The plot bunnies are attacking Rebecca! Help!

[rebecca_in_blue]

All hail Rebecca, who actually did something with her day off! First, I woke up way too early this morning and had coffee with Sassy Jewish #1. He's in another play, The Odd Couple this time, and I read through Acts I and II with him to help him learn his lines. He's playing Oscar (the slobby one) and only has about half his lines memorized with three weeks till opening night!

After that, Sara and I drove downtown to the park. Remember when I spent a day helping rebuild a playground that burnt down? Well, it's finally finished and open to the public! Since I'd seen some of the under-construction phase, I couldn't wait to see the finished product. The new playground is massive and so cool. Heck, I'm glad the old one burnt down because this one is even better! I played on the spinner and see-saw that I'd worked on, and it was sweet to be able to enjoy the fruits of my labor. After the spinner made me dizzy enough to puke, Sara and I walked over the lake and fed some stale bread to the ducks and seagulls.


Me on the spinner. Sara spun me around so hard that I flew off, and now I have bruises on my arm and hip.


Me lying across the tire swing. Like my hair?

And now, about last night's new NCIS episode. I'm still watching one old Season 8 episode for every week that we don't get a new one. Since I began writing these episode notes (my first one was for Restless), I've been under assault from fanfic plot bunnies! I've never really lacked plot bunnies, I've only lacked the time and talent to turn them into good fics. But now, this one particular bunny refuses to leave me alone, and it's for a very uncanon pairing that I would never ordinarily write -- Zibbs! Yeah, as in Ziva/Gibbs! And heaven help me, I think I might actually end up writing the story!

Notes on episode 9x13 A Desperate Man
Featuring Ray Cruz, last seen in Pyramid

Writer: Nicole Mirante-Matthews (Penelope's Papers)

- Tony and McGee arguing over who'd had the most recent date (sex fling?) felt very frat-boy immature. NB: The Maxine that McGee mentioned was from back in Kill Screen. I liked Ziva sneaking up behind Tony. Maybe Gibbs has taught her his secret?

- "So please, do not ask me again." Methinks you doth protest too much, Ziva.

+ Ray calling the rest of the team to try to get in touch with Ziva really rubbed me the wrong way. She's obviously pissed at him, but instead of backing off and giving her some space, he starts bombarding her and calling her coworkers? It's called harrassment, you jerk.

+ Tony: "You better hope he doesn't call Gibbs." Me: Damn, I wonder how Gibbs would react to that. I wonder what... Gibbs: "Too late." Oh, my God, he did it! He called Gibbs!


My favorite promo photo for this episode.

+ Palmer running into his old high school classmate was so cute.

+ I loved the autopsy scene with Palmer and Ducky discussing wedding vows.

- "There's gotta be more to it than this." I liked Tony's monologue to McGee about whether he would ever find a long-lasting relationship. I think it's fit with a lot of the deeper stuff we've seen from Tony this season.

- The scene between Abby and Gibbs felt... I dunno, odd? Abby seemed very toned-down, almost depressed, hardly her usual bubbly self. I chuckled when he threw down her body dummy.

- Tony and Ziva's conversation on the rooftop -- I'm sorry, but ugh. I liked Ziva's line "You're supposed to be on my side" and how Tony got her to open up. He was really being put in the middle. But Ziva talking about how Ray stood her up at the restaurant felt so... high-school, and I'm conflicted over the mention of Eli. It makes sense that how Ziva feels about Eli would influence her relationship with Ray, but I kinda want the writers to move past her daddy issues someday.

+ Tony's talk with Burris was well-done and thoughtful. But Tony saying that he was "almost" married threw me. Geez, we had no idea Wendy ever existed for +8 seasons, and Tony has already mentioned her twice this season. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, writers.

- Does Ray purposely try to have bad timing? The last time Ziva was pissed and walking away from him (in Two-Faced), he decided it was finally time to tell her he loved her. When she did it again, he got down on one knee, proposed, and told her he wanted to have a big house with a garden and 2-3 kids. It annoyed me that Ziva did such a complete turn-around after his sweet-talking.

+ So Ray told Tony he was going to propose? I didn't see that coming. But then again, he did tell Tony he loved Ziva before he told Ziva.

+ Oh my gosh, how sweet was it when Tony told Gibbs he "should be getting ready to play father of the bride"? I loved the look between him and Ziva looked and watched this bit over and over.

+ "You and Jimmy Palmer! Double wedding!" Tony's delivery was priceless, and I was practically rolling on the floor laughing! And of course, Abby chooses that moment to walk in with McGee and announce that they have big news of their own! *dies laughing*

+ "So why the shift?" Thank you, Tony, for calling her on it.

+/- Ziva went down to Abby's lab -- YAY! Those two have not had a scene together in forever. Which makes me so sad, because I love friendship moments between them. Here it felt like Mirante-Matthews was purposely trying to rain on my parade and make their interaction as minimal as possible. Abby was concerned for Ziva, but she didn't even hug her? Hmph.

- Ziva and Ray at the airport. I'm... just... no, I don't even want to go there. Ugh.

+ Ziva and Gibbs in the car -- sad, but very sweet too. He touched her hair, and she teared up just a tiny bity and told him to "just drive." Awww. There have been some very touching moments between those two this season. I think it might be because Mark and Cote seem to be very affectionate with each other in real life.


Here they are at CBS's Winter 2012 TCA this month. Aren't they so cute together?

+ The Tiva anvil dropped by Burris at the end. Ugh, but I took it as a strictly-friendship moment and I managed to like it.

Go, fanfiction writers! To your keyboards! A new world of possibilities awaits you!

Random P.S. On Sara's page-a-day art calendar, I'm currently looking at Surf, Isles of Shoals, a 1913 oil painting by Childe Hassam. It's quite lovely.

Comments

[alidiabin]

First things first: I love the picture link. I like the impressionist style.

Well done for using your day off. Very honorable cause.

I agree with you on NCIS, somewhat, it was a good episode. Iffy bits are kinda to be expected now, we're nine seasons in.

I want an Abby and Ziva friendship scene too. Maybe, Abby can talk to Ziva about Abby's adoption, Ziva would understand more than any of them about long lost brothers and family being more than DNA.

[hagar-972.livejournal.com]

I was actually okay with the way they played the Eli-Ray parallel.

Israeli families where at least one parents are on a job like that tend to... congregate in neighbourhoods or small towns. (Tel Aviv has a neighbourhood that got named for that, no lie.) Not everybody lives in those clusters, but a lot do. So in my head-canon, Ziva would've grown up in a couple-thousand-people town where you were weird if you didn't have at least one parent in the Community, and where this kind of jobs and what it does for family were... out in the open. It wasn't a secret.

Her parents divorced. The job-family conflict is very much an American thing that Israelis are less afflicted by, and this was even more true twenty years ago. The way Israeli culture is structured just doesn't give to that: the way Israelis undersand "job" and "career" and "family" is different. So the way Eli failed on this, and the way her mother responded? Those would've been Big Deals, and she would've been surrounded by families with similar circumstances that didn't get broken up and angry this way.

For reasons the show never explores (and which, in my head, go back to Tali and to the way she and Ziva were together before Tali was killed), Ziva internalized this conflict and resolved it by fully taking the job path, not even trying for anything else.

And then that ended in tragedy, where Eli deliberately slammed on the worst buttons he could find to drag her away from NCIS and send her on a suicide mission. And never knew what to do with her after.

Given all that, I think it's a reasonble bet that "Do not be like Eli" is a critical life goal of Ziva's.

We saw Ziva be invested in two men: Michael and Ray. The show played Michael as a second Ari, both in his demeanor (and physical appearance) and his relationship with Eli. "Metaphorical son to Eli" opens the possibility of him not just being a second Ari, but of Ari and him both being reflections of Eli.

(I think Ziva did love Ari. To pieces. And that she's quite aware that he played her personally, not just as a Mossad agent. Given again Eli's behavior in Aliya...)

Ray started out more removed, but just that they made him CIA said that this won't end well, and how. The echoes would've been in Ziva's head, the hall of mirrors; she'd be sensitized to it. The first sign of a compartmentalization failure or maladaptive priorities on Ray's part - and what we get is that scene on the rooftop, and then that scene on the tarmac.

Unrelatedly, I do love it when the show plays up the Ziva-Gibbs-family angle. There's a complex relationship there that goes both to their screwed-up family histories and to their military identities and what both their familial and miliary identities mean to them, and I do love that.