Season 14, Epsiode 6 - "Glory of the Sea"

 

I enjoy most stories about buried treasure--even those that are episodes of procedurals--and there have been several that worked (NCIS, NCIS: New Orleans, CSI: New York, Bones, and Castle are all a few of the shows that have aired episodes with stories about treasure hunting). Unfortunately, this episode wasn't one. A quick recap: a rear admiral who's working on a project for the Navy is kidnapped by treasure hunters searching for a treasure buried somewhere off the coast of California by a Portuguese conquistador (turns out the admiral has figured out the treasure's location). Sounds like a lot of fun, and I wish it had been. So, why wasn't it?

The problem was the writing--again. The basic premise--searching for buried treasure--is the sort of premise that needs to be written for action or humor or both, and this episode didn't have enough of either. As is happening much too often, the writer has the characters talk too much, do too little, and spent far too much time focused on the guest character. (Unless the guest character is going to be recurring, like Anna, Arkady, Mama Deeks, Raymond, Sidorov, Tahir, etc. they should get minimal screen time.) It was a meh episode when it could have been a jolly good time; it made me wish that it had been written more like "Các Tù Nhân," "Cancel Christmas," or "Blame It On Rio." After all, how many times is the team going to be searching for buried treasure?

The first problem was we didn't have the entire team. I know that wasn't the fault of the writer, but it seems a bad episode to not have all the major characters present. Deeks is taking a personal day to help Mama Deeks find an apartment near them, so we get an opening conversation between Kensi and Fatima. It turns out Kensi is planning a day with Rosa. Prodded by Fatima, Kensi reads off her plan--a list of museums in L.A. Anyone who knows L.A. knows a lot of time would be spent in traffic driving from one museum to the next, finding parking would be a challenge, and the actual time spent at the museums would be minimal (and she forgot the Norton Simon not to mention there are two Getty museums). Last review I mentioned that it was nice that the writers were using conversations to move storylines forward even when certain characters weren't in the episode. But, writers, that doesn't mean that every episode has to have conversations about ongoing storylines. This was one of those conversations that the writer didn't have to include. 

There was some good banter between Callen and Sam. Their opening conversation briefly  touched on the situation with Sam's dad Raymond before shifting to Callen's upcoming wedding. Callen's comment about getting married in a suit from wardrobe sounded like Callen to me--the man who's spent most of his adult life living out of a knapsack, sleeping on the floor, and never staying too long in one place. Even though he's finally settling down, he's never been interested in clothes or appearances. There were some problems later on, problems that might be due to the writer being unfamiliar with the characters. For instance, both Callen and Sam speak Spanish fluently, so the idea that they didn't know paloma was the Spanish word for "dove" was silly. I'm not fluent in Spanish, but even I know paloma means "dove."

And finally there was the rear admiral who's getting ready to retire. This is the kind of story where a quirky character with some pizazz would be ideal. Arkady, Sabatino, Roberta, Chegwidden, Bridges, Raymond, etc. stand out as characters because they have personality. This admiral was stiff, almost stodgy, and overall, uninteresting (he reminded me of a character you see in a commercial for liquor or insurance). Spending so much time on a dull character was a drag on the episode. The entire podcast section should have been left on the cutting room floor: it was boring and unnecessary. Viewers didn't need to know the details about underwater gliders, and an episode shouldn't be used to showcase the writer's research skills. The basics about the project were sufficiently covered in Ops during the agent briefing. 

The idea that the agents can't solve puzzles--after solving the puzzle Hetty left them when she was in hiding at Nogales, when she went to Vietnam, when warning them about Katya's return, and the many times they've had to figure out who, what, where, and why just to solve a case--made me think this writer hasn't seen earlier episodes. Finding the journal in the ship was fine, but for the admiral to have gone to such lengths to hide it and cut up the map and put the pieces in separate hiding places meant he was either a) very paranoid or b) had a reasonable suspicion that someone might come after him because of his treasure hunting or c) did it because he has something like OCD. But we didn't see anyone like that in this character.

While Callen and Sam were paired together (a nice return to their partnership), Kensi was paired with Rountree while Fatima held down Ops. The pairings themselves weren't a problem, but the lack of action and almost total reliance on conversations were. Obviously, characters have to talk, but the trick is to have them talk while they're moving instead of having them stand around or sit. There needs to be more moving and less standing/sitting. This is also another episode where we never see the bad guys until the final two minutes when they're confronted by the agents, and before we know anything about them (other than their silly pseudo-names), one is knocked out and the other is dead.

Most of the conversations were of the team members figuring out all the steps the admiral had taken to hide his clues, but there was very little activity. Kensi and Rountree spent a lot of time with the librarian while Callen and Sam spent time at the admiral's house or back at OSP going through the admiral's journal. They got on the road after discovering the clue about the sailor statue, but that's not much action. I just wish the writer had been able to incorporate action into this story. And because the team wasn't up against anyone else going after the same clues--as far as we could tell until the bookstore--there was very little urgency in their work. (This is another problem lately: the lack of urgency, the almost conversational attitude of the team to cases.)

The short history of the galleon, the tidbits of information Sam shared (like the meaning of parallel--something Callen would already know from in his work for the DEA and CIA, as well as NCIS) and the details about the Channel Islands were fine, but they didn't make the episode more entertaining. And then there was the conversation that didn't work for me: the conversation between Callen and Sam after "rescuing" the admiral. The part where Sam teases Callen about the bachelor party was cute, but the earlier part of the conversation didn't work for a few reasons. The first was the writer conflating Chris O'Donnell with Callen. I know some viewers like it when writers conflate the actor and the character (the man in "Better Angels" having a son named River, like Dani's real life son). I confess, I don't like it. I don't mind when actors have friends or family on the show if they aren't, somehow, identified as friends or family. So, when one of Chris's sons was in "Past Lives," his character name was Michael--not Chip, Charles, Chuck, or Finley. So, back to this conversation: Chris may have a fear of sharks, but Callen isn't Chris O'Donnell. He's a character who's gone swimming in the ocean ("Endgame") and lived at the beach.  And the only time Callen has expressed a fear of sharks was in "Crazy Train" because the bad guys were chumming the water, something that would make most people--even Deeks, for instance--fear a shark attack. And, again, it seems like the writer hasn't seen earlier episodes because in "All the Little Things," Anna says she feels safe when she can smell the ocean, so a beach wedding actually would make sense since most beach weddings don't include the bride and groom saying their vows while in the ocean. These are the little things, the inconsistencies and lack of building on what we already know about the characters and earlier dialogue, that bother me more than they should. Where is Gemmill? What many of the writers for the show seem to need is someone who knows the early seasons, as well as the most recent seasons, someone like the showrunner. Maybe then there would be some continuity to the characters and the dialogue. 

Just one more thing: one of the reasons the secret squirrels worked so well--besides being very good at their jobs--was that they were still an integral part of the team without changing the dynamics of the four field agents. The dynamics of the team--and the show--have changed with the addition of Fatima and Rountree as field agents. To me, that's not been a positive, and I'm talking about their positions, not the characters. It's not that Fatima and Rountree couldn't do field work occasionally, just as Nell and Beale did field work occasionally, but the dynamics would've been less impacted if Gemmill had introduced both of them as replacements for Nell and Beale, or even probationary field agents working in Ops before transferring to full field-active status rather than dumping them in as full-fledged field agents.

I really wanted this to be a fun, exciting episode with memorable scenes and memorable dialogue, and while it had a some memorable lines, the episode could've been much more exciting and a lot more fun than it was. I miss the fun episodes, but as everyone who writes knows, writing good drama is difficult enough, but writing comedy is much more difficult than writing drama.