by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night the CBS-TV shows
NCIS (the original one that
kicked off the franchise, based in Washington, D.C.) and NCIS: New Orleans did a so-called “crossover event,” a story that
not only crossed over the time slots of the two shows but told a continuing
story with both sets of regular characters. The combined episode — combined
considerably more artfully than Law and Order and “Chicago Trilogy” producer Dick Wolf has been
able to achieve when he’s done these sorts of cyclical shows — starts out with a modern-day
high-tech knockoff of the mystery of the Marie Celeste: a plane with a full fuel tank but no one on board
— at least no one alive; there
are five crew members and passengers, but they’re all dead — enters the
airspace over Washington, D.C. and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service
(which is what NCIS stands for, both on these shows and in real life, though
these days you’d never know that from most of the scripts) is assigned to jam
the input to the plane’s automatic pilot from the GPS system so the plane
crash-lands harmlessly in a deserted field somewhere instead of the middle of a
major metropolitan area, where its nearly full fuel tank could explode and
jeopardize hundreds of innocent lives. The plane is owned by a super-capitalist
high-tech entrepreneur named Jenner Blye (Samrat Chakrabarti — and given how
much of the American manufacturing sector has been taken over from companies
from China and India, it’s chillingly appropriate that this Anglo character be
cast with an actor whose name proudly proclaims Indian, or at least
subcontinental, origins!) whose company developed a defense weapon called Manta
Ray. From the script by Christopher J. Waild, we never learn much about what
Manta Ray is, how it works (or doesn’t, since it’s established early on that
the U.S. Defense Department rejected it), or why it’s so important that
elements of the Russian secret service were sent to steal it and kill anybody
involved in it or who knows its whereabouts.
There was supposedly a secret
meeting between Blye, his executives and Russian representatives, including
Anton Pavlenko (Lev Gorn), and someone else has sent a professional assassin to
kill everyone who was at that meeting. The assassin is Eva Azarova (Cassidy
Freeman — someone created a woman out of a clone of David Cassidy and Bud
Freeman?), who gets access to the Blye entourage by setting a so-called “honey
trap” which, as anyone who’s ever seen a film noir with Barbara Stanwyck in it (or, for that matter,
a James Bond movie) could guess, means a woman who sexually seduces and
enthralls a man as part of an espionage plot. The man is Luca Sciuto (Tyler
Ritter), brother of NCIS series
regular Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette, she of the ever-annoying pigtails), a
master chef whom Blye hired to cook his meals wherever he was — only he wasn’t
on the plane with the other four even though he was supposed to be, which of
course leads the NCIS team to suspect that he had something to do with the
murders of everyone who was on the plane. Abby predictably pleads that her brother could never have
committed such a despicable crime, and when we finally meet Luca, he turns out
to be the most dementedly clueless character since the role Cillian Murphy
played in the film Breakfast on Pluto, utterly unwilling to believe that his hot girlfriend was just using
him for a plot that included sabotage and murder. As the story rolls on and the
people at NCIS D.C. trace the plot to New Orleans, where Eva was based and the
haunted flight originated (and we get some nice glimpses of CCH Pounder as the
New Orleans medical examiner — I always liked both her name and the air of
no-nonsense authority she projected, and it’s a pleasure to see her here just
as it’s a pleasure to see the older David McCallum, whom I had a hot boy-crush
on in his days on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as the D.C. medical examiner even though he’s weathered the years less
well than I have — odd that with all the hot, in both senses, young and
young-ish actors on these shows the two most interesting players would be the
venerable character actors playing the medical examiners!), and the story
travels there for the second half.
We meet a few more interesting characters,
including Eva’s hard-assed boss in the Russian secret service, Paulina Kurteva
(Tina Benko), and we find that the killings were all (or almost all — at least
one of the surprise baddies gets offed in the more prosaic manner of getting
shot) done with a super-toxic poison that’s deadly to the touch, and which was
administered by lining flatware and bottle tops with it, so the person who
lifted the knife or fork or opened the bottle would die while the others in
their party who didn’t handle
“spiked” utensils would live. Yeah, right — though since the real Russian secret service has been accused of offing its enemies by
feeding or exposing them to radioactive polonium (the other element Pierre and Marie Curie discovered, and
which she insisted on naming after her native country, Poland), maybe this plot
device isn’t so nonsensical at all. Eventually there’s a shoot-out inside an
art museum and Jenner Blye’s security person, Blake Huxley (Alex Quijano), is
killed (he’s the one who just gets it with a gun instead of an exotic poison),
and it seems like Huxley was in league with the Russians to steal his boss’s
big secret Manta Ray weapon — only it turns out [spoiler alert!] that the real crook is Jenner Blye himself; when
the U.S. turned down Manta Ray (for reasons which Waild’s script leaves as
ambiguous as he does as to what Manta Ray was supposed to do in the first
place), he decided to sell it clandestinely to the Russians and then apparently
had to off everybody who could have testified that he had offered it to the
Russians so he couldn’t be prosecuted for treason and could claim to have been
the victim of industrial espionage instead. It’s a show with more than its
share of silly premises and plot twists, but “Sister City” is an effective
two-hour suspense melodrama if you can forget how improbable it all is and how
unbelievably naïve Luca Sciuto is (eventually it turns out that both he and
Abby were adopted by their parents, and
though they weren’t blood relations they inherited their parents’ willingness
to take in “stray cats,” an expression I was using long before Waild put it in
his script, meaning people who are homeless or disabled or crazy or all three
and trying as best one can to help them out), and handle the annoying characters
on either end: Pauley Perrette (who since it’s her brother who’s in peril at
least gets to act a bit more
emotionally than usual) in the D.C. NCIS and Rob Kerkovich as the terminally
(and infuriatingly) nerdy Sebastian Lund in New Orleans
