Royals & Loyals

Or it would be, if this episode wasn't so badly ridiculous.

Much as I like this series, it's impossible to know where to start with this episode; it's so full of stereotypes and impossibilities (Gibbs just walks on to a RN vessel and sabotages it; his team walk around without an escort, etc.).

What actually had me laughing out loud though, was Abby's new electron microscope, which looked suspiciously like an optical microscope with a video camera on top and apparently had a magnification magnitudes greater than any current scanning electron microscope.

Only the monumentally stupid or cloistered could take this episode seriously.

McGee pushes a few keys on his keyboard, and Voila! He's hacked into a (supposedly) super secure data base at another government agency, the CIA no less. Are viewers actually naïve enough to believe it? Okay, so it's just a TV show with a 40 minute time limit (it says an hour but of course 20 minutes of that are for commercials) and things have to happen in overdrive due to time constraints. But making it that easy to hack the CIA was simply laughable. Even more laughable is the fact that McGee has hacked into so many data bases and no one is the wiser. Are our country's data bases that easy to hack in to? And so easy to avoid detection? And of course there is Abby, who also churns out results in overdrive speed. As she said one an episode some years back, "You can't rush science, Gibbs." Yet in episode after episode Abby rushes science to get extra fast solutions.

It was actually a pretty good plot (although a rework of other plots) and the bad guy/girl got caught. But the warp speed deductions/detections/solutions are really getting old.

This was a good episode. Interesting to have some interaction with the British Royal Navy. Even MORE interesting to see Daniel Gillies in this one. He's nice to look at, no matter what character he plays. :-p

Anyway, I have to wonder about Gillies' character being named Peter Malloy. I'm hard-pressed to believe it was a complete coincidence, and yet I can't find any mention of it anywhere. Classic-TV fans (in fact, fans of really good TV) will recognize the name Pete Malloy as being a character in the venerable show Adam-12. Malloy was the experienced, wry, and foxy (in more ways than one) senior police officer in that TV show.

Well, well... once again, we are reminded of the One Night in Paris, a mystery since 26 January 2010 (Season 7, Episode 13). That is 37 weeks, or 8½ months, earlier. Or 16 weeks, if you live in Finland. In any case, that particular mystery is dragging way too long. So much so, that now that the night and its consequences are given several minutes of screen time instead of a quick aside, it serves only to distract the viewers from the main plot.

All that makes NCIS quality entertainment is present, except for this imbalance. Even with the main plot involving the Brits, which would normally make this episode stand out as fresh, it cannot compete with the "Tiva" relationship issues. This would not be bad if the audience were rewarded with something, anything, but alas, not so. It's likely to frustrate the fans, whose patience the show-runners are now testing to the breaking point. For crying out loud, either stay completely episodic like some relic from the 1980s (remember, the 1990s gave us Babylon 5) or develop the character interaction like a 2010s show should!

This is one of the better episodes. What makes it stand out is Daniel Gillies as the British officer Malloy who has to be one of the handsomest creatures ever to walk planet earth. NCIS usually tends to be populated with doltish muscleheads for whom I have zero empathy. In perhaps a year or two Gillies should be playing Bond. He just crackles. I found myself holding my breath while he was on screen.

The fun comes in this episode from jurisdictional disputes with the British Navy, the CIA and ...

The one thing I did not like were the expositions on CSI technology given between experts who obviously should know all this already. The writers should have this exposition directed at a more naive character.