NCIS recap: 'M.I.A.'

In tonight’s NCIS, a last request from a dying woman leads to a drug theft operation and helps soothe one corner of Torres’ spiky soul.

Lt. Laura Ellison, who’s been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, is at peace with her death, except for one thing: A year ago, when she was a division officer onboard the U.S.S. Gray, one of her sailors was lost at sea. Petty Officer Collins’ death was ruled an accident, but Laura was suspicious. She got sick before she could investigate further, and now she’s running out of time.

Thankfully, she and her father, Retired Gen. Ellison, are old friends of one Leroy Jethro Gibbs, and when they reach out, Gibbs offers to help.

Before we can get down to business, though, we need to check in on the four young Turks, who’ve agree to start training for a marathon. Torres, who’s clearly hungover, and Quinn, who wants to eat breakfast first, offer to give McGee and Bishop a head start on their five-mile run and still manage to beat them to the finish line. Quinn attributes it to the two of them being “naturally gifted runners.”

But okay, down to business. The U.S.S. Gray was patrolling South American waters on a counter-narcotics mission when Collins disappeared. It’s docked at Norfolk now, so the team is able to board and talk to Master-at-Arms Michael Vinton, who conducted the investigation.

Basically, he found a broken stanchion on deck, indicating that sometime between 2300 and 0200 on the night of his death, Collins leaned against it and fell overboard. The last person to see him alive was Petty Officer Nicole Trainer, who’s since left the Navy and is now a bit goth. Not, like, Abby goth, but dark lipstick, nose ring, no-eye-contact goth.

Laura told Gibbs that Collins had a mysterious black eye around the time of his death, and Trainer confirms that he got it during an altercation with Trainer’s boyfriend at the time, Petty Officer Holden Baxter. This shoots Baxter up the suspect list, and McGee and Torres discover that he’s exactly the “self-serving, arrogant d-bag who only cares about himself” that Trainer described. Baxter tattles that Collins and Laura were in a relationship, which was against Navy rules. However, he was on watch with lots of witnesses the night of Collins’ death, which rules him out. Curse your smug untouchability, Baxter!

Abby, meanwhile, reviewed the evidence collected from the U.S.S. Gray following Collins’ death and found his blood on the stanchion — along with bleach, which is corrosive and therefore banned by the Navy. Someone was trying to hide something. Something like… murder? *twirls mustache*

Okay, sorry, very little about this episode is funny. To wit, Ducky visits Laura in the hospital and offers to get her into a doctor friend’s super-special experimental treatment program for cancer patients that has extended lives by five or even 10 years.

Then, when Bishop and Torres arrive during Laura’s chemo treatment to tell her that Collins’ death in fact wasn’t an accident, Torres is clearly uncomfortable with the whole scene. The women ignore his twitchiness, and Laura tells Bishop that she and Collins weren’t in an inappropriate relationship. Actually, she was helping him apply for a commission and even sent in his officer application just before he died.

Once they’re out of the hospital, Bishop accuses Torres of acting weird, but he corrects her: “I don’t act weird. I act mysterious.” But he refuses to confide anything, so they turn their attention to the fact that the U.S.S. Gray was seizing millions of dollars in cocaine to turn over to the DEA. Their interest is heightened when Abby announces that drugs the ship confiscated in Panama and supposedly turned over to the DEA somehow ended up on the streets of Curaçao. And since one brick of cocaine could go for $25,000, they’re extra interested to learn that Nicole Trainer has large and unexplained cash deposits in her bank account.

When Quinn and McGee track her down, they find her living in a craphole, causing McGee to complain, “Not exactly the safest neighborhood.”

“Says the guy who had four dead bodies in his apartment,” Quinn says.

“Five,” McGee corrects her. Hey, at least he owns it.

Alas, they find Trainer in her apartment, dead from a heroin overdose. Gibbs declares the scene too clean and, suspecting it was a murder staged to look like an OD, dispatches Torres to guard Laura at the hospital. Torres is not happy about this and demands, “Why me?” He accuses Gibbs of knowing he’s got a problem with that assignment, “but that’s the point, isn’t it?” Gibbs says they both need to do their jobs.

Man, this is the most confrontational we’ve seen any of Gibbs’ people be with him since, oh, probably DiNozzo, and I. am. there for it.

NEXT: A Hallmark moment provides Torres some peace

So Torres spends hours in Laura’s room, staring out the window and ignoring her. She finally calls him on it, saying she’s learned to read people since her diagnosis. Some are sympathetic; others pity her. And then there are the ones who keep their distance, “the ones who’ve been through the pain of losing someone they love to cancer.” She says she understands and is sorry for his loss. But Torres isn’t interested in Hallmark moments and shuts that down.

Back at HQ, Ducky points out that Trainer’s wrists were restrained, and Abby matches tissue under her fingernails to one Holden Baxter, who’s too obviously a bad guy to actually be the bad guy. When Quinn and McGee arrive to bring him in, he bolts, letting McGee show off his new running moves (which include jumping onto a box pallet and launching himself at the fleeing Baxter like a jungle cat).

Baxter insists he had nothing to do with Collins’ death and is shocked to learn that Trainer’s dead. He admits to visiting her the night before because NCIS had come around asking about Collins, and he got nervous. He tells NCIS that Trainer admitted that someone forced her to steal the drugs, but she was terrified of that person and threw Baxter out. He says he didn’t tell NCIS because he didn’t want Trainer to get in trouble. “I thought I was doing the right thing,” he mutters, in a moment that’s both surprisingly believable and surprisingly humanizing.

The still-uncomfortable Torres is lurking outside Laura’s room when her father approaches and drops the bomb that she was turned down for the experimental treatment program because her cancer’s spread too far. She found out that morning, he says, as they watch her laugh and chat with a doctor.

Next thing we know, Torres finds Laura outside in her wheelchair and chides her for sitting in the cold. “If the weather wants to kill me, it’ll have to take a number,” she jokes. He drapes his coat over her lap and stands stiffly next to her. Laura, ever the chatterbox, apologizes for speaking too bluntly to him. At first Torres is silent, and then he tells her, “I don’t like clutter in my workspace.”

“Deep,” she says drily.

But he’s making a point. He’s a minimalist with no personal effects at work except one framed photo of himself at 19 years old that was taken by his friend Sofia. They’d been inseparable since they were 5, and he looked at her one day in the high school cafeteria and knew that she was going to be his wife.

Laura knows the end of this story and asks, “When was she diagnosed?”

It was their senior year, and both of them believed the treatments would work… until they didn’t. Laura’s a reminder of what he doesn’t want to be reminded of, and he apologizes for taking that out on her. She accepts because she’s an exceptionally well-written guest character.

So at this point, there’s only one character we met previously who hasn’t been ruled out; ergo, economy of characters dictates that the murderer is Master-at-Arms Vinton. He forced Trainer to steal drugs, killed Collins when he confronted him, and then killed Trainer a year later to cover his tracks.

Now, to tie up all the loose threads this week: In the orange room, McGee and Bishop tell Quinn they hacked her fitness app and learned that she took an Uber to the final mile of their run. Ha! She absolutely owns that but tells them that Torres ran the whole thing and actually did beat them because “he’s freakishly fast.”

When Gibbs tells Laura that they’re arrested Vinton, she frets that she should’ve done more for Collins. And that’s when Gibbs tells her that the Secretary of the Navy reviewed Collins’ officer application, and was he posthumously commissioned to the rank of ensign. “He had a good role model,” Gibbs tells her.

Then Torres knocks on the door and verifies that he and Gibbs are good before settling next to Laura’s bedside. Then we get a touching final scene with as many natural ending points as the last 20 minutes of Return of the King. First, Laura gives Torres her surface warfare pin, telling him it’s not something to remember her by, but her way of saying that she’ll remember him.

Then he tells her that no matter how little time the doctors say she has, he wants her to keep fighting, every single day. She agrees, then tells him not to think of her as some girl who died, but someone he helped. “Because you did, Nick.” And then they settle in for some ZNN.

Stray shots

• Do you want more marathon training hijinks? Or would you rather the young Turks get back to complaining about apartments and rent?
• Another week, another reminder that NCIS is one of the best around at character-driven beats interspersed with rich supporting characters and a satisfying mystery. Here’s hoping this quality keeps up as we cruise into the final episodes of the season.