Identity Crisis (NCIS)

Infobox Television episode
Title = Identity Crisis
Colour =
Series = NCIS
Season = 5
Episode = 04


Caption = Tony and Agent Krieger undercover as a couple.
Airdate = October 16, 2007
Production = 098
Writer = Jesse Stern
Director = Thomas J. Wright
Guests = Brian Dietzen as Jimmy Palmer Joe Spano as Senior FBI Agent T.C. Fornell Torri Higginson as Dr. Jordan Hampton Dorian Brown as FBI Special Agent Courtney Krieger Joe Egender as Robert Graves
Episode list = Episode chronology
Prev = Ex-File
Next = Leap of Faith"Identity Crisis" is the 98^th episode of the drama television series "NCIS" and the fourth episode of its fifth season. Originally aired on October 16, 2007, the episode was written by Jesse Stern and directed by Thomas J. Wright.

ummary

Ducky is performing an autopsy on a cadaver marked as "John Doe" in front of a class of Navy students, when a student discovers a gray liquid coming from the dead man's brain. It is soon discovered to be mercury and thus Ducky concludes that this man actually was murdered. He and Gibbs go to talk to the M.E. who allowed the body to be donated to science, Dr. Jordan Hampton, who turns out to be a woman and overworked, which makes Ducky forget his anger.

The team now tries to identify the body but as all searches in databases have no results, they go to the place where it was found. When asking in a nearby café, a woman acts suspiciously and when she tries to leave in a hurry, the team stops her. It turns out that she is actually an FBI agent called Courtney Krieger, who was charged with watching the dead man, now identified as Marvin Hinton, who was an ex-inmate with a changed identity.

Back at NCIS, Krieger explains to the team that Hinton was the bait for a gangster called "The Eraser", whose prime field of work is giving people new identities and erasing their old ones, something he did for a group of terrorists. Abby in the mean time ponders about the meaning of a tattoo found on Hinton, but can't make heads or tails out of it. The team meanwhile raids Hinton's flat and finds out that this is where he was killed. They find more mercury and the traces of at least six different women he was with.

Ziva is growing jealous of Krieger and thinks that she might have killed Hinton for some reason while Gibbs is visiting Fornell to update him on the case (which he didn't know about because the email from Krieger was spam-filtered). Back in MTAC, FBI and NCIS are tracking "The Eraser", named Kamal Konkani to a punjabi restaurant in Maryland. Tony and Krieger are going into the restaurant undercover and discover a delivery to a Frederick LeClaire, which was one of Hinton's aliases. They follow the delivery boy to a house and enter it to find Konkani's lair but not himself. The delivery boy identifies Hinton as Konkani, thus the team thinks one of his clients killed him.

They bring in a waitress from the café they checked out earlier for questioning because they suspect she killed her husband three years earlier with mercury and might have done the same this time. But when Abby, with the help of Ducky and Dr. Hampton, discovers the real image on Hinton's tattoo and find out that Konkani was in London while the tattoo was made on Hinton, they conclude that the delivery boy has set them up and that he is Konkani, albeit only his successor. Krieger and Ziva, who were on their way to drop him off, manage to take him into custody again and Gibbs and Fornell manage to break him. He tells them where the old Konkani is and the FBI manages to capture him, but the terrorists he provided with fake IDs are already gone and most likely on their way to the US.

Reception

On the episode's original airdate, "NCIS" was the most-watched program of the night, attracting approximately 17.5 million viewers in total with 4.1% rating and 12% share in the 18 to 49 years old demographics. [Gough, Paul J., " [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ia12e296ae3e0ab61ad02156d674116f5 Fox's ALCS game takes 18-49, 'NCIS' viewers] ", "The Hollywood Reporter", October 18, 2007. Retrieved on October 18, 2007.]

G.I.Joe References

A number of charecters in this episode are named after members of Hasbro's 1980's G.I.Joe action figures and corisponding comic book and cartoon.

Carl Greer (Doc)
Shannon O'hara (Scarlett)
Agent Courtney Krieger (Covergirl)
Robert Graves (Grunt)
Marvin Hinton (Roadblock)
Blaine Parker (Mainframe)

References

External links

* [http://www.tv.com/ncis/identity-crisis/episode/1130458/summary.html NCIS: Identity Crisis] - TV.com