‘NCIS’ season 13, episode 11 reaction: Ducky’s emotional story; Bishop and Jake’s decision

There were two separate stories that needed to be handled on Tuesday night’s winter finale of “NCIS,” which each one of them emotional and important in their own right.

We begin with Ducky, who admitted that he had a younger brother who he had never spoken about to much of the team. Why? He believed him to be dead. However, as a new investigation put him in some degree of danger, he ended up learning a little bit of valuable information that suggested otherwise. As a matter of fact, we ultimately did determine that a letter from the brother Nicholas was actually written much more recently than he first suspected, and he was still alive.

This was a powerful performance by David McCallum throughout the hour, as we learned why seemingly losing his brother after so many years of searching for him ended with him as a broken man. So to see him eventually find Nicholas at a nursing home was a nice moment to what could have been a bittersweet ending. While he has shown the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, he did still remember his brother and some of their history.

It was almost strange how in the midst of all this the official end of Bishop and Jake seemed to be mostly an afterthought, but given his affair and everything that had happened between the two of them, it felt like the right way to go. The one thing we’re most sad about is just that one of the things we liked about her character going into this show was that she had a preexisting relationship with someone who was not a part of the team. You don’t see that often these days.

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