Episode 14, Season 12 -- "The Noble Maidens"

This was a busy episode, and while it was better than "Red Rover, Red Rover" in ways, it had some problems. It's always a crap shoot when the writers tackle a complicated story arc, and  while the problems didn't derail the story, they shouldn't be happening in the 12th season. The beginning of "Noble Maidens" didn't dovetail neatly with the ending of "Red Rover," and Katya's defection presented a logic problem: in "Red Rover," Carlson explained that Joelle was in charge of Katya's defection, but in "Noble," Joelle tells Callen that she never saw Katya. If someone "handles" a defection, that usually means they physically bring the defector in, and if Joelle was in L.A. and handling Katya's defection, then Katya should be in L.A. And, if Katya wasn't in L.A., why were the FSB agents near L.A. and the CIA agents killed? But, if Katya was in L.A., why were Odessa and Vanya shipping Anna to Russia? It could be that Katya had been brought to L.A. by Joelle, but was heading back to Russia, but it wouldn't make sense that Joelle hadn't seen Katya. So, that part of the story arc was a mess. At some point, the writers will realize there's a difference between viewers trying to make sense of what happens in an episode and anticipating what comes next.

Those issues aside, the episode moved at a pace that maintained a sense of urgency without being frantic, and gave the writers an opportunity to interject a few important revelations without detracting from the main action--the rescue of Anna. This episode was a showcase for Callen and Chris O'Donnell didn't disappoint. It's not often that the mask of control Callen wears is torn off, but in this episode it was torn off, tossed aside, and figuratively pounded into tiny pieces. And it was a joy to behold. As Callen, Chris has always been able to emote through the most minor of actions and a minimum of dialogue, so when there's an episode in which Callen is pushed so hard that his emotions revolt against being controlled and take over, it's something special. 

From the very first scene of Callen on the street, we see and hear the frustration and anxiety he's feeling as he searches for Anna who's been missing for hours and he's no closer to finding. Nell calls and suggests a new strategy, but Callen shuts her off as Sam approaches. Sam tells Callen, he's come up empty in his search, so Callen--desperate--wants Sam to use his street covers and offer a $250,000 reward--no questions asked--for information on Katya's whereabouts. Sam first asks Callen where he's going to get that cash, and then tells him that they're not going to find Anna this way, that they need to regroup. Callen agrees and tells Sam he'll see him back at Ops, but that's the last place he's headed. Callen is obviously stressed to the max, and yet Sam is surprisingly impatient, almost angry, at his partner. Of all people, Sam should understand exactly how Callen feels.

We next see Callen in Zasha's flat where he confronts her. In this scene, Callen shows how intimidating he can be when he's pushed to his breaking point. Their "relationship" is more clearly defined by this conversation, and Callen has an obvious advantage over Zasha which he uses without hesitation. She reluctantly uses her contacts because he insists, but according to them, Katya's still in Russia. Callen doesn't believe her, a natural response given Anna's abduction and what's happened to Joelle, and he threatens to stop protecting her if she doesn't do what she can to find Katya. (Just an aside: I loved Zasha's digs.)

Back at OSP, Nell is no longer whining about being manipulated by Hetty but is, instead, taking charge. She handles multiple complications that arise, and her response when confronted by Sam, even angrier to find that Callen hasn't returned, is when she demonstrates how in control of the office--if not the situation--she is. To be able to stand up to Sam requires authority, and when Kilbride arrives in a more aggressive, belligerent mood than usual, she faces him and while polite, concedes nothing. She handles the complications and confrontations with the maturity and calm one expects from an intelligent, seasoned professional, someone she hasn't been often enough in recent episodes.

There were also several shorter scenes that worked well. In the hospital scene between Callen and Joelle each demonstrates respect for the other, and Joelle provides all the details she has about where she was kept captive.The Kirkin-Deeks-Kensi scene provides the first hints about "noble maidens," hints fleshed out by Arkady in a later scene with Callen. It was essential that Callen be the one to tell Arkady about Anna's situation given their relationship, and it was nice to see the writers acknowledge this. The scene between Callen and Arkady (with Sam as a bystander) provides details about "noble maidens," as well as Callen (more on this later). Arkady's anger at Callen when he learns that Katya has Anna is understandable and reinforces the fatherly love for her that he's shown in episodes all the way back to season 6, while the scenes between Anna and her captors, Vanya and Odessa, captured both the peril of her predicament and her defiance and fearlessness when confronting them. Callen has always been attracted to strong, independent women, and Anna meets that criteria.

Besides the search for Anna, there are a few other notable events. Perhaps the most consequential is the comment by Kilbride that Hetty isn't coming back. He mentions this to Nell when trying to ascertain her feelings about remaining at NCIS without Hetty and gauge if she'd be willing to consider becoming the permanent operations manager of OSP. This raises the question of when--or if--we'll see Hetty again.

The other notable event was the death of Anatoli Kirkin. I have to admit that his death affected me little. While I liked Kirkin in the earlier seasons, I found the foppish, silly caricature he had become uninteresting. In the early seasons, he had an edge (that Kirkin would have noted the irony of him rescuing Anna from a shipping container when she had planned to send him to Russia the same way). I wasn't saddened by his death because, to me, Kirkin died several seasons ago, but the way he died was appropriate because it was fitting that this Kirkin give his life to save his one true love. (As an aside, if Kirkin is the best "muscle" Arkady can muster, it's time he stays home before he gets seriously hurt.)

The ease with which Callen and Sam dispatched Vanya and Odessa was very unsatisfying after the remarks about the lethal training of "noble maidens." Based on their less than lethal performance against Callen and Sam, I would say those fifteen years of training were a waste. However, their defeat led to the most emotional of all the scenes in the episode.

Callen and Anna are the characters who control their emotions more than any of the other characters--with the exception of Hetty--so when their emotions finally break free, the result is a momentous torrent of feelings. Anna's expression and voice when she recognizes Callen coming to free her is pure, exuberant joy and obvious, undeniable love while Callen's actions and words show the depth and the strength of his feelings for Anna and his relief at finding her alive and unharmed. It is the most emotional scene between them we've ever seen. After the rescue there's a brief conversation in which both acknowledge that they need to talk about everything that's happened recently, and when Callen tells Anna that Carlson has restricted her movements to L.A. temporarily, Anna says--almost asks, "But I can go home." Callen replies, "Yea. I got some stuff to finish up with Sam, but . . . I'll see you back there." What a step for them to acknowledge--publicly--that they have a home together!

As Arkady stays with Anna to see her safely home, Callen reconnects with Sam and apologizes for shutting him out, Deeks mourns the loss of Kirkin with Kensi by his side, and Kilbride compliments Nell on having managed a successful rescue operation but leaves her with the still unanswered question of who expunged Anna's criminal record because it was that act that set this chain of events in motion. He even goes so far as to suggest it might be Hetty's handiwork which would cause some further complications for the team. And finally, because it's NCIS:LA and Callen and Anna haven't had a season relatively free of complications since season 8, the final scene of this episode is a slow pan of Joelle's room at the hospital, and we see her asleep in her bed and Callen asleep in a chair next to her. Thanks, guys.

This episode also introduced a serious revision to Anna's personal history. Joelle underwent a similar revision from school teacher to CIA officer (and betrayer of Callen), and while Anna's revision isn't as drastic, it’s also problematic. One always wonders why writers revise a character’s history.  Perhaps the writers thought this would create a more personal connection between Callen and Anna; ironic, since her keeping this part of her past hidden may do just the opposite, and they already had much in common. Maybe it was added as a way to introduce the "training" Callen underwent when he was a child. There's also the possibility that the writers wanted to make a connection between Anna and Joelle—both keeping secrets from Callen although for very different reasons and different kinds of secrets. It's also possible that the writers included it because they liked the idea of the Institute of Noble Maidens, but I think there's more to it than that. It may be a way of saying that we all keep secrets from each other until, at some point, we simply can't. After all, Deeks kept what happened to Boyle secret from Kensi for years and finally told her because if he loved her, he couldn't keep it from her. If that’s the reason, the writers could have come up with a secret that wasn’t a revision to Anna’s background, but they didn’t, so here we are again. Anna realizes she should have told Callen; now, it's time for them to see if they really do love and trust one another. This could be one more step that Callen needs to take to build a lasting relationship with any woman. He forgave Joelle; he should be able to forgive Anna if they have the talk they need to have (which would be lovely to see, but doubtful that we will).

Some of the earlier conversations Anna had with both Callen and Arkady are difficult to reconcile with this revision, but her career history can remain intact even with it. Did Anna become a Russian operative? Attending the school doesn't make that inevitable. And if she did, she may have decided that she didn’t want to continue in that career. After all, she had to accept the new background Arkady created for her and use it to make a new life for herself in the U.S. This new background didn't change her name; it simply eliminated all details about her training as a noble maiden. Having that training as part of her personal history would have made it difficult--probably impossible--to join any law enforcement agency in the U.S. I dislike revising a character's history several seasons in without a very specific reason, but this revision is less troubling than Joelle's because this revision won’t keep Anna in the series if her relationship with Callen doesn’t continue, whereas Joelle’s revised history seemed to have been done for the expressed purpose of keeping her in the series even after her relationship with Callen ended, and that has been a mistake.

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And now the "more on this later" . . .

Ever since Gemmill assumed the reins as showrunner--and even before--he's been like a toddler trying to shove a triangle (Callen with his sharp edges) into a round hole. In "Sans Voir," we first learn that Hetty took in another child, Hunter. Later, in "Raven and Swans," Gemmill added Sullivan and Grace and unnamed others to Hetty's brood of orphans taken in and "raised." Then, in "Rage," Military added his two cents and Callen tells Sam that he owes everything he is to Hetty who took him in when he was 15 or 16. Later, in "Mother" when Hetty explains her role in Akhos' life, Callen completes her explanation about taking him in and training him, suggesting that this is what she did with him, and in "Answers," Callen tells Sam that if he were to take over as operations manager, it would be the culmination of all of Hetty's teachings, all of her lessons. None of this jives with the original backstory Brennan gave us in the earlier seasons--the boy of five who arrived in the U.S. with his older sister, only to be separated from her and spend 13 years in the foster system, with placements in 37 different foster homes, until the age of 18. But that didn't seem to matter to Gemmill or the other wrtiers. For whatever reason, they continued to create new and conflicting backstories for Callen, even going so far as to create two retcon flashbacks this season, one of which was completely unbelievable given his original history. And now, in this episode, it seems Gemmill might be trying to return to Callen's original backstory, or roots, but at a price.

In this episode when Arkady explains who and what the "noble maidens" are, he suggests that Callen has gone through similar training with Hetty. Callen's response is very clear and completely contradicts much of the rewrites made recently to Callen's personal history. He tells Arkady, "Hetty, she helped me when I was young. She didn't teach me anything or train me." His comment is preceded by flashbacks from earlier episodes with some of Hetty's comments in voice over. In my opinion, this view of how Hetty "trained" Callen makes much more sense than any of the rewrites Gemmill and the other writers have done over the past 6 seasons, but it also makes Hetty a much less motherly figure. 

Many viewers have an idealized view of Hetty as a motherly figure believing that her feelings for the children she raised and her agents mirror the care and affection of a natural mother, but this scene complicates that view of Hetty. Hetty admitted to Callen that she took him out of the orphanage and got him into every foster home. Was this how she "trained" him? That's certainly implied and it's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. After all, Hetty had been Clara's handler, and she knew that Callen's grandfather worked for the OSS. Is it that farfetched to accept that Hetty chose Callen's career for him when he was a child? She explained it all in "Ravens and Swans." And if she did choose it, is it then unreasonable to imagine that Hetty kept him in the foster system and managed to select some (maybe all) of his foster families, families who could teach him things that would come in useful in his future career? Maybe one of those families was the Rostoffs who taught him Russian. But Callen never stayed long enough to become part of any family. Was that always because of something he did, or could Hetty have sometimes intervened to move him to another family? In his talk with Lance in "Skin Deep," when talking about his foster experience, Callen said that after he made a few friends and started to feel comfortable, something would always happen and he'd be shipped off to another family. Was any of that Hetty's doing because it was part of Callen's "training"? If this was part of his "training," it had much the same effect as the formalized training of the "noble maidens": it toughened Callen and taught him to fight, to keep his emotions under control, to distrust people, to disappear and blend in, to become completely self-reliant, to work alone. These are all traits Anna learned in her training as a noble maiden, which may be one of the reasons she and Callen understand each other so well. But it makes Hetty much less a mother and much more of a manipulator, in fact, a ruthless manipulator, willing to sacrifice the childhood of Callen--and the childhoods of the other children she "raised"-- to mold them into what she wanted them to be. It's not a particularly pleasant thought, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility, either.