Roundtable Discussion Part One: wikiDeeks talks Season Five Highs & Lows!

Team wikiDeeks gathered around the table again this month to discuss some of the highlights (and lowlights!) from NCIS: Los Angeles Season 5 including what we thought of all those metaphors and what the future has in store for Densi!  Let's listen in to what they had to say. . . Part 1: Season 5 Highs and Lows Diane:  Let’s talk about Season 5 highlights... Lindy:  I thought Season 5 started out with one of the best season openers I’ve ever seen with “Ascension.” Just a terrific episode, and it really brought out ECO’s acting skills. It was really quite amazing. I thought it had some problems, but it was a good way to continue what they had started the previous season. But after that, I don’t know…it just started taking steps back for me and all the way through to the end for me. I like a couple of scenes in “Recovery.” “Frozen Lake” was a critical episode but it was full of a lot of things that people didn’t like. Overall it was one of those seasons that started out with a lot of promise and by the end it was kind of blasé, I didn’t have any emotional feeling at all as to what happens to Callen and Sam for some reason. Except for “Spoils of War” which stood alone as one of the best episodes they ever did. Essentially for Deeks, ECO’s acting was out of this world and that was probably one of my most favorite episodes of all times. Gayle:  I’ll jump on to what Lindy was saying. To me hands down the best Deeks episode from my standpoint was “Impact.” It was just what they gave Deeks to be able to portray in a way that we have not really been able to see in terms of his character. I think a lot of us thought there was going to be a little more continuation of that and they played it out in a little more humorous way with the motorcycle, but I was hoping from at least his standpoint or Sam’s recovery or even Kensi’s recovery that we were going to see a little bit more of that, and I think they teased that this would come back on Sam at some point. But as far as we saw from Deeks and what Eric brought to that, hands down that was the highlight of the season. Lindy:  Does that include “Three Hearts"? Gayle:  “Three Hearts” stands on its own. Lindy:  Good or bad? Gayle:  For me good. But I know not everybody agrees with that.

Lindy:  You liked the raccoons?

Gayle:  I’m anti-raccoon but otherwise I’m pro-metaphor!

Karen S:  I’m pro-metaphor but it seems there were so many at the same time, we had the raccoons, the knives and the boxes and it was kind of confusing.

Gayle:  It was a lot but I think the great thing about metaphorical story telling is that it makes us stand back and think about it. If they were just being very obvious and blatant about things, then it would be just shallow storytelling and I think it takes the characters and the show to a deeper level.

Karen P:  What I liked the best about Season 5 was that ECO’s acting was amazing all the way through. He was heartbreaking when Kensi went away, and I agree that “Spoils of War” was the best episode they have done. I feel that Deeks was the emotional center of the show this year and in past seasons, it’s been Callen looking for his past or Sam with Moe and Kensi looking for her father’s killer, and this was the first season where Deeks carried that emotional load, and how he was doing was really the question that carried forward from episode to episode and I liked that a lot.

Brenda:  I totally agree. I feel Eric did a great job of displaying a great range of emotion with what he was given. I felt the season on a whole was uneven, where I thought there were some episodes that were awesome and others were not. I thought there was more uneven writing this year than in the past. I absolutely loved “Spoils of War” and because so much of it revolved around Deeks, I thought that could easily have been the season finale. It really showcased the struggle Deeks went through, and he saved everyone else’s butt as they were pinned down and he rescued them, and that could have been a great season finale.

Karen P:  I felt that “The Livelong Day” where he was a nerd was great and he was terrific in that. It was a team episode and not necessarily the ‘we saved the world episode.’ But overall the season, with jumping from episode to episode, didn’t have enough continuity, I think.

Diane:  Lowlights? Where do we start?

Brenda:  How about Hetty? I know people have varying opinions about Hetty and I have been a friend of Hetty up until partway through the season, and I can’t remember what episode it was where she just made me irrevocably mad and I was sure I was never going to like her again. I had softened off a bit but I think it was with that whole Kensi and Jack thing where she knew full well who this guy is and she doesn’t say anything to anybody, and it wasn’t even addressed. To me that was just over the top even though she has done a lot of crazy things.

Lindy:  I have a feeling they are going to pick this up for next season and this isn’t done yet, the whole thing with Jack and Kensi and Hetty. It’s going to be a beginning part of another arc because they just left that too abruptly and here she goes flying off to Washington DC. I think they are going to pick that thread up again.

Karen P:  I hope you are right Lindy, because otherwise I don’t know how I’m going to deal with the frustration. It was unclear to me at the end whether Kensi and Deeks didn’t question the insane coincidence of Kensi running into Jack again in Afghanistan, which makes them really naïve, or did they understand what Hetty had known and were OK with it? I don’t even understand how that could be, and if the writers aren’t able to address it I think I will be forever angry.

Karen S:  I’m wondering if they are going to take this thing to Washington and Hetty will get into trouble for what she did in Afghanistan, and perhaps Densi will come in and have her back and help save her despite how they were the ones who were hurt in the process.

Lindy:  I also think they had ample time where they had at least two episodes at the end where they could have dealt with all that and I was really surprised when they didn’t, which makes me think they will pick it up again and start it over and maybe we will get some clarification and maybe a confrontation between Deeks and Hetty. Kensi has got to be pissed when she finds out too.

Brenda:  There were a lot of inconsistencies this season. I mean the last time we see Sabatino, he’s totally hitting on Kensi and all over her, and now he’s totally angry and hostile. Are we supposed to believe that Afghanistan changed him, or what happened? To me that was another one of those implausible things like Hetty, where you’re not sure what’s going on with these characters here. I also thought it was very implausible that Nate was there when Deeks was recovering , but then Kensi comes back from her ordeal and he’s (Nate) not around to make sure that she is OK? I would imagine that there would have had to have been some kind of mandatory debrief. Did we just miss all that? Because to me that was just a huge omission.

Lindy:  I agree. I think they really dropped the ball after “Spoils of War.” I think they had a chance with the last two episodes to address all these things and they didn’t do it, and I don’t understand why.

Karen S: I think a couple of those episodes were written before all that and they aired them later, and that could be a part of the inconsistency. But I didn’t like the way they were treating Deeks again like he was a doofus. That was annoying to me too.

Brenda:  I was kind of pleased with how accommodating they were with Daniela’s pregnancy, but I felt that that may have somewhat thrown their story planning for a loop and may have been some of the reason behind some of the inconsistency this season.

Lindy:  No, I don’t buy it. I think they knew a long time before and I don’t think she sprung it on them, and I couldn’t think why they couldn’t encapsulate it all and deal with it. I don’t think they are that stupid. I just don’t understand why they did what they did. Part of me thinks that Shane Brennan has dropped the ball for the series because he’s concentrating on the New Orleans show, and that really bothers me because they are taking it to a new time period and that makes me very nervous.

Gayle:  I’m with Brenda on this that to me they had so many things planned but because of Daniela they tried to make some adjustments, and a couple of the pieces didn’t fit together like we’re accustomed to. So I’m trying to set all of that aside and go into Season 6 with an open mind.

Brenda:  I think that was a key phrase- “like we were accustomed to”- because when I look back at some of the old episodes, why didn’t I like it (this season)? Was it because I am pro Densi and there was just not enough of that, or were the past seasons at such a high level that you almost shoot yourself in the foot when you are always producing stuff that is really awesome all the time, because if it’s only slightly off of that, even if it is still just really good, but it feels like it is sort of a drop off in quality?

Diane:  Karen P, I know you have expressed certain objections to “Three Hearts?”

Karen P:  I know we touched on the metaphors… the many, many metaphors.  I really liked “The Frozen Lake’s” metaphor- I thought the whole martial arts angle was a legitimate way for Kensi to communicate what she was feeling, and I think it worked really well. But by the time we got to “Three Hearts,” Dave Kalstein just went around the bend with layers and layers of metaphors, not to mention the structure of that story, which was the third episode in a row that he wrote with a was-he-a-good-guy-or-a-bad-guy stranger that was thrown into the team.  You had the Gurkha, Tuhon, and Angelo. It started to feel formulaic by that time, that this was a Dave Kalstein script and this is what he is doing and it was very frustrating.

Join us next week as we discuss “Spoils of War”, all those metaphors and spoilers that never came to pass. Next time… only on wikiDeeks!