. We finally see her apartment, which is full of the oddest things, and we see some vulnerability with the character. I still haven’t completely warmed up to her, but it gets a little better every year.
The stakes are high this year when it appears someone out there is planning a nuclear attack. When the attack is imminent and the United States is about to strike back, McGee and Parker use their guts to sabotage the response. It’s really treason, but of course it turns out they were correct, and there was no attack on the way. It’s one of the franchise’s best episodes of all time. It’s different, and it’s dramatic, and it puts our characters in a dangerous position of acting against their own government. There tend to be a lot of these espionage situations this season, and it feeds into McGee’s obsession with LaRoche. It does end on a cliffhanger.
For those of you into the personal stuff and banter, there is plenty of that when Torres Dates Jess’s sister. There’s also an episode where Torres and Jess have a fake wedding to capture bad guys. It’s a pretty loaded season with much more to come; they aren’t even slowing down a little bit. You get the typical extras here with your 20 episodes. There is the traditional 20-minute season wrap-up, a gag reel, and a feature on the tech advisor for the show. They’re doing their jobs by getting us back to our 20 episodes a year. “Our job is to sit by the monitors.”
