Normally I wouldn't write up an individual episode on a long running series like NCIS, but this is, in the words of Christoper Walken "
This guy is Unfucking Believable".
Now, I don't watch shows like NCIS for it's intelligence, or it's America **** yeah jingoism, but for the absurdity. This particular episode was more absurd than usual which means it's outright asinine. This episode was called
Kill Screen. Yes it is that kind of
Kill Screen, so it's a computer and gamer episode all wrapped up in one!
The case starts off simple enough, pick pocket pick pocketing until security busts him. (Un)fortunately the purse he just nabbed contains finger tips and teeth. The team quickly ID the remains and just as quickly conclude the guy is already dead. A little later local police find his remains and they discover he is also a feet "taller" than he should be. They learn nothing from him besides knowing he was horrifically tortured and killed.
McGee the resident tech head has been having issues with his computer which quickly draws the attention of an agent from another alphabet soup agency who implies McGee is hack his own computers for classified information. McGee has actually done this before, but no one has ever given him **** about it.
So the team goes off chasing down the dead guy's relations. They zero in on one of his ex-girlfriends who was now using a dead mans credit card. It turns out she is some hot gamer chick so everyone passes her on to McGee, because you know, he is one of those people. The chick goes on about how awesome of a gamer she is and how she has the HIGH SCORE on a DOZEN MMORPGs. I leave it to you as to how "Unfucking believable" this is. they suffer a drive by shooting almost immediately after the gamer girl shows McGee the kill screen she ran into in one of her MMORPGs.
The kill screen contains some sort of encrypted code and no one can make heads or tails of it initially, but they very quickly find a money trail to an arms dealer coming out of the game company leading to a programmer who is now missing. Some more bread crumb clues later they find the programmer dead, naturally in some run down building that looks like the insides of a ship. The architecture is all over the place. He has been dead for over half a week with his fingers and teeth gone. They figure the arms dealer didn't do it since he was nowhere near the country at the time so they turn to the only other person in the investigation who might have knowledge of the goings on of this case. They interrogate the agent from the other agency and with a bit of "We have evidence on you trickery" the rogue agent blurts out a confession that he kill those people because they were hacking into the Pentagon and no body else was doing anything about it.
The bad thing is that the first guy he "Enhanced interrogated" and killed had nothing to do with it, the programmer only wrote the tools to hack the Pentagon, didn't use it, meaning he committed no crime and he committed attempted murder on gamer chick who stumbled on the kill screen. So Special Agent Man is 0 - 3. Also the arms dealer having paid for the tools never received it, so he gets out of jail for free. 0 - 4.
Then things get completely FUBAR. The programmer had wrote in a dead man switch in the program he had inserted in the MMORPG which has 15 MILLION users and they all happen to be connected concurrently. It starts hacking the Pentagon with the goal of wiping all data from Americas defence network. McGee ascertains there is a central server controlling all these computers and attempts to back hack. With what could only be described as divination, they figure out where the physical server is. They return to where they found the dead programmer (Way to fucking go clearing the crime scene) and discover a false wall. Gibbs the team leader kicks the wall down setting off every alarm in the building and trapping the two fellow agent following him, leaving him alone. McGee in the process of back hacking finds a real time map of the building the away team is with flashing skulls and triangles. Mcgee's background contains this.
It explodes and has sound effects and everything.
Mcgee now has to guide agent Gibbs through the trap filled maze with a first person camera. He controls Gibbs like a first person shooter with his voice. McGee has a "Revelation" that it's all just a game. This has some very poor results. Gibbs proceeds to get gassed, almost gets set on fire then blown up while a helpful female voice proclaims in the wrong order which firewall has been breached. Even when Gibbs is flat on his back the gun on the screen never moves. The man has an absolute death grip on his gun. It's practically a skull gun.
Entering the server room they lose video and sound starts breaking down. Gibbs is half deaf from getting blown up. After pulling all the power cords nothing happens, so McGee tells his computer illiterate boss who hates computers to use the UNIX command line. Gibbs obviously having a bad day starts shooting, McGee freaks out. Cut back to Gibbs who has shot up the computers including most of the screens. Then to salt the wound one of the computer fans and screen starts up again exactly where it was before. Gibbs shoots again breaking the final screen, killing it. You see what they did there HAHAHA. Your KILLING ME.
This is some seriously bad TV. It so bad it's bad all the way to it's so bad, it's ironically funny. Unholy ****.