Yahoo Finance NCIS: Sydney Recap: The Team Gives a One-Armed SEAL a Hand
Episode 3 of NCIS: Sydney on CBS… well, I found it a bit hard to follow. (Maybe I needed help from an Audio Description Narrator Lady?) But with a second viewing, I managed to put all the pieces together.
The series’ third episode also locked in who all will comprise this “NCIS: Sydney” team moving forward, not that there was any great drama surrounding that.
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The “Brothers in Arms” case was set in motion by a tour group’s discovery of a severed arm floating in the Malabar Ocean Pool. Since said arm was sporting a Navy dive computer favored by SEAL Team members, Mackey and JD first checked in with an Australian Defence Force detachment that had been training with some SEALs, but no one had reported a missing (or armless) comrade.
It was determined that arm belonged to a PFC Coleman, a retired SEAL whose benefits were now being sent to a local dive shop where he worked with three mates. When Evie and DeShawn paid the shop a visit, posing as a couple, the former discovered dive tanks that were filled not with air but drugs. The dive shop guys were brought in for questioning by JD, and they quickly confessed to being drug mules — except they were lying, JD noted, since he had fibbed about finding cocaine inside the tanks, not MDMA.
So what were they really up to when Coleman disappeared or died?
Blue used the severed arm’s dive computer to track where and when Coleman had stopped breathing. Then, she clocked the appearance of a UUV/drone in that same area — but which was gone come morning. Said drone was found stuffed into a nearby breeding cave for sharks, though the data drive that recorded its video surveillance is oddly missing.
JD theorized that Coleman and the other dive shop guys had stumbled across the drone and laid eyes on its footage. The drugs were then planted on them as leverage, to turn over the data drive. Evie found the data drive in the dive shop fish tank, after which Mackey & Co. saw that the video was of the underside of a Collins-class RAN submarine parked in Sydney Harbuor.
When the rest of Coleman’s body washed up, Doc Roy reported that the PFC had been whacked in the back of his head with a sharp object, after which his scuba suit was zipped back up. JD presented the three dive shop guys with a scenario in which the one of them that was on the dock with Coleman killed him and fed him to a shark, and a brief scuffle ensued.
The actual killer got hauled away, but JD let the other guys go free — in part to see who they might meet up with, as in the mystery man hot to reclaim the drone footage. The two dive shop guys nearly drowned the buyer, given his role in Coleman’s death, but NCIS showed up in time to save him. Alas, before they could question the buyer, who shows up like a bad penny to claim him but Colonel Richard Rankin, the DoD attache that Mackey and JD locked horns with in Episode 1.
When Blue reports that the MDMA planted at the dive shop had been seized in a DEA bust (yet not destroyed), Mackey theorizes that someone with the wherewithal to make that happen was behind the drone. She and JD then pay a visit to Colonel Rankin’s office, to propose that the CIA was surveilling the Aussie sub. Rankin of course pooh-poohs the notion, after which Mackey and JD make clear that he will leave the remaining dive shop guys alone, or else their CIA theory lands on the front pages of the ink-and-paper newspapers the DoD bigwig so loves to read.
Episode 3 closed with Blue fretting over the lack of RSVPs for the farewell party she had planned for herself, seeing as earlier in the episode she had relayed a phone call from her injured predecessor, McNamara, to JD. But, it turns out, JD had suggested Blue stay on as their forensics whiz, and was merely getting McNamara’s OK. Cue a ship-shaped “WELCOME” cake and revelry! (But, why has Doc Roy been sad…?)
What did you think of NCIS: Sydney Episode 3, Mackey finally telling Blue to just “take a breath,” and the fact that NCIS is now carrying Sigs?
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