One thing that I have always liked to watch are police procedurals. Even though they are largely inaccurate to the real-world police (shout out to Skip Intro’s Copaganda series), they are still comfort food. I started watching with my mom and I still watch a lot of them often for something to put on in the background. Some shows are more interesting than others but few of them require more than a tiny bit of concentration. I returned to the world of NCIS after scumbag Michael Weatherly and asshole Mark Harmon left the show. Not long after that, the franchise branched out and I was suddenly enjoying NCIS, NCIS: Hawai’i, and then NCIS: Sydney. While Hawai’i sadly was canceled (for two much crappier spinoffs starring Harmon and Weatherly, Sydney remains. The show has really grown on me because it follows a ragtag group, a fusion of US Navy Federal agents and Australian Federal Police agents. There are actually only two Americans on the team.
Lately, the show has been kicking it up a notch with the character arcs and episodes almost themed as miniature movies. Recently, there was an excellent two-parter that followed the newest and most forgotten member of the team stepping up as an expert in explosives as a serial bomber terrorizes the city. However, it is the latest episode that I wanted to talk about as a fan of horror movies. The show dipped into multiple interesting topics, including mind control, top secret government programs, and tarot cards. All of these topics are ones that I have done deep dives on in the past. (I have ADHD and often get sucked into hyperfixations with the latest thing that interests me, drinking deep of each subject’s marrow).
The episode takes place during Fleet Week (something that was also recently experienced on NCIS Prime) which has run the team ragged as they chase down drunks and petty crime. The episode opens with Australian agent JD (Todd Lasance) breaking another case in the interrogation room. He is apparently on a roll as his teammates congratulate him on a historic run in the box. The team is summoned to a crime scene where it appears that a seaman has killed himself. However, the scene troubles everyone because the naval officer seems to have drowned himself in a tide pool. They question whether the man was killed elsewhere but there is no evidence of it. The investigators struggle with ruling it a suicide with such strange circumstances.
Returning to headquarters, the team ponders over a tarot card found on the body of the victim. The picture on the card is of a man kneeling with his face in a puddle just like their drowned sailor. The returning Trigger (the team’s esoteric expert on explosives and chemical analysis) points out that the tarot card looks like a custom job. He used to date a girl into tarot cards and remembers enough to drop a little wisdom. Everybody is spooked by the imagery and the essence of the supernatural hanging in the air even if it does not exist. A government psychiatrist arrives with the seaman’s psych file, revealing that he seemed to be fine but mentions drugs and hypnosis as things that could have caused the change in behavior. They now have footage of the event from a local surf camera which clearly shows the seaman drowning himself calmly as if in a trance.
They have to brush off the psychiatrist as they find out that the seaman had a tarot card reading the night before. They find the shop closed up and find that the fortune teller inside has been murdered in her bathtub, along with another custom tarot card. The timing of the murder means that the seaman and his friend must have had their fortune read by the killer. They locate the friend in their own drunk tank. The friend turns out to be the seaman’s boyfriend and the two of them were planning on leaving the service together soon. The victim’s boyfriend claims that they did not even drink that much but he woke up hungover and out of it. When he is shown the tarot card, his eyes glaze over and he becomes distracted and nonverbal for a moment before snapping out of it.
Using manufacturer markers from the printing of the tarot cards, they find that they were made by a woman named Phoebe Bale in prison. She was convicted for a double homicide in Budapest but was extradited to Australia to carry out the rest of her sentence. However, they find out from the prison that Phoebe was paroled. The Warden wrote her a recommendation letter but when pressed cannot remember writing the letter and angrily dismisses the thought that she did anything inappropriate. Clearly, the woman was another victim of some sort of mind control. In fact, as JD and team leader Mackey (Olivia Swann) descend on Phoebe’s apartment, the toxicology screening results come in revealing that all of the victims were dosed with the same chemical. It is a chemical synthesized from motion sickness medication that makes the target highly susceptible to manipulation.
JD and Mackey apprehend a woman in the apartment who claims to be the cleaning woman. As Mackey gets a call from the office with the results of the tox screen and a photo of their target, JD sits down with the “cleaning lady”. In one of the scariest moments of the show, JD is dosed and succumbs to Phoebe’s manipulations. He obsessively searches through a pack of tarot cards for The Devil at her command, allowing her to slip away. Mackey returns to a distraught JD who is completely out of it. I found it interesting that they chose the happy-go-lucky male commander to get dosed rather than any of the female agents. It was refreshing.
With Phoebe in the wind, JD blames himself for getting manipulated so easily. Mackey tries to remind him that he was dosed by an expert. In fact, they discover through a little light hacking that Phoebe was in charge of a psyops program called Operation Tarot. She used her drugs to manipulate a couple into brutally killing themselves, but was caught by the authorities. Her handler cut her loose at that point and the team reasons that she is striking out at Fleet Week to draw out the US Government to get her revenge for abandoning her to her fate in prison. It is not long until we find out that the helpful psychiatrist from earlier was actually her handler. He is actively hunting her but is over his head.
The team manages to catch Phoebe and they put her in the interrogation room. Even with Phoebe in his home field, JD hesitates to question her again. Mackey gets his head back in the game and JD faces his fears. He is able to bait her into confessing it all. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist/handler shows up to break Phoebe out. However, at the last moment the team is able tor realize that he has been brainwashed into doing so. The idea was for him to assault a federal facility so he would die by suicide by cop. Realizing that he is unarmed, they take him peacefully so that he can also answer for his crimes. At the same time, the seaman’s boyfriend acts on a subliminal command to kill himself publicly, and the team is able to stop that as well.
The episode mostly dips into the elements of hypnosis, brainwashing, and psyop programs similar to MKULTRA. While Tarot is a visual theme, they do not go to great lengths to get that right. However, this is forgivable since the agents are not very knowledgeable about the subject and the killer only uses some of the language and custom artwork as prompts for her suggestions. The only tarot expert in the episode is dead in a bathtub before we see her. The hypnosis scenes remind me a lot of scenes in movies like Get Out and Weapons. When people take the drug, their vision blurs and there is a frantic desperation to the scene. It felt awful in the best ways. There is a little truth to this kind of brainwashing as the US government used LSD and other drugs to make people more suggestible or mentally weak. Still, it is just a very creepy flight of fancy. This episode killed it and showed me why sometimes an episode can grab you and not let go.
Wolf of Words 