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‘NCIS’ Season 14, Episode 16 Recap: 3 Major Takeaways

By Alexandria Ingham

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‘NCIS’ Season 14 picked up the Chen storyline again. While Bishop had been told she couldn’t work on the case, Reeves kept her up to date anyway.

The episode starts like most others. A navy commander is murdered – well, forced to kill herself to protect her daughter – and Torres is teaching the women about the art of pick pocketing. However, the episode takes a dark twist from there. These are the main takeaway moments from “A Many Splendored Thing.”

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#1. There’s No Point Lying to Gibbs

Surely by now the team members would know not to lie to Gibbs. Even Quinn and Torres should have learned that. But Bishop and Reeves try it anyway.

They spend the first part of the episode following their own lead on Chen, from the NCIS Season 14 winter premiere “Willoughby,” after intercepting an encrypted message – one that is just song lyrics. After finding Chen’s courier, they learn that Chen is after the electrical power grids.

It doesn’t take long for Gibbs to find out that Bishop is working the case, despite being told to stay away from Chen. He knows that she is too close to this after losing Qasim, who was more than just a boyfriend. He’d proposed, but she’d never been able to give him the answer he wanted to hear.

#2. Suicides Aren’t Always as They Seem

Commander Turner comes home from her run to find a gun out on the table. When the TV turns on, she is given a choice: she can either kill herself or the voice in the TV will kill her daughter. All this is because she didn’t hold up to her end of the bargain.

It’s up to NCIS to figure out whether Turner killed herself or if there was something else going on. Various elements of her life don’t quite add up, including the oxytocin levels in her body right before she died. This is the love hormone, and when they realize that her Smart TV had been hacked and the suicide was an act of love, NCIS starts to piece it all together.

The hacking in the Smart TV does leave behind an IP address, which Abby gets a ping from and is able to send the team to a power plant location. This is when Gibbs realizes that Bishop and Reeves are working their own case.

#3. The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

This is a popular saying, especially in crime dramas. It comes up tonight when Chen reveals to Bishop and Gibbs (at Gibbs’ home of all places) that he is working with the CIA to help bring down a Syrian warlord.

Sometimes these types of deals can work, but Bishop has some of the information the CIA needs. The problem is that it would take months to locate the warlord who is working with IS.

Instead, Bishop gets a memory of Qasim and it helps her crack Chen’s code. It turns out that it’s all binary code creating a computer virus that will exploit the vulnerabilities within generators to make them explode.

Chen had wanted Turner to buy defective computers for his plans, but she refused and that was why she had to lose her life. The only good thing from this is that there is some evidence to deal with Chen directly. Of course, Bishop isn’t about to let anybody else finish this for her.

She lures Chen to one of the power plants and forces him to cuff himself to a generator. This gives her the chance to input the code – oh how I loved the use of floppy disks! – and kill Chen in a generator explosion.

#4. Going Rogue Isn’t Cheap

So, Gibbs wasn’t completely happy with Bishop, but she doesn’t regret her actions. Honestly, I’d have done the exact same thing in her position. Chen needed to go and she was able to do something that nobody else was able to do.

This does lead us to the best and most poignant conversation of the night. At the very end, Gibbs is disappointed that Bishop doesn’t regret her actions.

"Gibbs: Each time you go rouge, there’s a price to pay…and it’s not cheap.Bishop: I understand.Gibbs: No you don’t, but you will soon."

Does this mean that Bishop is going to go off the deep end? The discussion about going rogue made me think of the NCIS Season 14 premiere. Could this be a way for Bishop and Torres to bond further?

Next: NCIS Season 14, Episode 15 Recap: Evil Abby's Evil Plan

I loved the quick wrap of the Chen storyline. There’s not been the drawn out process of catching him and dealing with him, and Bishop was able to get her revenge. I would like to see some type of interaction between Reeves and Bishop, as they have become one of my favorite partnerships on the show right now. There is so much potential for the two of them – and in a completely platonic way.

One thing that I have enjoyed is looking more into each member of the cast ever week. Last week was Abby and the week before was Jimmy. It’s been an excellent insight into Bishop, someone who I’ve never really cared too much about in NCIS until this very moment.

NCIS Season 14 isn’t on next week. It returns the week after with all new episodes at 8/7c on CBS.

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