NCIS New Orleans Season 1 Episode 9 Review: Chasing Ghosts
Kathleen Wiedel
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Poor Laurel. Her boyfriends can't help but like her awesome dad!
On NCIS: New Orleans Season 1 Episode 9, she practically begs Pride not to be friendly with her latest boyfriend, lest their relationship turn into a soliloquy on how amazing her father is. She just can't take the bromancing!
Personally, I'd be counting my lucky stars if my boyfriend got on so well with my dad, but it was pretty funny when she started listing off all the boyfriends that Pride got so friendly with! On a side note, I have to wonder if the latest boyfriend's name - Orion - was a deliberate homage to Scott Bakula's character on the much-loved series Chuck, where he played the title character's father who was codenamed (you guessed it!) Orion.
I don't think Laurel was being very fair to Pride, as he pointed out to her:
What do you want me to do? Give him that Clint Eastwood stare your grandfather gave me when I started dating your mother?
Pride
This episode also featured a reunion of sorts with Bakula and his former Quantum Leap costar, Dean Stockwell, as obnoxious City Councilman Hamilton's racist ex-cop father, Tom "T-Bone" Hamilton. Stockwell wasn't really given a lot to do here, which was a bit disappointing for me, but there's still every possibility that he could make a return appearance later on.
Interestingly, Stockwell is not a stranger to the greater universe of NCIS: he played the Secretary of the Navy in eleven episodes of JAG from 2002 to 2004! He last appeared with Bakula on Star Trek: Enterprise back in 2002.
The case of the week revolved around the 40-year-old murder of a Jewish chief petty officer who had been recruiting blacks for the Navy. At first, it all seemed to revolve around hatred and bigotry:
Pride: "Lynching," "hate crime": different term, same sentiment.
The image of CPO Jacob Tarlow hanging from the tree was pretty powerful, but I felt that they spent more time talking about characters (like Tom Hamilton) be bigoted than actually demonstrating it.
In this case, it turned out that the murder wasn't about race or religion at all, but a man coveting his best friend's wife. To borrow a French phrase, Cherchez la femme.
I'm supremely glad that his brother wasn't the killer as that would have been way too on the nose: Jacob and Esau? Really? But as soon as we cycled back to the brother and the best friend, it became fairly obvious that the best friend had a thing for the wife. One of the oldest stories in the book. Too bad for Paul Hare that the woman he loved never actually married him, so he never did get what he wanted even after murdering his best friend. It was a forty-year tragedy.
I found some of the plot developments somewhat contrived, like the FBI just happened to have photos of the very cop they were looking for (and that cop just happened to be Councilman Hamilton's father). On the other hand, "Chasing Ghosts" also gave us some nice character development for both Loretta and Pride. Fun new fact: Pride's dad is in jail! I wonder how that happened...
The episode concluded with a happy Thanksgiving feast with the NCIS family, plus Laurel's boyfriend Orion (seriously, that has got to be a Chuck reference). Honestly, I'm not a greens person, but I think I'd be willing to give it a go at their table! I gave a good chuckle as they skirmished throughout the episode on the matter of who wouls make the best greens.
Now it's your turn, NOLA fans - what did you think of "Chasing Ghosts"? Do you think that Pride should avoid "bromancing" Laurel's boyfriends? Who do you think won the War of the Greens? Did you enjoy the Quantum Leap reunion? Let us know in the comments below!
NCIS: New Orleans will be on hiatus next week, so you can take the opportunity to rewatch the first nine episodes right here at TV Fanatic when you watch NCIS: New Orleans online.
