Tonight's NCIS season finale

[Ritterskoop]

This episode has the potential to be excellent, which they haven't had many like that in a while. When you've been on the air 17 seasons, you run out of fresh stories eventually. This one will be the season-ender; they had to scrap episodes 399 and 400 for the fall because of the quarantines.

But this one, they sound proud of. Christopher Lloyd plays a WWII vet (maybe) who served on the Arizona (maybe) and wants to be interred there. I have trouble hearing anyone other than Doc Brown when he's onscreen, and other folks have the same thing with his Taxi character, but we'll see. He had asked to be on the show earlier (I assume in the episode where a veteran dies and leaves a mystery about a coin), but they said to wait, as this one would give him a much better story.

[silverscreenselect]

I've seen the trailers and it looks good. They had a similar episode in their second season in which Charles Durning played a Medal of Honor winner who turns himself in and confesses to killing another Marine during the war. However, Durning's memory is fading and Gibbs decides to investigate to determine what really happened. You can probably guess the outcome, but it's an excellent episode and Durning got an Emmy nomination for the role. (Durning was an actual World War II vet who landed on Omaha Beach.)

There was also a somewhat similarly themed episode in the first season of the new Hawaii Five-O with Robert Loggia as a volunteer vet tour guide on a battleship at Pearl Harbor who gets taken hostage with McGarrett. The subplot revolved around whether his character was really at Pearl Harbor as he claimed, and I think it turned out that he had assumed the identity of an older brother.

[Ritterskoop]

Pretty good, and definitely better than anything they've done in a while (you just run out of storylines after a while - no Chief Petty officer should go near Rock Creek Park ever again).

Christopher Lloyd is still a bit too energetic for me to believe as a 95-year-old, though the makeup was good. He has one big scene and a bunch of solid less showy ones.

Without going into details so as not to spoil it, I'm impressed with how much cooperation they must have gotten from the Navy. That's not typical for TV shows.

I did wonder (tiny tiny spoiler) if the admiral in the opening scene was correctly shown in camouflage, coming home from a deployment. I would not think Navy would ever wear that style of uniform (Army/AF/Marines I could see). Looking forward to learning more on this topic.

[tlynn78]

I enjoyed it. I haven't watched NCIS is a long time, as it conflicts with my 'normal' trivia night, but I thought it was a solid episode. Solid acting all around, and McGee is so grown up now!

[silverscreenselect]

I enjoyed it. I haven't watched NCIS is a long time, as it conflicts with my 'normal' trivia night, but I thought it was a solid episode. Solid acting all around, and McGee is so grown up now!

Too many of their episodes are almost identical. The faces are different (except Mark Harmon), but you could pretty much watch an episode from any season and see the exact same thing. It's comfort food for those who enjoy that sort of show, just like the Perry Mason episodes from 60 years ago.

The only really memorable ones are those like last night that go outside the box. Some of the episodes with Ralph Waite as Mark Harmon's father were quite good. And the wrap-up of the Ziva returns storyline involved a big surprise that the writers had cleverly built up over the course of the first half of the season. I thought that one was the best of this season until last night.

[Bob Juch]

I enjoyed it. I haven't watched NCIS is a long time, as it conflicts with my 'normal' trivia night, but I thought it was a solid episode. Solid acting all around, and McGee is so grown up now!

Too many of their episodes are almost identical. The faces are different (except Mark Harmon), but you could pretty much watch an episode from any season and see the exact same thing. It's comfort food for those who enjoy that sort of show, just like the Perry Mason episodes from 60 years ago.

The only really memorable ones are those like last night that go outside the box. Some of the episodes with Ralph Waite as Mark Harmon's father were quite good. And the wrap-up of the Ziva returns storyline involved a big surprise that the writers had cleverly built up over the course of the first half of the season. I thought that one was the best of this season until last night.

CSI was the same way with the notable exception of the episodes written by Jerry Stahl and Bob Harris.

[earendel]

I did wonder (tiny tiny spoiler) if the admiral in the opening scene was correctly shown in camouflage, coming home from a deployment. I would not think Navy would ever wear that style of uniform (Army/AF/Marines I could see). Looking forward to learning more on this topic.

I can't say for certain but I work in the same building with Military Entrance Processing Center, where all services send their prospective recruits for processing. I have seen Navy personnel wearing the same (or similar) camouflage as Army, Marine, or Air Force personnel. I have also seen them wearing "naval camouflage", which is base blue with digitized black and gray. I suppose it depends upon where the person was stationed (not all Navy personnel are aboard ships).