‘NCIS’ season 12, episode 9 review: Was Thanksgiving episode with Jamie Bamber a winner?
Tonight, “NCIS” had an episode entitled “Grounded” that certainly brought a lot of entertainment to the table. After all, this marked an opportunity to see Jake for the first time, and to see a story that was mostly centralized around Dulles International Airport in Washington DC.
In the end, what we had here was probably our favorite episode of the past few weeks, mostly because of the amount of time allotted to Tony having some great moments, and to go along with that, getting to see Jamie Bamber on the show. We like Jake as a character quite a lot, and find him very interesting in further establishing who the Bishop character is. Personally, we feel like the show could have benefited from bringing him into the equation a whole lot earlier than they did.
We do hope that we see more of this character in the end, though we don’t quite know when that will be. It for certain will not be for a little while longer.
For the time being, we just enjoyed the romp that constituted this hour, mostly because it continued to find unique ways in an effort to keep all of the characters involved. We’ll just have to wait and see if the rest of the season can continue along the trend of mixing fun storytelling with interesting characters and the occasional bit of drama. There have been a few times over the past few weeks where we have thought that the “NCIS” story as a whole is a little bit heavy. Grade: B+.
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Dido Twite
November 26, 2014 @ 8:34 pm
Loved seeing Smart Tony back! he was the star of this episode by far. He proved again that he is a natural profiler with a great sense of people. Jake was also great, and he had better chemistry with Tony than he did with his TV wife. He was stiff and awkward with Bishop, they seemed like they didn’t really know each other, and it wasn’t until he met Tony that he came to life. He was a lot of fun. I think Gibbs should hire Jake and send Bishop back to NSA.
liz laughlin
November 26, 2014 @ 7:19 pm
I didn’t see the first 15 minutes but the part I did see was about a C+. . Preliminary viewership numbers look like it will be the lowest so far this year. This is interesting because this is usually the episode where NCIS starts it’s climb to the top viewership episode for the season. For the last 6 seasons, the highest viewership has been achieved at episode 11, 12 or 13. It might be that snowbound people in much of the country finally were able to get out of their houses. I thought that it was interesting that Bishop’s husband, Jake, seemed to be very surprised at what she actually did on the job.
Dido Twite
November 26, 2014 @ 8:35 pm
Is that the excuse this week? We were actually just starting a storm on the east coast.
liz laughlin
November 27, 2014 @ 7:36 am
I don’t live in the snow belt. I just read an article a couple of days ago that Buffalo, NY was digging out of a huge snowfall. I thought that maybe you all were in some warmer times. If you are bracing for the next winter blast or are already in it, you have my sympathy
As I said above right around episode 8 or 9 NCIS usually starts to get higher viewership numbers and runs up to it’s highest viewership episode at ep 11, 12 or 13. This year every episode has had significantly lower viewership numbers than the same number ep last year.. Episode 9–Grounded–was 3 million viewers lower than ep 9 last year Over all, viewership averages 17.57 million so far this year.
Season 6 aver. 17.74 million
Season 7 aver. 19.31 million
Season 8 aver..19.70 million
Season 9 aver. 19.23 million
Season 10 aver. 19.29 million
Season 11 aver. 18.49 million
If they don’t start picking up some viewers soon, then this could be the lowest year since season 6. NCIS usually ends the season much lower than it begins. CBS says that the numbers are dropping because of DVR use but before DVR use we had VCRs. So I don’t think it is a very good argument. Fewer people are making an appointment with their TV on Tuesday night to watch NCIS.. You would think that TPTB would be asking themselves, “why?” I think that a lot of fans have a pretty good idea why. Maybe TPTB are just happy to be number 1.