As you all might remember, we began writing a critique of the NCIS show in 2011, when so many of those who buy and read our suspense novels sought our opinion about the authenticity of the show. Since part of David’s twenty-seven-year career as a Federal Agent was with what is now known as NCIS and Diane was a Federal prosecutor, we decided to write about our opinions of each episode. We are a bit late writing a critique of Season 15 by two episodes. Over the past few seasons, our enthusiasm for the show has continued to diminish, partly because the writing declined and also because the characters we looked forward to each week began departing from the cast. To make matters worse, the producers replaced them with characters that didn’t fit into the team and even increased the number of team members, which led to a lack of cohesiveness.

As Season 15 approached, as we were traveling and researching our next thriller, we wondered if we would even bother watching anymore. We could see upon reading the season promos, that Gibbs is supposed to have a new love interest and the female actor doesn’t look like she is well cast for Mark Harmon. The preview for next week’s show revealed to us that Agent Quinn’s replacement will be another awkward character who won’t fit in. Also, a review of the shows ratings revealed about three million of their usual viewers felt as we did and they disappeared.

Tonight we watched ‘Exit Strategy’, which is obviously written to prepare viewers for Ducky’s departure, or nearly total departure as he is going to take a sabbatical to write a book about his lengthy career. That aspect of this episode was cleverly written and entertaining. The rest of the show was also well written and acted with the four Special Agents combining as a team to solve the case. It was fun to try to anticipate ‘who done it’ and unlike some of their past shows, this one was technically accurate. One of the detectives showed Agent Torres a ‘pen-cam’ while they were on a stakeout, which actually recorded the detective’s disappearance despite Torres throwing the spy device out of the car window as a joke. David did suspect the ‘suspect’ pretty early on, but Diane kept expecting a surprise. The ending scene provided a nice and unexpected twist.

Will we faithfully critique each show as we did the past seasons? This all depends on the quality of the episodes going forward. What do you think?

Be Blessed, Diane and David Munson