Let’s hear it for Walk-A-Mile day! Parker’s (Gary Cole) job shadowing program could easily have been one of those well-intentioned leadership training misfires, but instead it turned out to be a powerhouse crime-busting, team-building exercise.
To give his team better perspective on what makes NCIS tick, Parker puts McGee (Sean Murray) in the motor pool, Knight (Katrina Law) with custodial and maintenance, and Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) in accounting, where he’s horrified when his supervisor (Victoria Kelleher) sternly tells him, “We don’t kid here.”
It’s Kasie’s (Diona Reasonover) job shadowing that kicks things off when the dispatch operator supervising her (Nina Concepción) leaves to grab coffee and Kasie takes a call from a panicked-sounding man that ends with gunshots.
The man used a code — Echo Whiskey 2770 — that McGee recognizes as an old NCIS ID. It’s linked to Eric Webb (Chris L. McKenna), who retired years ago and has been living the civilian life ever since.
When Parker and McGee head to the last location of Webb’s vehicle satellite radio, Kasie insists on coming along, as she’s understandably both freaked out by and invested in whatever’s going on with Webb.
Greg Gayne/CBS
The address turns out to be a CIA safe house with the steel-reinforced door kicked open and bodies all over the floor. One of them is Webb, per the wallet in the dead man’s pocket, which is awfully confusing for Kasie when dispatch forwards her a call from… Webb.
Webb tells Kasie that the CIA sold him out, so he left his wallet with one of the bodies and ran. Now she’s the only person he trusts.
Webb works as a sitter for the safe house where the CIA had stashed black hat hacker Alexander Renard (Harold Nieves Fisch), who had an extremely gorgeous head of hair and is now extremely dead on Palmer’s (Brian Dietzen) autopsy table.
CIA Deputy Director Weston (Indira G. Wilson) and her agent, whose name I didn’t catch but who’s played by Andy Favreau and will therefore be known as Agent Favs, explain that someone killed Renard for information about a domestic terrorist plot he learned about on the dark web.
Weston asks if Webb has contacted NCIS again, and Parker says no. After she and Agent Favs leave, Vance (Rocky Carroll, who also directed the episode) asks why Parker lied. But if Kasie trusts Webb, that’s good enough for Parker.
The team interviews retired CIA agent Harlan Atwood (Louis Ferreira), who tells them that he and Webb weren’t able to stop the bombing of an American consulate in Spain years ago. It left 15 people dead, and Atwood says Webb was haunted by that failure, so he suggested the safe house job to give his buddy some post-retirement direction.
Palmer, who Walked-A-Mile at the armory and is now experiencing a little temporary deafness, shouts at Torres that the dead CIA agents from the safe house were killed execution-style, probably by the Chechen mob guys who in turn were likely killed by Webb in a firefight when they arrived to snatch Renard.
When Webb resurfaces to call Kasie, the team coaches her on how to get him to reveal his location, but Webb knows what she’s up to and says he’s got something to take care of before he’ll surrender himself. He then asks Kasie to help him uncover why Renard pointed him in the direction of a train station locker holding a pre-1940s tape recorder with big band music on it. Catchy yet mysterious!
Or not so mysterious; a month earlier, Renard made a stop at an antique audio restoration shop that would’ve worked on the tape recorder. When Knight and Torres check it out, they find the owner dead in the back alongside a stolen Russian missile with its uranium payload missing. Can you say “dirty bomb,” kids?
At this point, Weston and Agent Favs resurface to brush off the idea that a CIA leak could’ve compromised Renard’s safe house location. They’re shady as heck about it, so no wonder Webb’s in the wind.
When he calls Kasie again, they have as friendly and free-flowing a conversation as you can when one of you is on the run and the other’s standing in the middle of MTAC. Kasie asks if he wants to stop this attack to atone for the one in Spain, and he gets her to open up about burying herself in work so she won’t dwell on her string of failed relationships.
Webb gets suspiciously quiet when Kasie mentions that brand of cigarette left behind at the restoration shop — but he doesn’t get, like, CIA suspicious. I still trust Webb and his warm, melodious voice.
The clues start flowing after Parker sends an exhausted Kasie to the diner for some food. The bombmaker was shot by the same gun as Webb’s, and his encrypted hard drive shows that a CIA slush fund under Webb’s name recently deposited six figures into his bank account. Weirdly, nobody takes a beat to wonder if maybe the man who’s in hiding because he’s afraid the CIA is out to get him could possibly have been framed.
Of course, they then learn that Webb stole a bunch of chemistry supplies from a local high school and kidnapped Kasie from the diner. Suspicious, yes. But I still trust him! (This is why I will someday be kidnapped myself, I’m sure.)
Walk-A-Mile pays off in spades when the team assembles the random bits of evidence from the diner. McGee’s new motor pool friend (Billy Malone) IDs a tire track at the scene as belonging to a commercial pickup truck, Knight’s custodial friend (Michael A. Sheppard) recognizes the dirt left behind as professional-grade fertilizer, and Torres’ accountant admirer (Victoria Kelleher) says a torn receipt is for a transit pass across the Potomac.
It leads them to a truck stolen from Enchanted Acres Landscaping, which they track to the safe house. There, Kasie jumps in front of Webb to defend him from her team. Sure, Webb nabbed her from the diner, but his gun wasn’t loaded. How else could he get her help linking the DNA on the cigarette at the restoration shop with his old friend Atwood?
‘Twas a frame job! Atwood’s girlfriend died in that Spanish consulate bombing, and after a recent terminal cancer diagnosis, he decided to take revenge on the CIA for the bureaucracy that kept him from acting quickly enough to save her.
So Webb is now free to come in from the cold. He thanks Kasie, who in turn invites him to join the team for chimichangas. And when a phone rings on the NCIS desk next to her, she firmly declines to answer it.
Stray shots
- Fab performances by Reasonover and McKenna tonight! McKenna, in particular, spent most of the hour as a voice on the other end of the phone line, but even sight unseen, he made me believe in his character so thoroughly that I immediately rejected the idea of Webb as the bad guy.
- If you can’t get enough of government employees taking calls from distressed field agents, Netflix’s The Night Agent could be right up your alley!
- Do I buy Torres as a secret math whiz? Sure, as much as I buy McGee as a talented tap dancer or Bishop’s floor-sitting obsession. Our agents contain multitudes, and I do like the thought of Torres being as coveted in the accounting department as Ben Wyatt.
- Raise your hand if you, like me, would listen to every episode of the Kasie and Webb Show.
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