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Monday 28 May 2012

NCIS - 7.8: "Power Down" Review


NCIS investigates the death of a woman at a robbery which turns out to be more complex than it appears. Also Washington DC is hit by a power failure as a result. Can the team cope?

There's a shoot-out at a building where server info is stored, resulting in a power failure.  So why's Tony (Michael Weatherly) playing with all the electrical equipment, not everything will work even with their generators.  Palmer (Brian Dietzen) tells him Ducky (David McCallum) sent him up for a Sit Rep.   Gibbs (Mark Harmon) will get angry if Ziva (Cote de Pablo) and McGee (Sean Murray) aren't at work.   They happen to be stuck in the lift and Ziva breaks McGee's watch, cos he keeps looking at the time.  There's a silver lining, according to her, they could be worse off and be stuck here with Tony.   Oh no, then she'd have to mention his sweat again! Ha.  

Ziva comments Gibbs is feeling right at home, which he is, never was into all that techno stuff.  Tony adds you don't need electricity to drink bourbon and use hand tools.   McGee asks if Gibbs is behind Tony.   Tony quickly adds a cocktail wouldn't hurt now or then, just to cover himself, avoid a head slap in the process.

Ducky arrives late at the CS as Palmer has trouble navigating even when the street lights are on.   The Vic is Navy Lt.  Emma Paxton identified by her credit card in her boot.   The security guards shot three of them, she was still alive and was presumably shot by the others, nothing can be that straightforward.   McGee needs to take photos of the server farm, which he explains connects Net to Net users, but his battery runs out.   Cue Gibbs and his Polaroid, hey I've still got mine too.

 Tony notices tyre tracks from the car.   McGee asks how they can run prints through AFIS and the photos from the cameras without power.  McGeek shouldn't have to ask that! Emma was organizing concerts for military overseas.   Tony believes she was robbing the farm.   She married her high school sweetheart, Anthony Paxton ( Corey Sorenson), Tony: "nice name."  McGee resorts to using board and pins since his touchscreen TV no longer works, he says it's going to be a long case.

Abby (Pauley Perrette) needs her Caf Pow and attempts to make her own and needs to run a diagnostic on her "babies." She doesn't have any power.   Gibbs tells her Ducky has corpses that she doesn't have.   Abby will have to identify the tyre print by hand so he shouldn't expect her normal miracles, at least for an hour.   Tony is flashing to the fourth grade where his teacher thought he was cheating on his Geology test, when Gibbs uses the copy machine.   McGee refers to it as a brontosaurus and who'd know how to use it.

Gibbs questions Anthony who wants her buried with full military honours.   McGee says according to the CEO of the farm nothing was stolen.   Tony looks at the map and comments McGee hasn't seen Dragnet, Baretta or Kojak, thus "this will mean nothing to you, Who loves ya baby."  Tony complete with lollipop in hand.   Of course everyone will remember Kojak and his famous catchphrase and lollipop.  "Right boss, Telly on the telly, sorry." (Referring to Telly Savalas, the actor who played Kojak.)  Tony adds what's a cork board without a map! McGee has to go through the credit cards and bank statements and says he doesn't do hard copies.   Tony and McGee flip for who will talk with Emma's CEO and Ziva sneaks off with Tony.

Ducky says his tools don't need electricity.   Two gunshots were fired at close range.   He lets the staff use one of the lockers for storing food, cue influx of staff.  Made a change from hardly anyone going down there.   Emma suffered from severe trauma, broken bones and GS wounds, but she's never been in combat.  Emma's CEO (Cara Buono) tells them Emma called in sick and she is allergic to perfume.   Ziva doesn't wear any, it's Tony's eau de cologne, as there's no hot water.   There, see I saved Ziva the sweaty comments from earlier on by mentioning them myself, ha.

 Emma was lying to her husband as she was seen with another man.   Tony asks for a description.  "He was a male."  Tony comments, "A male man." McGee suffers from paper cuts and Gibbs provides him with band aids.   McGee was acting like a big baby here, as if he's never encountered paper before, he uses a typewriter to write his books!!  He hasn't gotten any paper cuts then?!  A commentary on the computer age and how technology's made people lazy! McGee ponders "how did people survive before search engines." Er, they didn't, they all used to live in caves.

Tony returns and throws files off his desk onto McGee's papers on the floor, yes more juvenile antics from him.   Tony wonders how people survived before e-mail?  Again he doesn't use e-mail that often or even the Net as he's said to Gibbs on many occasions in past episodes and yet here he's given that line.   Tony is old enough to have gone to school, college, etc without the use of computers!  Also the Baltimore PD wouldn't have been that computer savvy when he was around, especially in the early days! It took Abby two hours to find the make and model of the Chevy Impala '99.   She ponders how people survived before algorithms.  

An abandoned car report was heard over the police radio.   Here they find the car and a blood trail.   As well as a container with computer equipment.  McGee mentions it's like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, which Tony hasn't heard of.  Tony: "Doctor Who, who watches that?" (I do.)  Tony says it's more like Nic Cage in Lord of War.   Also there are Jason Bourne Identikits: passports and weapons.   Ziva's used such places before when she prepared for Ops.   McGee is glad it has its own generator, which gives out.

Tony notices a second car was used to leave in and he feels like Davy Crockett.   Ziva finds blueprints for Swiftcast, the server farm.   Tony had to say it, that Anthony is married to Mata Hari.   Emma also had a fake passport for him which he denies seeing.   He hired a PI, Emma wasn't cheating on him.  McGee views the tapes in MTAC and Tony asks if he needs help.    McGee doesn't and Gibbs tells him McGee was just rubbing it in since he was left with the paperwork earlier, and why not I say! ha.   Gibbs notices a man following her on the video and he leaves his handprint on the wall.   They have to physically go through the fingerprint cards from the local LEOs.   Now it's McGee's turn to flash to the fourth grade and Mrs Johnson's science fair.   Tony says "you never see this crap on Columbo." That's cos he doesn't need files, or fingerprints, ha, he only needs his Columbo brain and logic!  Abby matches the prints to Donovan Graham and it only took them all night.)  His photo matches the sketch.

They find two DBs in the house, both from the robbery and Emma's CEO, Cmdr Resnik.  Tony asks if she had a make-over.  She's NSA and Gibbs has to squint to read her ID.   They were working on a classified project.  She and Emma were the only two people who had their iris coated into devices, like a masterkey, enabling them to open any lock which has an iris scanner.   The passports were just incase their cover was blown.   She doesn't know if Emma had gone rogue.   Ducky says the CS was staged, both of the men were moved after they were killed.   Palmer asks who one of them was.   Gibbs: "Don't know Jim, do you have any ideas?"  Ducky also finds they had been digging.

Tony: "Think McToma, it's a classic cop show switcheroo."  They swapped it with a bugged copy and bugged the Net.   McGee says all government agencies were exposed explaining why the power went out.   Abby finds Emma wasn't selling info, she ran the blood, whilst drinking non-alcoholic whiskey,  to find she had ingested a vaso dilator, which would have blocked Emma's ability to unblock any iris scanner and mentions MacGyver.   There were traces on the guard.   When the power comes on, the security guard attempts to access the server.   Tony walks in repeating the lines from Dragnet, 'where the names have been changed to protect the innocent.'  Gibbs: "Book 'em Dano-zzo." Oh Gibbs you've been watching Hawaii Five-O.

Emma had a choice, as Gibbs tells Anthony and "that's what makes her a hero." Tony enjoyed being unplugged, no spam  no e-mails to return.   It gave McGee time to think, yeah of everything he could be doing on a computer, ha.  Elf Lord.  Gibbs switches off his computer and relaxes.

Good to see an NCIS episode where they had to resort to good old fashioned legwork without having computers and other equipment around to rely on and a chance for Gibbs to show them how it used to be done.   As said already, Tony should have been all for that as he's old enough to have been around before the computer revolution.  Probably he'd have liked to have been doing something else whilst the power was down and I don't mean eating either.

1 comment:

Kae said...

How did they get all those printouts (like bank statements) if there was no power?