NCIS recap: The long diss for Knight

If hooking up with your married billionaire boyfriend in his panic room is your thing, then I’ve got good news for you about this week’s NCIS.

Of course, it doesn’t end well for the sexy young thing (Alisa Allapach) living out your dream when masked men with zip ties and chloroform break into the mansion. When her married billionaire boyfriend (Travis Schuldt) freezes, she’s forced to grab one of the guns on the panic room wall to shoot one of the intruders herself, and she ends up in her married billionaire boyfriend’s wife’s robe when NCIS shows up to question her.

But this episode isn’t about the mistress. It’s about the wife.

Melinda Martin (Brianna Brown) is unfazed by the young girlfriend, the excessive blood, and the dead guy in her house. At one point, the imperious blonde crisply says, “Give us the room” to the law enforcement officers processing the crime scene. They decline, but barely.

Freddie Martin, a mega-defense contractor whose company was worth over $200 billion last year, is the obvious target of this kidnap plot, and Melinda’s the obvious suspect. But she simply raises one eyebrow and says cooly, “If I was going to have my husband kidnapped, it would’ve worked.”

I, for one, believe her and would like to sign up for any long-term life coaching package she might offer.

Weirdly, she seems way more bothered about the gossip blogs picking up the story than about her husband's extracurricular sex life or the fact that she appears to be the actual target for the kidnappers, which Kasie (Diona Reasonover) and Jimmy (Brian Dietzen) glean from the surveillance photos on the dead intruder’s phone.

Parker (Gary Cole) immediately assigns Melinda a round-the-clock bodyguard in the form of “Agent Useless,” aka Jessica Knight (Katrina Law), who Melinda’s been bossing around and treating with barely disguised contempt all episode long.

The snide behavior continues as Knight accompanies Melinda to her house to pack some belongings for the safe house. Melinda criticizes Knight's skincare regime and footwear choices before concluding that Jess is using her career to hide from something and suggests our stalwart agent consider freezing her eggs. It’s… it’s a lot in 60 seconds.

Knight, meanwhile, sneaks a picture of the contents of Melinda’s jewelry box and unhappily strikes a deal with this bulldozer (respectfully) of a woman: she’ll put on tennis whites and join Melinda at the country club in exchange for Melinda’s compliance with Knight’s security requirements after that.

It’s on the court at the Georgetown Tennis Club that the two women start to see different sides of each other. Melinda’s impressed by Knight’s athletic prowess, and Knight’s impressed by Melinda’s savviness and quiet compassion.

Melinda points out that the wealthy club members who are sipping G&Ts at 12:15 on a Tuesday afternoon are networking to secure funding for bills or campaigns. And of course, Melinda herself kept her tennis date because her opponent’s likely to contribute to Melinda’s foundation dedicated to finding homes for orphaned children. The Brighter Days Fund’s $50 million bank account is the likely reason Melinda’s being targeted.

Oh, and did you think the boys have been slacking while Knight’s on high-maintenance-socialite-with-a-heart-of-gold duty? Heck no. Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) and McGee (Sean Murray) have been busy pursuing the true mystery of the week: whose leather jacket did Jess wear home the night before?

So what had happened was, Jess drank so much at her sister’s party last night to celebrate Robin's graduation from *checks notes* an online hat-making academy that, according to Torres, “a rhino would’ve been hungover.” 

And while our fair agent doesn’t need the electrolytes, ibuprofen, and vitamin C that Torres brought her that morning, she also isn’t sure whose leather jacket ended up draped around her shoulders at the end of the night. So that’s what the boys are working on this week, alongside unraveling the whole murder/kidnapping situation.

The case of the leather jacket cracks wide open when Nick and Tim find a sticker with a barcode inside it and Palmer uses his family's dry cleaning biz connections to locate the owner.

Of course, he wasn't aware that he was tracking down Jess' mystery suitor, and it flusters him for about 20 seconds until the owner turns out to be an older, not-so-handsome (respectfully) actuary from Bethesda. “I thought Jess always went for the cool guys," Jimmy marvels.

Okay, fine, the boys have also discovered that there are no records of Melinda before 2002 and that her maiden name actually belonged to a woman who died 22 years ago. Kasie uses tattoo ink colors to reveal that the dead intruder is Eddie the loan shark, a Kansas City Royals fan from Missouri who broke his parole to come to D.C.

When Knight gets a text with this information, Melinda’s softening demeanor falls away, and she insists they head back to her house for her forgotten Invisalign. She then proves that she’s got something to hide by tricking Knight into the panic room and locking her inside.

But hey, it gives Knight time to review the pics she took of Melinda’s jewelry and the battered class ring from Mt. Washington High in Kansas City jumps out at her.

Jessica Knight, meet April Day, the valedictorian and homecoming queen who grew up in a trailer park and disappeared with her homecoming king boyfriend, Jason Marino, 20-some years ago.

Parker provides the next bit of the puzzle: he recognizes Jason from a case he worked for years in the FBI. Jason’s the long-dead son of Carla Marino, the matriarch of the biggest organized crime family in the Midwest.

Vance (Rocky Carroll) and Parker wonder aloud if Carla placed Melinda into D.C. society to lure a defense contractor into the crime family’s web. And when the team follows Melinda to Rock Creek Park, where she met with an Episcopalian minister from upstate New York, they find the man dead and high-heeled footprints leading away from the scene.

Meanwhile, Knight tracks down Melinda, but the two women end up tossed into the back of a freezer truck. Carla Marino calls her kidnapper henchmen and instructs them to swab April-turned-Melinda's cheek for DNA.

So there’s a kid, of course. As the meat truck carries the women to a destination unknown and Jess figures out a way to slice open her zip ties (this is why you need to keep a henchman in the back of your kidnap van at all times!), Melinda spills her story.

She and Jason ran away from his awful family, but he was killed in a motorcycle accident in Maryland. She was three months pregnant and terrified to lose their child to Carla, so a kindly pastor in upstate New York buried Jason and helped arrange a closed adoption for her daughter. RIP to Rev. Carter, who was killed for keeping Melinda’s secrets.

If you think this story is the extent of Melinda's toughness, well, you haven’t seen her and Knight take down their kidnappers with literal meat mallets. It’s as impressive and as terrifying as it sounds.

Armed with Melinda’s full story, the team’s able to track down her biological daughter, Lauren, and lay a trap for Carla (Rebecca De Mornay, fabulous as ever!) when the crime boss comes to collect her granddaughter.

Carla and Parker clearly have a cat-and-mouse history (seriously, is there anybody Gary Cole doesn't have chemistry with?), but Carla calmly points out that her hands stayed clean and her people are willing to take the fall for all the crimes. She’s simply a concerned grandmother who’s been looking for her kin ever since she saw a photo of her dead son’s long-lost girlfriend April Day in Georgetown Living Magazine.

Parker threatens Carla into staying away from Melinda and Lauren, but do any of us believe for a minute that the queen of Midwest crime is going to honor that?

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The new Knight and Day friendship survives the end of the case, and they agree to meet for tennis at a location of Jess’ choosing (a local high school, and Knight gets to pick her own outfit this time). Then Jess encourages Melinda to step inside the flower shop where her daughter (Tabitha Brownstone) works. After all, Lauren added her DNA to the database to help find her bio parents.

Then Knight watches from the car as Melinda tentatively approaches the daughter she hasn’t seen in 22 years, launching into an emotional explanation that's cut short when Lauren moves around the counter for a hug that Melinda slowly lets herself relax into.

Stray shots

• Okay, NCIS has been killing it with guest stars this season. Hollywood, please cast Brianna Brown and Eliza Coupe in a sister sitcom and let these two women cook. 
• If you’re as invested as I am in the Jimmy and Jess romantic saga, please know that the cool leather jacket actually belongs to the actuary’s son, a bass player in a band. And while Knight doesn’t stick around to meet him when he comes to collect his belongings, she does instruct her wingmen to let her know if he’s cute. Watch this space as the situation develops in future episodes.
• If you’re digging the “fleeting glimpse of a long-lost person in the media leads to mayhem over secret identities,” may I recommend the Geena Davis movie The Long Kiss Goodnight? It’s my “Die Hard is a Christmas movie” Christmas movie and also kind of my Roman Empire, and I need more people to watch it and love it the way I do.
• Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! And remember: never bring a knife to a meat mallet fight.