"Divided We Fall" (Season 13, Episode 5)

 

Failure is a fact of life, and every team has failed at one time: Hotch's team, Gibbs' team, Grissom's team have all failed. And this team has failed before. They failed to find Michelle in time to save her in "Uncaged" and they failed to prevent the return of Callen's father in "Warrior of Peace." It's not the team's failure that was a problem for me in this episode; it was that the team failed because of a storyline with problems and uncharacteristic behavior. If a writer is going to have characters fail--which can make for a great, emotional episode--at least let them fail doing their best in a situation where they have the possibility of success and where their actions reflect who they are. In the previous two episodes when the team failed, the team had a plan--a logical, doable plan--followed it and almost succeeded. They failed because sometimes the best plans still might not be good enough. There are always unexpected factors that can't be controlled. In this episode, some illogical actions and uncharacteristic behavior made successfully completing the mission impossible.

Sometimes NCIS:LA episodes sacrifice strong storylines for good character scenes. These two are not mutually exclusive as evidenced by episodes that manage both equally well. In fact, the majority of episodes in seasons 1-8, as well as several episodes since then, offered both strong storylines and good character scenes. What doesn't work is when a storyline serves simply as a backdrop for character scenes because the characters need a purpose beyond themselves. A strong, well-constructed storyline doesn't mean the characters aren't driving the story; instead, a well-constructed storyline usually ensures that the characters stay true to their essence. Whatever issues there are with the storyline, the actors on NCIS:LA always deliver, and this episode was no exception. Because the acting is always on point, when the storylines are equally compelling, the result is a truly memorable episode. Unfortunately, as action-packed as this episode was, the story included a few problems. 

The episode begins with Callen and Sam intercepting Laura Song, a U.S. intelligence agent whose cover might have been compromised, and whisking her away to a safe house. The scene abruptly cuts to OPS. Kensi and Deeks enter, Deeks complaining about being called in by Kilbride on a Sunday and imagining what the other team members are doing. In this scene, we finally, learn Kilbride's position--Director of Special Operations, an impressive title and one that suggests being based in D.C. rather than L.A. We're also reminded that Kilbride has a son and Kensi reminisces about her own father and the difference between his demeanor at work and with his family, suggesting that the cranky Kilbride seen at OSP isn't the same Kilbride when he's a father. (After this episode, that seems highly unlikely.) Kilbride appears onscreen and brings Kensi and Deeks up to speed about Song and gives them the task of getting Song's daughter, a sophomore at USC, to the boatshed and keeping her safe.

The scene shifts to the safe house as Fatima and Rountree arrive. Fatima is griping about possibly missing her dinner date because of this protection detail assignment. It seems Fatima only frequents restaurants that are very popular and require reservations weeks or months in advance even though there are literally thousands of restaurants in the L.A.area that don't. (For someone who supposedly grew up in L.A., she seems woefully out of touch with the local scene.) They enter the apartment building and get set up in the surveillance room. When Callen, Sam, and Song arrive, Rountree meets them and Callen takes Song up to the apartment in the elevator while Sam takes the stairs to check out the floors. When Callen and Song reach the apartment, they meet Fatima inside who's been checking it to make sure it's secure. There's a brief conversation which ends with Song telling Callen and Fatima, "Until then [Kilbride arrives] I guess my life is in your hands." The next scene is a time shift and it is now one hour later. The apartment lobby is strewn with bodies and weapons and the walls and pillars pocked with bullet holes. Kilbride strides through and finds Callen and Sam on the floor. He asks them what happened. There's no response. From this point on, the episode incorporates the creative construction technique of mixing flashbacks and present time interview scenes, but even with this impressive opening, the episode has a plethora of problems beginning with the "safe house."

As seen when Fatima and Rountree arrived, the "safe house" wasn't a house but an apartment located on the top floor of an unoccupied, six-floor apartment building which created some problems. It wasn't clear who owned the building, but the idea that the government would buy a six-story apartment building and keep it empty in order to use one apartment as a safe house is unrealistic.It also didn't seem that there were any tenants as no one appeared once the shooting began. Such a safe house might be unnoticed for awhile, but any apartment building in L.A. with no tenants would begin to draw attention from people, either potential tenants or potential squatters. Once the explosions and gunfire began, there would've been at least one call to LAPD (and we learn later from Deeks that there was an LAPD alert), but we never see one LAPD squad car or officer. Another problem--and it was a big one--was when the power was cut. This building, containing a federal government safe house that relies on electronics and technology for surveillance and security, doesn't have a backup generator? Not even for the apartment itself? Whatever type of jammer used by the PRC agents on the NCIS coms (or is it comms?) wouldn't have affected a generator. So, the apartment building posed some problems, as did the apartment/safe house itself.

It's suggested, in a roundabout way, that Hetty Lange designed the safe house. Now, Hetty may have made a mess of her latest op in Syria, but if there's one thing Hetty knows, it's how to build a residence or room that does what it's intended to do and more. The bullet-proof windows and solid steel doors were Hetty; the skylight wasn't. Nor would she have left the multiple street entrances so easy to breach. In addition, if Hetty had built a safe house on the top floor of any building, she would have ensured that there was some other means of escape besides the two most obvious routes--the elevator and the stairs (this is the woman who put the trapdoor in the boatshed and the secret passage in Dove Cote).  And, exactly which doors were solid steel? Certainly not the front door of the apartment, the one blown off the hinges that was obviously wood and easily splintered. 

There are two scenes with Song in the safe house before all hell breaks lose. The first is between Callen and Song. She's getting settled and gets herself a drink and then asks Callen if he works for Hetty. He tells her that he does--he did--and when he asks her how she knew, she replies that the apartment has Hetty's fingerprint all over it. Callen then asks her about her relationship with the admiral. She is much more detailed in her response telling him where she was born, that her mother was American, where she grew up, how she met Kilbride. Later, she engages Sam in conversation, establishing rapport through their common bond of being both parents and law enforcement agents, talking about boarding schools and spending more time with her daughter. The conversation comes around to Sam's wife and she expresses her sympathy when he tells her that she was CIA and died in the line of duty. Song doesn't, however, share details about the death of her own husband (something we learn about later from her daughter). After discovering Song's true nature, these efforts by Song might have been an attempt to gain the trust of her protectors so they would provide her with a firearm, something she requested several times, or perhaps she was feeling philosophical, knowing that her career was ending. To their credit, both Callen and Sam refused her request for a firearm and during the formal investigation, they both explain their refusal was for her safety because keeping her safe was their responsibility. While those scenes were well done, there were other issues that prevented the episode from being exceptional.

One of the issues was the very obvious lack of support for this protection detail. The agents have an intelligence source who may well be the target of a hit by a major foreign government, but they have no intel about whether or not there are any known foreign operatives in the area, no confirmed chatter about any possible action against her. Where was the intelligence gathering by the OSP personnel? This episode revealed the huge hole left by the departure of Nell and Beale. OSP can't operate without intelligence gathering, and if there's no one gathering it, the agents aren't adequately prepared. Another example of this was the lack of surveillance. This is an apartment building with several floors, so the PRC agents must have used a helicopter or climbing gear to get onto the roof. If only there had been someone in OPS monitoring the safe house using exterior neighborhood cameras--like the camera from the construction site across the street that didn't lose power--they could have alerted the team inside or sent a REACT team in support. Keeping tabs on activity in the surrounding neighborhood would have been part of this sort of operation in past seasons, and in this episode, the absence of OPS personnel was an issue.

It wasn't just the absence of intelligence that posed problems. When the protection detail began to go sideways, the actions of Callen and Sam belied their years of experience as special agents. Their task was protection. Granted, they were in a safe house, but they're not ones to let their guard down or to not take any task seriously. They had no intel, they had no idea if the threat was real or not, but when the power went out, they would have acted differently than they did. The very first thing seasoned agents would've done--because power going out is never a good thing--would've been to get their charge inside the panic room even if they had to drag or carry her and then assess the situation. Instead, they took their attention off Song and she left the safe house. That was an action that didn't ring true and wasn't necessary for the storyline. It was followed by one of the scenes that bugged me the most: When Callen and Sam go into the hall and see Song, instead of going and grabbing her and taking her back to the apartment, they stop about twenty feet away and tell her to come back. It was like the writer wrote, "Stop twenty feet away." It made me want to scream, "Go get her!" and made the scene feel false. And once the skylight was breached, Callen and Sam were put out of commission quickly and Song taken because there was no urgency in anything they did after the breach. If the writer had been true to the characters, as soon as Callen ran back to the apartment with Song, he would've gotten her into the panic room and not waited at the apartment door because--as we've seen in many episodes--he, like Sam, is willing to sacrifice his life for the mission, especially if that mission is saving an innocent or a fellow agent.

Meanwhile, Fatima and Rountree stayed on the first floor where their sole job was monitoring the building. Why the feed wasn’t sent to the safe house so the protection detail could also monitor the site seemed strange--almost as strange as Kilbride having two team members babysit Song's daughter instead of joining Song's protection team or Rountree bringing magnets when he's going to be in a room full of computers and technical equipment. But Fatima and Rountree remaining at the building allowed them to be part of the action once the action started. And there was plenty of action. (I admit, the use of slow motion in action sequences is now old hat.) I found myself thinking that the PRC agents had the worst bullet-proof vests ever made the way they went down so quickly. After killing several PRC agents in the lobby, Fatima and Rountree head upstairs and meet Song, killing the two PRC agents with her. They then get trapped in an elevator and Rountree and Fatima escape through the ceiling hatch leaving Song who closes the hatch and is apparently captured. I wondered why PRC agents were coming into the lobby and why Song would come downstairs. If the mission was to extract Song--which we learn later was their mission--why wouldn't the PRC agents and Song simply exit the building through the broken skylight on the 6th floor? Why descend six floors to street level? And why shoot up the building, risking the loss or capture of agents if you can quickly exit with minimal loss?

The scenes in the boatshed with Kensi, Deeks, and Lily (Song's college-age daughter) seemed to be filler because they provided details about Song's background and the mother-daughter relationship but nothing relevant to the main storyline, or if they did, I missed it. They seemed an attempt to draw parallels between Lily and Kensi since both of their father’s died under similar circumstances, but I found Kensi's comment to Lily about her being strong for her mother when her father was killed interesting since Kensi, after her own father's death, left her mom to deal with her husband’s death alone.

The investigation was conducted by one of the most underwhelming interviewers I've seen. Ali seemed nice, but was unbelievable as an Inspector General (IG) for the Office of Naval Intelligence. While this could’ve been an interesting device, a lot of the time spent in these segments seemed irrelevant or maybe it was supposed to be revealing. What was the reason the agents were kept apart for 36 hours (and how was Deeks able to survive)? Surely it didn't take more than twelve hours to arrange for an interviewer, and waiting so many hours to speak to witnesses seems excessive and possibly makes their testimony less trustworthy as those involved were undoubtedly reliving the entire experience in their minds several times. The discrepancies in the agent's stories made sense since they involved small, unimportant things, but the IG's reactions didn't. Why would the IG care if Song drank bourbon or scotch? Why would Fatima and Rountree give different versions of their magnet game or the conversation about her dinner date? Were these supposed to be character revealing, implicate the agents, or simply show that memory isn't always accurate? Did any of those discrepancies matter or change what had happened? I do wish Ali hadn't tried to ingratiate himself with Fatima during her interview. His interview of Fatima was embarrassing in a pathetic guy kind of way. And Deeks' comment about The Dirty Dozen was puzzling because I've seen the movie. I didn’t get the allusion because nothing in the film seems relevant: the film is about a group of convicts sent on a suicide mission. None of the NCIS agents resemble any member of the dozen and Kilbride certainly doesn't resemble the non-convict leader who trains them. Besides, most of the convicts die completing the mission, and those who survive hate superior officers (maybe that reflects the agents' feelings for Kilbride). I also found Deeks' comment about him and Kensi trying to adopt weird in that setting. When he said he couldn’t imagine continuing in law enforcement if Kensi died and they had a child, he was referring to Song, but it was also a verbal slap in the face to Sam who came back to NCIS after Michelle's death even though he had two children. While some viewers adore Deeks because he's so open about his feelings, he reminds me a little of that person who thinks everyone is interested in him and his life and wants to hear about it.

There were other issues with the storyline. Why did the PRC agents use explosives on the glass entry door in the lobby? (It was obvious later that it wasn't bulletproof.) When Kensi reaches the safe house (after learning the power is out and visuals are down), the coms are back up and she hears the team members. Neither Callen nor Sam ask Fatima or Rountree about Song. Instead, hearing that they are trapped in an elevator on the top floor, Callen and Sam are more interested in rescuing them than in determining the fate of the person they were assigned to protect. Talk about out of character. There’s also no explanation of why Callen and Sam were sitting on the floor in the lobby. Back at the interviews, it's the admiral's turn and he reveals that the PRC team had severely compromised the security of the safe house before the NCIS agents even arrived without any explanation about how they knew the location. That's convenient; it's also lazy writing. And why wasn't Song's daughter a target? Was Song willing to let her daughter stay alone in the U.S. while she went back to the PRC, or was the surprise she told her about at the beginning going to be taking her back to the PRC? Song's comment to Kilbride before she dies, that she chose him years ago because he was an easy mark, suggests that she'd been an agent for the PRC all along, but with her death, there's no way of knowing for certain. Having an agent turn has happened before and will happen again, but when it does, the intelligence community would rather question the agent to see what intel has been compromised than kill him/her.

The most troubling issue for me in this episode was Kilbride's god-awful, condescending attitude towards the team and everyone else, even calling the IG an idiot to his face (that Sec Nav decided to keep Song's true status secret from the team--even with their top secret clearance--was another issue that bothered me.) When the IG tells Kilbride that he should tell the team that Song was not a hero but a traitor because they blame themselves, Kilbride's reply epitomizes his disdain and his complete lack of understanding about the agents and how seriously they take their job and the standards they set for themselves: "If they have a great need to wallow in their angst, who am I to stand in their way?" Does Bartels think this comment makes Kilbride look like a leader instead of like an arrogant SOB, and does he think that Kilbride looking at Song's photo in the final shot somehow makes him an empathetic character? Not for me. Sorry. And Kilbride's assumption that the team will be okay after they read the report and realize what they were up against shows how little Kilbride understands the emotional psyche of the team members who will not so easily forgive themselves for failing because the fact is that they failed (everyone except Kensi and Deeks who had the daunting task of babysitting the daughter). It's ironic, really, since the final shot of the episode is of Kilbride wallowing in his own angst.

Hetty might keep things from her team, but she never treats them with such disrespect and arrogance. I tolerated Kilbride, but after this episode, I'm not a Kilbride fan. All-in-all, I found it an action-packed, well-acted, imaginative, but ultimately unsatisfying episode.