NCIS, also known as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, is a popular American television series that has gained a massive following over the years. The show revolves around a team of special agents who investigate crimes involving the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps personnel. One intriguing aspect about NCIS is the so-called "curse" that is often associated with the show. This curse refers to the unfortunate events that have befallen some of the cast members and crew throughout the history of the series.
According to Kate, the record shows that the murder victim, Lt. Schilz, was "dishonorably discharged" from the service. Commissioned officers cannot be punitively discharged, if a court-martial convicts them, they are "dismissed from the service."
A hunter finds an aircraft cargo pod containing the mummified body of a Naval disbursing officer who disappeared from his aircraft carrier, as did 1. Gibbs then turns on Kate, saying that after she s been here for more than a month, she s going to realize that there s a lot of sick people in the world before asking Randy if he s one of them.
This curse refers to the unfortunate events that have befallen some of the cast members and crew throughout the history of the series. **The curse has led many people to question whether there is some sort of paranormal or supernatural force at play**. One of the most notable instances of the curse was the untimely death of a recurring cast member.
A Year of NCIS, Day 5: The Curse (Episode 1.5)
Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: A deer hunter, who did not even come close to hitting his deer. While chasing after it (?), he stumbles onto an aircraft drop tank, finds his way inside, and locates the mummified remains of a servicemember.
Plot Summary: We get right down to business as Gibbs utters the immortal “Grab your gear!” upon entering the office. The team rendezvous with a sheriff and begins examining the drop tank and the body. Tony recognizes the drop tank as being from an F-14- a particular model of tank that was re-purposed for storage.
When they get the tank back to HQ, Abby finds partial prints and a serial number on the tank. Which means, that if it fell off a plane, they can locate it via a TFOA (Things Falling Off Aircraft- seriously) report. They crack open the tank and find dog tags, identifying the body as Lt. Mark Schilz. The tank also contains a golf bag belonging to a Lt. Lynch and a flight bag belonging to a Lt. Cmdr. Farnsworth. They also find a wedding band on Schilz’s body.
Records demonstrate that, in 1994, Lt. Schilz was reported missing at sea off the carrier U.S.S. Eisenhower. He was charged with theft in abstentia of $1.2 million from the Eisenhower safe (Schilz was the disbursing officer) and dishonorably discharged. Farnsworth was the pilot of the plane that lost the tank and Lynch was his navigator, so it stands to reason that the storage tank was intended to schlep their luggage (but probably not Lt. Schilz).
Ducky thinks Lt. Schilz bled out, but he will need a catscan to find out. Either way, he was murdered, and then stuffed in the tank. Gibbs and Kate debate/speculate over whether that means he had an accomplice in the robbery or surprised the thieves and got killed.
Kate locates and interviews Lt. Schilz’s widow, Mary. Mary does not believe her husband committed the robbery. Moreover, she needs him to be exonerated so she and her child can get Lt. Schilz’s death benefits and child support. Dishonorable discharges don’t get these things. The wife talks about how Lt. Schilz called her from the carrier the day their daughter was born, and that was the last time she talked to him.
Tony tracks down the NCIS agent Richard Owens’s 1994 report regarding the Eisenhower robbery and Lt. Schilz’s disappearance. Gibbs is not impressed with the sloppy and conclusory nature of Owens’s report. So he has a powwow in MTAC with Owens. Gibbs isn’t super pleasant to Owens, and thinks he mailed in the investigation so he could get off the ship after a long deployment. Gibbs orders Owens to fly from his duty station in Hawaii to Norfolk.
Kate returns, and the team determines that the assistant disbursing officer under Lt. Schilz on the Eisenhower was Randy Wiles- the man that Lt. Schilz’s widow married. This did not come up in Kate’s interview. So Kate and Gibbs go interview him. It turns out that the widow doesn’t know that Wiles and Lt. Schilz served together. That makes Gibbs incredibly suspicious and he accuses Wiles of murdering Lt. Schilz, setting him up, and running off with his wife and the money. But even Gibbs can’t explain why a guy with $1.2 million has two jobs and sends his kid to public school.
The Eisenhower is back in port. So we’re on a ship for the second time in two episodes. But not a ship at sea. Tony and Gibbs meet with Owens, and Gibbs continues to rip Owens a new one for his sloppy work.
Kate calls and notifies Gibbs that Farnsworth and Lynch died in a crash two years prior, and both were still in the Navy, so neither made off with $1.2 million. Kate and Gibbs have a debate over whether they’re crossing the dead Navy officers off the suspect list or the accomplice list since Kate does not believe that Lt. Schilz is guilty. And she wants his family to get his death benefits.
Kate then interviews the disbursing clerk on The Eisenhower, a woman named Erin Toner. Kate finds Toner playing golf at a fancy country club. Toner explains her nice house and country club membership with a story about a lottery win.
Gibbs questions Owens’s competence more, and determines that Wile had an alibi, but Toner’s isn’t quite so airtight. Toner also had a relationship at the time with a Petty Officer named Ted Martinez; and Martinez had the kind of access necessary to put Lt. Schilz in the drop tank. Owens starts to display a little sheepishness at not investigating Martinez.
Still, Owens shows Gibbs something by coming back to HQ to help out with the investigation. Gibbs puts him to work helping Tony trace Martinez. He and Tony determine that Petty Officer Martinez got discharged, went to NYC, and then to Mexico with an unidentified woman, and then they find out that Martinez was murdered in a hotel in Mexico.
Abby finds some fabric on Lt. Schilz’s body and, with her analysis, Gibbs is able to determine that it’s the fibers from the orange mailbags used on board a carrier (and which we conveniently saw used in background on the Eisenhower). Kate, meanwhile, figures out that Toner DID hit the lottery…but only for $37,000.00. So she stole the money with Martinez, then killed him in Mexico and took it for herself. They’ve got her, but Kate needs a confession to exonerate Lt. Schilz. Just implicating Toner won’t demonstrate that Lt. Schilz wasn’t an accomplice.
Gibbs sends Kate to bring Toner back to NCIS, and Kate spins a yarn about needing Toner to reconstruct the scene. Toner resists, but Kate threatens to recall her to the Navy if she doesn’t come voluntarily.
Back at HQ, the team shows Toner a video mock-up. And then they tell her their theory of the case- that Martinez killed Lt. Schilz in the disbursement area, and then drug him to the flight deck in a mail bag, with nobody noticing because they were all looking at Toner- a good looking woman on a carrier the first year the Navy allowed women to serve on carriers. Toner plays it pretty good and points out that they don’t have any evidence. But Gibbs tells her they matched her fingerprint to the gun that killed Martinez in Mexico. So they can either extradite her to Mexico to stand trial there, or she can confess however she wants as to who killed Lt. Schilz. At this point, they can get her for stealing the money, so they just need a description of the murder to exonerate Lt. Schilz.
After it’s all over, Owens realizes that Gibbs was just bluffing about having Toner’s fingerprints, and, like everyone else who deals with NCIS, Owens expresses a mixture of awe and horror at their ruthless efficiency.
Quotables: “Sailor on the half shell!” -Abby, after she removes the top half of the drop tank to expose the mummified body inside.
Tony: Radar Intercept Officer. Also called a GIB- one B- short for “Guy in Back.”
Kate [to Gibbs]: Why do you need two Bs?
Gibbs: The second one’s for “bastard.”
Time Until Sexual Harassment: 24.20. Took them a while this episode. Kate relates Wiles’s story about not telling his wife about serving with Lt. Schilz to the movie Bounce. She then describes the plot and declares that she believes Wiles. Gibbs says, “Of course you believe him- it’s a chick flick.” He then proceeds to tell her what would happen in a guy flick- basically the guy kills the accomplice, sets him up to take the fall, keeps the money, marries the widow.
Ducky Tales: Ducky holds forth on Egyptian burial practices.
Later, he reminds Gibbs of a case involving a servicemember buried up to his neck in an ant hill. Gibbs cuts him off before we get to the good stuff, but we get something better, when Ducky talks about Gibbs’s third ex-wife clocking him with a baseball bat and Ducky having to stitch Gibbs up.
Still later, Ducky gives Abby an elitist discourse on golf.
The Rest of the Story:
-Like most network TV shows, NCIS routinely airs a Halloween episode. This is 2003’s iteration. They play into it by relating the mummified remains of Lt. Schilz to a mummy’s curse (hence the episode title). But it’s too tedious to recount these script-writing leaps in an already complicated and over-long Plot Summary.
-I could be wrong, but I think this episode depicts Gibbs’s first use of “Grab your gear!” to let the team know they’re off to the races.
– Wait, so the ETBUIW was hunting deer in a state park? Because that’s where Gibbs says they’re going to retrieve the body. Can you hunt in Maryland state parks? The sheriff doesn’t seem perturbed, and the guy isn’t under arrest, so, maybe…?
-Gibbs seems like he’s in a pretty good mood at the start of the episode. He laughingly asks Ducky for the time of death of a mummified corpse, and chuckles with the hunter over the latter’s curiosity getting the best of him when he opened the drop tank.
-We learn that Tony has been with NCIS for two years.
-In a nod to Sea Dog, Kate has to ride back to NCIS HQ in the flatbed that transports the drop tank:
Kate: Let me guess, you’re gonna suggest I ride back in the flatbed with the driver?
Gibbs: Wasn’t a suggestion.
-Gibbs and Abby use sign language again, this time to make fun of Tony.
-Kate references the 2000 Ben Affleck film Bounce. Gibbs doesn’t know it, probably because it was made after 1975. Although, in fairness, I don’t recollect it either.
-Kate has worked for NCIS for a month.
-Yes! Gibbs whacks Tony on the back of the head for the first time. And Tony really had this one coming, since it was in response to like his eighth joke about Gibbs going blind from old age. I like Tony, but this is a classic bit.
Casting Call: Lots of goodness. Lt. Schilz’s widow and Wiles’s wife, Mary, is played by Lauren Bowles. Bowles also played Holly Cleary, Sheriff Andy Bellefleur’s wife on True Blood. I guess she likes a man in uniform.
Erin Toner is played by Melora Hardin, chewing all the scenery she can chew, and she is fantastic. She looks familiar because she’s Jan from The Office, Michael Scott’s competent boss turned sad, unemployed girlfriend (because Michael destroys everything he touches).
And, while I never would have caught this without IMDB, Owens is played by David Ramsey, familiar to fans of the CW super-hero universe as the actor who plays Green Arrow’s best friend John Diggle on Arrow (and The Flash, and Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow).
Man, This Show is Old: Other than having to remind myself that 1994, when the original crimes took place, was not as long ago to the NCIS team as it is to me, there wasn’t much in this episode to remind us of the halcyon days of Fall 2003. This episode aired the night before I started my first attorney job.
VIP: Kate getting Toner back to HQ was top notch work. And she’s the one who stuck it out to exonerate Lt. Schilz so that his wife and child could get the military benefits they were due.
Rating: This was a good murder mystery, with real stakes and an awesome bad girl. In terms of acting ability, Hardin is a cut above the usual gamut of network TV guest-stars, and you can tell she’s loving every minute of this role. The rest of the guest cast was also exemplary, and it’s not a surprise that two of them went on to big roles.
Some of the plot is a little contrived, but the widow/child angle helped me connect with the victim (something that didn’t happen in Sea Dog or The Immortals), and the mystery was well-paced. While Gibbs continually dressing down Owens became uncomfortable, Owens had it coming, and Gibbs was a good sport about letting Owens redeem himself. It’s kind of a shame we don’t see Owens again.
Great episode, seven Palmers.
In Season 4, actor Sasha Alexander, who played Special Agent Caitlin Todd, was unexpectedly written out of the show when her character was killed off. This shocking development left fans in disbelief and fueled speculation about a possible curse. In addition to tragic deaths, other cast members have experienced misfortunes and personal challenges during their time working on the show. For example, actor Michael Weatherly, who portrayed Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo, faced a DUI arrest in 2015, which led to his departure from the series. However, it is essential to approach the idea of the NCIS curse with skepticism. **Many argue that the "curse" is simply a coincidence, as tragedies and challenges are a part of life that can affect anyone, regardless of their involvement with a particular television series**. It is crucial to separate fact from fiction and not attribute every misfortune to an otherworldly force. Despite the speculation surrounding the curse, NCIS remains a highly successful and beloved television series. It continues to entertain audiences with its mix of crime-solving, character development, and compelling storylines. The curse may persist in the minds of some fans, but the show's enduring popularity suggests that its appeal goes beyond superstition and supernatural beliefs. Ultimately, whether one believes in the curse or not is a personal choice. However, it is essential to remember that television shows, like NCIS, are fictional creations that entertain us and should not be taken as indicators of real-life paranormal events. The curse may add an air of mystery to the show, but it should not overshadow the talent and hard work of the cast and crew who bring the series to life..
Reviews for "The NCIS Curse: Are There Really Forces at Play?"
1. Emily - 1 star
The latest episode of "NCIS: The Curse" was a complete disappointment. The storyline was convoluted and poorly executed, leaving me feeling confused and uninterested throughout the entire episode. The acting also fell flat, with the dialogue lacking the energy and charisma that I have come to expect from the show. Overall, it was a lackluster episode that failed to deliver the usual excitement and intrigue that "NCIS" is known for.
2. Mike - 2 stars
I have been a fan of "NCIS" for years, but the latest installment, "NCIS: The Curse," left me underwhelmed. The plot seemed forced and predictable, lacking the suspense and twists that usually keep me on the edge of my seat. The character development was also lacking, as the interactions between the main cast felt stagnant and uninteresting. I hope that future episodes can recapture the essence of what made "NCIS" great, but this particular episode fell short of my expectations.
3. Sarah - 2.5 stars
While I usually enjoy the crime-solving mysteries in "NCIS," "The Curse" failed to captivate me. The storyline felt disjointed and rushed, leaving little room for character development or emotional investment. Additionally, the resolution of the case was unsatisfying and left many loose ends, further adding to my disappointment. I hope that future episodes can restore the allure that "NCIS" once had, but this particular episode fell flat for me.