Welcome, fellow and fellowess fans of NCIS. Tonight's the night we say goodbye to everybody's favorite ex-Mossad assassin and adorable NCIS agent, Ziva David. The goodbye story will continue into next week, and then this wonderful chapter will come to a close.
For those of you who missed the breaking story a few months ago, you can get caught up to date here. My full series of NCIS posts is here.
We shall continue below the fold.
To start off with, there's a fairly interesting article on the show here.
Life comes with few chances to witness a fundamental law being turned on its head.
But last season 18.5 million viewers did just that every week, tuning to "NCIS" to certify it as one of TV's highest-rated shows and, even more impressively, make it a series whose audience after 10 seasons has expanded, not shriveled, with age.
That's very true. Almost every popular, long-running show starts off slow, hits a big peak, then slowly diminishes as the writers run out of fresh ideas and things turn a little stale. My three most recent NCIS posts feature a number of clips displaying some of the true beauty and uniqueness of the show — and almost all of the clips came from the last two seasons. They haven't lost a step.
As for Cote de Pablo's exit, I don't suppose we'll see who her replacement will be for a few shows after that. When Caitlin got snuffed out by Ari, I think they went two or three episodes before Ziva was introduced. Call it a 'mourning period' for lost loves.
One thing I'd never thought of was what movies Harmon has been in.
His films include "The Presidio," ''Natural Born Killers" and "Freaky Friday."
As it turns out, I have 'Killers' in my collection. Sharpen up those eyeballs and see if you can spot the big guy:
The driver, of course. The red streak in his hair was a dead giveaway. And, as these things go, his lady did make a good observation. Bicyclists, especially bronze medal winners, are somewhat difficult to plug with a shotgun from a moving car.
From the cast page of 'Killers' on the IMDb:
Mark Harmon: Mickey Knox in Wayne Gale's Reconstruction (uncredited)
Jeez, you play the main bad guy and you don't even get credit for it? And he played the part so well!
As a small side note, if you asked a bunch of movie critics to name their top ten 'bloodiest' movies of recent years, 'Killers' would probably make the list, but, in actually, it's not even close. Most of it is what you might call implied violence, like the scene near the beginning when Harrelson's character throws a big Bowie knife at the guy out in the parking lot. There's a big musical roar as the slo-mo shows the knife slowly spinning through the air, breaking through the glass, then suddenly it's a close-up of the guy's face with a "Ooh, ya got me, pard!" look on it. No blood, no gore, no muss, no fuss.
Say, speaking of your observational prowess, let's see if you can answer this toughie:
According to the article, what famous person was "furious" over this scene:
The mystery answer is here. Click on the left side of the box on the upper-right to mute the annoying music. Personally, I don't believe a word of it. Typical sensationalistic National Enquirer-type "unnamed insider" bullshit.
As for tonight's show, I've decided to watch both tonight's show and next week's together, so while I'll be responding to comments today, I'm going to skip over any others until I've seen both episodes, just so I don't read any accidental spoilers. "I thought Ziva's dying screams of agony as she burned to death were wonderfully realistic! What an actress!" That kind of thing.
The other mystery on the table is what the hell Gibbs was about to do with the rifle. The last show ended with a freeze shot of FBI agent Fornell, yet even if we figure he's not the target, the whole thing still looks highly illegal. Yet the wounded JSOC guy was there, so that would seem to put the stamp of authority on it. The last few minutes of the show are in the 'goodbye' post linked above if you want to refresh your memory before tonight.
It should be quite somethin'.
