After watching TEN's promo for this week's new episode of NCIS, I was briefly under the mistaken belief that the team were going to be confronting the Hulk. Apparently no cell could restrain him...blah blah blah...cue Ziva saying "I've never fought a man as strong as him"...blah blah blah. Oh, but surprise, surprise, it wasn't the Hulk and his strength wasn't actually the focus of the episode. This episode wasn't about a marine with super-human strength or who could turn green and fight after he got angry.
However TEN was actually not entirely off the mark with its promo, but for all the wrong reasons as usual. Because it kinda was NCIS fighting a comic book character but it wasn't the Hulk, nor Iron Fist (a comic of which McGee is reading at the beginning of the episode - although this seems like a gratuitious excuse to signpost the episode ahead because it seems unlikely that Gibbs would allow them to read comics at work, let alone McGee of all people who is usually such a good-two-shoes). No, this episode is effectively NCIS vs Captain America (again a reference that is rather unsubtlely brought to us by McGee - actually he also compares him to the Hulk as well. This episode is swimming in comic book references).
I'm not gonna ramble on about the group dynamics (which are excellent as usual - indeed the scene where McGee and DiNozzo speculate Ziva has feelings for the man they are hunting is hilarious) or a great plot (although this one also has some recycled elements in it - DiNozzo doing his Fugitive speech, which McGee has the decency to point out we have heard before). I'm not even gonna talk about the appearance of Amy Carlson, who I find strangely hot in a non-conforming Hollywood manner. No, I'd like to wax lyrical for a moment on the subject of the super-soldier, and the possibility of it actually either a) occurring, or b) having already happened.
I have to say, if I found out that the super-soldier programme was not only fact rather than fiction, but had indeed been occurring since the 40's, I wouldn't be surprised. Towards the end of WW2, rumours abounded about the Germans performing eugenic experiments to create stronger, better, harder, faster soldiers, and it seems unlikely that whatever the Germans did the Americans wouldn't do better. Oh yeah, I'm sure they were desperate to inject their soldiers with the various drugs needed to create an army of supermen that would be able to wipe out those damn Commies (let's face it, by the time it would have happened, the normal soldiers would have already done the job with the Nazis). Oh yes, call me a conspiracy theorist but I'm on the boat with this one.
So the idea that today, in a time of heightened paranoia and fear about a new enemy (errr...not exactly sure who they are, but they are bound to be "towel-heads" and come from Iraq, or Iran, or...somewhere there's a great deal of oil, and definitely someone the Americans don't like) a company is mixing steroids to create Captain America is not such a leap of logic. Afraid? You should be.
It was also interesting that, in a television program that is usually so pro-Republic, a small dig was made about the war in Iraq when Gibbs informed the senator's PR man that he supported the soldiers fighting the war rather than the war itself. True dat, peoples.
So if NCIS can lose faith, maybe there's hope for the future of America after all.
"B"
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