Episode 15, Season 12 - "Impostor Syndrome"

It's been awhile since my last review, so excuse me if I'm a bit rusty. This episode focused on an interesting, technologically feasible, and seriously creepy premise: deep fakes. It had loads of potential; unfortunately, the writing fell short. There were some good scenes--there always are--but there were glaring problems. Now that there will be a Season 13, here's hoping that the writers use the hiatus to hone their skills.

Some of the problems appeared, unfortunately, in the first few scenes. As I remember, NCIS:LA is a show about an elite squad of federal agents. If only every writer for the show remembered this. Which brings me to the opening scene. As has happened in previous episodes, the show opens with the agents already on the job: Callen, Sam, Fatima, and Rountree are conducting surveillance on a suspect (Adam) who is, somehow, involved with al Qaeda. They suspect he's picking up something, so the plan is to take him into custody when he's picked up whatever "it" is. One might think that with four agents present, at least one would be close enough to physically take him down once the transaction is complete. You'd be wrong. Callen and Sam are sitting in the Challenger on the opposite side of the wide street, Rountree's in the food truck some distance away watching on video, and Fatima's outside on her motorcycle, waiting for Adam to emerge. When Adam comes out, Callen and Sam get out of the Challenger and from across the street and at least 25 feet away yell at him. Adam immediately gets on his motorcycle. Fatima doesn't cut off his escape route effectively and so gives chase while Callen and Sam casually watch as Callen says something like, "They've got this, right?" Because who cares if someone working for al Qaeda gets away, right? 

I don't know where the food truck was parked, but after a chase that lasts a minute, if the suspect is traveling only 30 mph, he would have traveled half a mile. In this case, when Adam reaches the food truck, Rountree knocks him off his bike. I like an action sequence as much as anyone, but I don't want the writer to ignore logic to get it. (By the way, Rountree, if you don't want customers coming to the food truck, there are these things called signs. Get one that says, Closed for Repairs, and put it up.)

Once Adam's in custody, Nell gets to work on the encrypted hard drive he had with him. And then there's the scene that is the most problematic in the episode: the gym. Fatima goes to her gym to work out because it's empty on Friday night (unlike the NCIS gym which must be packed), and surprise, there's a guy there (but no staff members). And, of course, he and Fatima begin chatting and because he doesn't have earphones, she brings out her phone and during the course of her workout, she leaves her phone unattended. Naturally, the guy is a bad guy (he couldn't have been more obvious if he had "Bad Guy" stamped on his forehead) and he downloads information from her phone. It's not that this couldn't happen; it's that it did and Fatima suffered absolutely no consequence for putting the entire team at risk--and at least one member may still be at risk. That is inexcusable in a crime drama that needs a modicum of reality in its situations. At the very least, Fatima should have received a severe reprimand and perhaps a letter in her personnel file. Callen has received far harsher criticism for far less damaging mistakes.

Once the information from Fatima's phone has been downloaded, the tech creepiness begins. Nell discovers a deep fake of a terrorist leader who was killed in 2017 on the hard drive, and while Callen interrogates Adam in the boatshed, Kensi and Deeks check out who bought the hard drive. There's no record of who bought it, but it's missing from the computer store as is the manager, Noel (it appears there's a mistake in the press release because no Noel is listed, but there is Garrett--the gym guy--and his character seems to be "Noel"). From this point until the final five minutes, we don't see Fatima in the flesh but we see her onscreen. Or do we? Is it Fatima or her deep fake? Meanwhile, the team is having a hard time since their comms have been compromised and who they hear often isn't who they think it is. This is because, as Nell explains to Rountree, whoever has compromised the comms has audio of the team members and is using a voice modulator to create and send messages in their voices. There's a sequence that does a good job of showing the danger of this: when Kensi and Deeks go to search Noel's apartment, Sam gets a message that directs him to another location where an apartment has been booby-trapped with an IED. Kensi and Deeks are attacked but capture their attacker, and Sam successfully avoids setting off the IED. Kensi and Deeks search Noel's apartment and find nothing but Russian cigarettes.

What I found confusing and not satisfactorily explained was first, how the comms were compromised and second, how Nell was able to communicate with the team later in the episode. I'm not a tech person, but wouldn't something have to be hacked for the comms to be compromised, and if something was hacked, wouldn't NCIS have been alerted? And there was no sense of when or how the team knew what was going on. Maybe this was intentional, to keep the viewers in the dark, but I found it unsatisfying because it seemed that Nell magically got around this pretty serious problem. It also made me think that the writer couldn't figure out how to have Nell get around the compromised comms, so instead of explaining the "how," she just skipped over that part. That's never good. However she does it, Nell is able to communicate to the team without Noel knowing and when the deep fake Fatima sends Callen to a "secure site" with Adam, Kensi and Deeks are already there as backup. (Who knows how they knew where to go.) And when the deep fake Fatima tells Rountree to send the content of the hard drive to a secure website for the CIA, he does but when Nell returns to ops, she tells "Fatima" (Noel) that he actually downloaded a tracking program. (When Nell had time to create this doppelganger of the terrorist hard drive is unclear, but there must have been an extra hard drive sitting around.) Anyway, Sam and Fatima break down Noel's door and Fatima secures him while Sam checks out the computers, and that's when he sees the deep fake Fatima and the deep fake Callen. (When the real Fatima returned to the team was another mystery.)

There were several scenes between Kensi and Deeks about their baby progress--or lack of. Deeks came across as pushy, not understanding what Kensi's going through. After all, he's not the one who's having difficulty conceiving or going through hormone therapy. Kensi is under stress enough without hubby's "optimism." By the final scene, he'd reigned in his "optimism" which must have been as much a relief for Kensi as it was for me.

Nell has become more comfortable in her role as Hetty's substitute, and she seems more able to deal with unexpected problems that arise. Her scenes with Callen provided a contrast between her way of operating and Hetty's, and Callen seemed completely comfortable working with Nell. I was surprised, after Sam told Nell about the deep fake Callen, that Nell would even consider not telling Callen about it after this experience where technology had created so much confusion in this operation and with Katya still on the loose and possibly involved (the Russian cigarettes) and Anna still a target. 

Which brings me to a real problem I have with Gemmill and the writers when it comes to continuity and the continuation of storylines that don't involve Kensi or Deeks. As viewers may remember, the final scene in "The Noble Maidens" was of Callen asleep in Joelle's hospital room. This created confusion about the state of Callen's relationship with Anna. Was this confusion intentional? Absolutely. Because Gemmill and the writers have used the Callen-Anna relationship for cheap drama for several seasons now, and it's become more than tiring; it shows how little Gemmill and the writers respect these characters and this relationship. This isn't the first time an episode has ended with an important event in their relationship only to have it be completely ignored in the following episode. Are Callen and Anna still together? Who knows? It's impossible to tell from this episode. Should viewers know the state of their relationship? Absolutely. Did Callen and Anna have an important talk about the present state of their relationship? That seems more than likely given the events of the preceding three episodes, but it's not something Gemmill and the writers thought important enough to actually put onscreen; meanwhile, another conversation about babies between Kensi and Deeks seems to be. This dismissal of any storyline involving characters who aren't named Kensi and Deeks is a major problem for me. And it doesn't happen only with Callen although he's the character to whom it happens most often. After Michelle's murder--probably the major event in Sam's life since the beginning of the series--we got two brief scenes (with Callen) where he talked about missing Michelle. That was all the writers had time for. And what about the Nell-Beale break up that just suddenly was? We saw nothing. We didn't get one scene explaining the end of a relationship between two team members. And there wasn't one word spoken about Nikita by anyone after his death--not a word by any of Callen's team "family" and no scene where Callen reflected on the father he'd searched for for more than thirty years. But I've lost count of all the scenes over several seasons between Kensi and Deeks about babies and starting a family, not to mention their conversations about their nuptials, the bar, buying a house, and quitting. It's not that I mind these conversations, per se; it's that I mind that these two characters are the ONLY characters Gemmill and the writers seem willing to let have them.

This series has such an excellent cast and so much potential for good, emotional stories it's disheartening to see how little this potential is realized because the writing and the leadership are lacking.