NCIS: Hawai'i
“Divided We Conquer”, Season 3 Episode 10
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’d watched a few episodes from the first season of the original NCIS, but I wasn’t aware of this spinoff. As usual I can’t avoid accidentally seeing some of the episode description: a terrorist group releases a bioweapon, and there’s a character named Jane Tennant.
Previously On
Alexi Volkoff, a federal asset, was murdered. Analisa Cruz was his assistant, working on something called Compound X. There’s some organization called ELITE. There are only four canisters of Compound X in the lab the good guys just entered, but one is still missing. Cruz was a bad guy all along and releases the virus on the good guys.
Recap
ELITE is quickly established as the good guys who are all lying in agony on the floor of the lab. “Sam” is trying to break down the door to the lab to get to them. The point man back at base warns him not to, but Sam isn’t listening. He blows the lock open with a small bomb, but one of the ELITE team (black-haired guy, looks like a young John Barrowman) blocks the door to prevent him from getting in and pointlessly getting himself infected.
Opening credits.
Cruz, fleeing through an industrial floor, injects herself with something. As she tries to leave the building, she discovers more good guys waiting outside; she slams and locks the door again so they can’t get her. She runs for another exit. Sam chases her, but he’s already coughing – he must’ve been infected when he briefly opened the airlock door before John Barrowman closed it. He collapses, and Cruz gloats over him, describing the effects of Compound X as if it triggers a massive autoimmune disorder. This is quickly confirmed by a scene back at base, where somebody says they’ve gotten a report on how Compound X works: it makes the body think it’s infected and causes a cytokine storm (props to the writers, using the correct term for a thing that actually exists).
Thanks to somebody saying “Tennant and Jesse are at the power plant,” I learn the names of the two good guys who find Sam sitting against a wall, unable to move. He warns them to stay back, as he’s infected.
After some time, Dr. Chase arrives. How is Sam still upright, she wonders, when everybody else died so quickly? It’s because he had very little exposure: the airlock was open for only a split second, and his biohazard faceplate had a crack in it. But this thing must be incredibly dangerous if even that tiniest, tiniest exposure was enough to get him to this state.
But Cruz opened the canister to release the bioweapon, so how did she survive? Obviously she has an antidote - and obviously that’s what we saw her inject herself with. (The amount of time that passed before she did so was ridiculous; everyone else was dead fifteen times over by then.)
Dr. Chase tells Sam to stay calm: “The slower your heart rate, the longer you stave the virus off.” But didn’t they say earlier it’s not a virus, but rather a compound that mimics a virus? Okay, fine, let’s say it’s a virus.
Another briefing back at base: Cruz’s real name is Tala Flores. “She’s using an alias?” asks somebody stupid. There is no reason to ask that question except to set up the response: actually, no, she changed her name legally. She was part of a group called the CLA that tried to overthrow the Philippine government and wants to fight American Imperialism. And two CLA members were tracked coming into Belgrade, which is where Sam and the others are.
A good guy in protective gear is searching for something (the antidote?) in the room where the ELITE team is lying dead. Luckily for him, it’s in a box helpfully labeled “ANTI-SERUM”. Unluckily for him, the vials inside are broken. Even worse, as soon as he leaves the room Serbian police surround and arrest him.
Eventually they drag him before somebody who speaks English. “American?” the Serbian commander asks. “Depends if that’s good or bad,” says the good guy. The commander reaches for his gun, but it’s a pointless fakeout for the viewers’ benefit; he reaches for his phone instead and calls “Whistler”, one of the women from the scenes at the base. Through Whistler I learn that this good guy is Jesse from earlier.
I don’t know why the Serbian police went through this charade of arresting him if it was just to get him on the phone with Whistler. Couldn’t she call him on his own phone? And why is this a “favor” that he now has to repay?
Elsewhere in Belgrade, “Milos” is giving Cruz a tour through some kind of abandoned medical facility. It’s a former veterinary clinic, and oops, this isn’t Cruz, just someone who looks vaguely like her. Ah, these are good guys, and they have Sam in quarantine. Ah, this is Tennant from earlier.
Tennant calls Ernie, a computer tech back at base. “How long does [Sam] have?” Ernie asks. His coworker hits him and says, “You don’t ask that!” But she’s an idiot; of course you ask that. Isn’t it important to know how long you have left to solve the problem?
After the conversation, Tennant tracks Cruz to her hotel room in Belgrade, and they fight. She shoots Cruz in the shoulder, who is shocked and horrified that somebody might actually shoot her just because she’s a terrorist. With Cruz disabled, Tennant grabs her suitcase with the canisters of the virus – but it’s already empty. She’s already passed them on to her friends in the CLA.
Tennant drags Cruz to the vet clinic and ties her to a chair for interrogation. But instead of doing that immediately – who cares about the ticking clock, with Sam dying and a deadly bioweapon in terrorist hands? – she first wastes time talking to Sam. “How are you feeling?” she asks. “Like an overmedicated canine,” he answers, which is not at all a weird thing to say. I’m surprised he didn’t add “, fellow Earthling”.
Carla, the doctor who is treating Sam (and who I assume is Dr. Chase from earlier), has managed to get maybe a single dose from the broken vials of the antiserum.1 We can use it to save Sam, or we can analyze and reproduce it to make more antiserum, which we’ll need if we can’t stop the terrorists from releasing Compound X. Sam says they have no choice: reproduce the compound, but as quickly as possible so maybe you can save me too.
Back at base, the boss (identified as “Swift” in captions) demands an update. The bad guys have left Belgrade, he is told, and we can’t find them. We’ll have to track down their friends and family and see if we can use those to figure out where they took the virus.
Tennant is interrogating Cruz. She has a long history of grievances: her home in the Philippines was bulldozed to make room for a US Army base (for which she blames the US); her mother died of cancer (not the US’s fault); her father killed himself (not the US’s fault); and she was separated from her sister (no word on how or why that happened, so that might turn out to be important later). So yeah, she hates America because at age 12 she had to go to a new elementary school.
Carla, talking to Sam, says people are bringing in equipment so she can reproduce the antiserum, and she hopes she remembers enough toxicology to succeed. Because when millions of lives might be at stake, of course you’ll move delicate scientific equipment to a contaminated and disused vet clinic so it can be used by a non-expert, rather than moving the antiserum to the nearest well-stocked sterile lab staffed with the best toxicologists and analysts in the world. That’s just common sense.
Back at base, Ernie has drunk wayyy to much caffeine, staying up around the clock to monitor the old social media accounts of 200 CLA members. But he’s not waiting for them to say something about their plans – these are dormant accounts, and he’s waiting for them to say anything at all. Finally, a CLA member sends a happy birthday message to his cousin. Ernie tracks down the server that was used to send the message, and how convenient! He’s staying at a hotel in Honolulu, the very city where the NCIS team happens to be based!
Tennant enters Cruz’s room with torture implements. She wants to know what the target of the attack is going to be. But ah, she’s not going to torture Cruz: we’re just showing you what the torture implements look like. Instead, we found your long-lost sister Maria (I knew that would turn out to be important!) and will torture her. And we’ve set up a live feed to where that’s happening, so you can watch your sister screaming.
Now, I’m not getting “morally dubious” vibes from this show. 24 had its good guys torture people sometimes – an action that was treated, depending on the episode, as obviously right, as a necessary evil, or as obviously evil. But I don’t think this show is capable of taking that step. I suspect this will turn out to be an actress who looks vaguely like Maria (who, remember, Cruz hasn’t seen in years), hired to pretend she’s being tortured. Or possibly Maria herself, if they really did find her, who’s been told about her psycho sister’s politics and has been convinced to pretend to be tortured to help save the world.
This does reach Cruz, and she cries and begs for Maria to be left alone. Maria gets a few more zaps of the cattle prod and Cruz finally reveals: they plan to attack the “Pacific Launch initiative”, some kind of meeting between Philippine and US government officials.
In the torture chamber, it is revealed that they used real-time AI to make Ernie’s Idiotic Coworker look like Maria. The torturer was Whistler, first name now revealed to be Kate.
So now that they know what the target is, they’ve increased security around the generals (shouldn’t it be admirals?), and they’ve caught two CLA members with fake IDs intending to infiltrate Pearl Harbor. No Compound X found yet, but we stopped them!
But Sam, at death’s door, is suspicious: Cruz is a fanatic. Why did she break so easily? Before he can continue, he collapses and stops breathing. Luckily, Carla injects him with a sample of the only-just-now reproduced antiserum. Sam gasps and revives.
Tennant mulls over what Sam said with Jesse, and they leap very quickly to an unjustified conclusion: the CLA aren’t going to attack the generals, but rather an event meant for the generals’ families. Cut to some kind of music performance, and the caterers of the event are all tied up in the back, replaced by generic bad guys.
The event is at a hotel. The team of good guys show up: the hotel found the tied-up employees, but the bad-guy impersonators are still out there in the hotel and we don’t know what they look like. Should we evacuate everyone? No, it’ll cause a panic and warn the bad guys we’re here. (Why not evacuate everyone under false pretenses, by pulling the fire alarm? Or, better, start an actual fire, so that when the bad guys see it’s real they’re not suspicious?)
But they manage to find the bad guys anyway, who are about to release three of the remaining canisters into the ventilation system. They take them down, and then Ernie’s Idiotic Coworker finds and shoots the fourth one.
And that, unceremoniously, is the end of the threat.
Ah, not quite yet. Cruz escapes from her chair and takes Carla hostage. It takes only about a minute to resolve this, though, as Sam (having recovered enough to stand and point a gun), shoots her from behind while she’s focused on Tennant and Jesse.
Weeks later, at a poolside, the team is celebrating their success. Sam gives a little speech to the rest of the team, where he says he’s happy to be part of this ohana now that they’re not wary of him the way they were when he first joined (no explanation for this is given). Tennant adds that the sacrifice of those team members who didn’t make it will never be forgotten. But I bet it well, because I don’t know if they were even named characters, much less main characters.
Late at night, Tennant comes home and calls out to “Julie”. But Julie’s not home, says a sinister-looking woman sitting in the darkness and identified in captions as Maggie.
Unresolved questions
What happened to Julie (whoever that is)? What’s “coming next”? Does this have anything to do with the terrorists?
Ratings
Story: 8/10. There were a few flaws in the story, especially in the ending. But overall it was a good ride. The investigation proceeded at a good pace, with a clear sequence of breadcrumbs leading the investigators directly from one step to the next. There was only one unjustified leap to a conclusion, when they figured out that the CLA was planning to attack the event that was hosting the families of the generals rather than the generals themselves.
I especially liked how carefully they set up the situation in the opening scenes, justifying both Sam’s exposure and why his infection proceeded slower than the others’. How many times have I seen a redshirt die at the very beginning of a forty-minute-long “save the main character” plot, where no explanation is offered for the disparity?
Similarly, the scene in which they establish Cruz was not using an alias was deliberately planted to ensure that later in the episode they could use the legal name changes to find the terrorists’ former social media accounts. That’s good attention to detail.
Writing: 5/10. Numerous lines of dialogue that were written for the drama rather than for whether they made sense in the scene, but that’s typical for action procedurals.
The script also had the “main characters do everything” problem, where the characters make very silly decisions solely to provide an excuse for the actors to appear on screen:
The job of creating an antidote for an extremely dangerous bioweapon is assigned to a single person in a disused veterinary clinic instead of to the best experts the CDC has to offer.
Ernie is hyped up on caffeine to keep tabs on 200 social media accounts who were all observing radio silence, when he could just hook those social media accounts up to an RSS feed, and from there to an alarm clock.
The bad guys’ plan starts in Serbia, but it just happens to take them to the other side of the world, to the hometown of the very team that’s assigned to stop them. This stuff happens all the time on television, because of course you want the accomplishments to belong to the main characters rather than the Random Other Special Forces Team Who Happens To Be In The Area.
While it would be better if they hid it more gracefully, it’s par for the course for globe-hopping action shows, so you have to let it slide.
I do give props to the writers for getting some of the details of how overreacting immune systems work, but they don’t seem to know the difference between a chemical weapon and a biological weapon. Compound X is repeatedly referred to as a bioweapon, and they treat it as such with their quarantine procedures, but in fact in every way it works like a chemical weapon:
A bioweapon is a bacteria or virus that is deliberately engineered and/or released within an enemy population center. It’s a living organism that reproduces inside a victim’s host body and spreads to others.2 But this can only happen while the victim is still alive; if the victim dies within seconds or minutes of exposure, there just isn’t enough time for it to reproduce, much less infect other people. Chemical weapons are the ones that kill their victims immediately, as Compound X is shown to do. And since biological weapons are much more difficult and expensive to create, there’s no reason to invest in creating one that deliberately lacks the one advantage they have over chemical weapons.
Bioweapons as a concept don’t match the CLA’s goals or methods as described in the episode. They want to kill everybody in a specific room, not half the people in Hawai’i. For something like that you’d use a chemical weapon.
We don’t actually see the virus transmitted from person to person at any point in the episode. Jesse and Tennant stand not two meters away from an infected-and-coughing Sam, suffering no ill effects. Yet Compound X is shown to be ridiculously infectious, infecting Sam through a crack in his biohazard faceplate and an airlock that opened for less than a second. Why the enormous difference? It could of course be that Sam’s lower exposure meant he wasn’t yet contagious. But a far simpler explanation is that Compound X is a chemical weapon, and the only people that it kills are those who were in the room when it was released (or entered it immediately afterwards).
Early in the episode, one character describes its effects as “mimicking an infection”. If it were a bioweapon, it wouldn’t be mimicking an infection, it would be an infection.
Antidotes are used against chemical weapons; for a bioweapon, it’s called a cure (if it kills the organism directly) or a vaccine (if it teaches the body how to kill the organism).3
Finally, anything referred to as a “compound” will be a chemical weapon. Viruses and bacteria are not chemical compounds.
Production: 7/10. No weak links in the performances. Cruz’s actress was very good at making me hate her guts. I liked the set design in the abandoned veterinary clinic and Ernie’s office. Some silly directorial choices, like when the Serbian police commander went for his gun; I suspect that the script merely said that Jesse thought the commander was going for his gun, whereas the actor was clearly told to actually go for his gun.
Characterization: 2/10. The only character that I got to know at all is Cruz, who embodied the archtype of “anarchist who came from nothing and rose to greatness thanks to the opportunities granted her by the very system that she now wants to tear down”. Everybody else was Generic Task Force Member. Maybe everyone showed more developed personalities in less hectic episodes, but I didn’t see much evidence of that here.
Clarity: 7/10. 10/10 for plot, 4/10 for characters. Having the same people both in and out of face-covering protective gear made it very difficult for me to recognize them from one scene to the next; mistaking Tennant for Cruz was particularly embarrassing. Over time I was able to attach the names Sam, Jesse, Tennant, Carla, Ernie, and Kate Whistler to their faces, but nobody else. I think Carla’s last name is Chase but I’m not sure, and I know Tennant’s first name is Jane only from the blurb on the CBS website.
Closure: 3/10. Assuming that NCIS: Hawai’i is a crime-of-the-week show like the original, a major terrorism plot is a good way to go out with a (metaphorical) bang. But it’s clear from the final scene that they never meant for this to be the end of the series.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s above average as action procedurals go. I have no particular reason to seek it out, but I won’t turn it off if it happens to be on.
If they don’t even know what the antiserum is made of or how it works, how can she possibly know how much of it consists of “one dose”?
There is an exception: Toxins and poisons derived from living things, such as ricin from the castor oil plant or botulinum toxin from the botulism bacteria, are sometimes classified under “biological weapons” because of their origin, even though they act like chemical weapons in every way. If Compound X is simply a chemical with a biological origin, then every distinction I make in this list is invalid. But it’s pretty clear from the show that Compound X is man-made.
When the episode switched from talking about an antidote to talking about an antiserum, that made it a little better; an antiserum could potentially be used to treat either type of weapon. But some types of antiserum would worsen (or even cause) the same type of cytokine storm that Compound X itself causes. It would be ironic if Jesse worked so hard to get the antiserum from the lab only to discover it was just another sample of Compound X.