the one tv episode i refuse to watch

NCIS SPOILERS AHEAD

Every year, I go through a NCIS phase — usually in August or September. For about two to three weeks I’ll power through maybe 3-4 seasons of pseudo-military propaganda (what can I say, I grew up during the Michael Bay Transformers era).

And that’s the episode where Kate gets killed. Where Ari Haswari puts a bullet in her head. Season 2, episode 23 of NCIS: Twilight.

After two whole seasons of getting to know the NCIS team through the lens of Kate (who serves as the stand-in for the viewer for much of the first season), I thought brutally ripping her out of the show like that must have meant she had some type of contract dispute.

The truth of it is a little more simple — I was listening to an NCIS podcast a while ago with the actors for Tony and Ziva (a Mossad operative. it has been a long 20 years) and they she actually dropped out due to the intensive filming schedule¹.

Sasha Alexander (who plays the aforementioned hole-some Kate Todd) was not the only departure. After 23 mind numbing seasons, almost every member of the original cast has changed (a set that most of the fandom seems to define as those in the first episode). The medical examiner’s actor passed on but he was already elderly at the beginning of the first season. The lead actor Mark Harmon, who after reducing his speaking role to a few words per episode, finally retired at some point. The chauvinistic, immature and fan-favorite character Tony DiNozzo left after realizing the ex-Israeli operative mother of his baby actually faked her death.

In spite of all this — in spite of the craziness of all these ways the characters are written off and how they have evolved in the show, I don’t think it’s the craziest reason nor way someone has left NCIS. And that would be the story of Pauly Perette — actor of the famous lab technician Abby Sciuto.

All was fine. Sometimes they appeared a little too close on screen — Perrette’s character started as a badass goth lab technician who was sassy and really held her own on screen but was quickly reduced to a plot technique that developed a strangely father-daughter relationship with Gibbs (main character whose role was reduced).

Then I can’t remember which season it was exactly, but there was a conflict that got so bad between Harmon and Perrette they would refuse to be in the same scene together. And about halfway through whatever season that was, I realized that their characters had been interacting via video call the entire season.

And that’s not the beginning nor end of this show. In the first two seasons most of the evidence is fairly admissable in court. But it gets really bad in season three when Ziva the mossad agent joins. Some confessions done under coercion. Breaking and entering for evidence (picking locks)!!! This show was never really meant to be realistic. But I guess that part really grinds my gears.

1. Sasha Alexander: Kill Ari Part 1 Ep. 2 of Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch