NCIS Season 7 Episode 7 - "Endgame"

Director Vance has been in hot pursuit of Lee Wuan Kai for over twenty years, but the trail has gone supernova over the last few weeks. Viewers last saw Kai (Kelly Hu) in season 1, episode 4 of NCIS: Los Angeles, where Vance travelled in from Washington, D.C. in order to ensure that Kai was captured. She but was eventually proven not to be the killer at least in that case. She pulled a Houdini and eluded capture, only to return in this episode.

It seems that Kai is the prime suspect once again when the body of a dead civilian doctor turns up on the side of the road next to an abandoned car. The murder seems to bear her signatures-the man was shot with the intent to make him suffer before a final kill shot. The markers of handiwork by Director Vance's white whale is enough for him to make a most rare appearance at the crime scene.

Director Vance's emotional buttons are pressed throughout this episode. We definitely see him more on edge, worried about his family but also bordering on obsession about Kai. It turns out the feeling is mutual-as Kai is stalking not just Vance but also his family. There is sheer terror in the reveal that Kai is talking to Vance on a cell in a car right by his house. This results in a close call with Vance's wife Jackie standing just yards away from Kai, almost about to confront her. Vance takes a gun out of his safe and rushes out to the front yard, chasing Kai away before her intentions could be discovered. The phone conversation and in-house confrontation has echoes of the Jenny Shepherd- La Grenouille denouement from season five, but in this case, there is a shooting and there is a death.

Meanwhile, Jackie Vance promises she will not be the victim in this situation. She is Vance's partner in marriage and will not be intimidated by outside pressure. This foreshadows the concluding moments of the show, when she is forced to make a life-altering decision. In doing so, Jackie saves her husband from a stalemate against Kai, but at a severe emotional cost.

The Gibbs-Vance relationship continues on a search for steady ground, with both men learning that they can depend and trust each other on a professional level. Gibbs had some success with Vance by visiting at his house last season and so it is again this time around. Gibbs is actually more calm and composed than Vance. Gibbs wants to help, but he also wants to ensure that they are looking for the right person and with proper evidence. They get that with a strand of hair tied into a bow, which they use to match to Kai's DNA. She left it there as a message about the dead doctor.

Gibbs gets Vance to spill about Kai. He first encountered her seventeen years ago when she killed a politician in Serbia. He shot her in the chest, which should have killed her. However, she did her best impersonation of The Undertaker and sat up like she was never shot at all. Returning fire, she clipped Vance in the shoulder and ended up killing his partner. She had Vance dead to rights, but let him go. He had been searching for ever since-so their history is very personal.

Meanwhile, there is a huge tease for fans of Tim McGee, as he has a "chance" meeting with a beautiful (but awkward) young graduate student named Amanda who sometimes works in the coffee shop. As Bogey says, this could be the start of a beautiful new friendship. Theirs is a humorous flirtation, with the girl having to reach into Tim's pants in order to grab his ringing cell phone (is that what they call it nowadays?) and then again to put her number in his phone because his hands are full with the crew's order of coffee (DiNozzo's fault). They agree to get together to have coffee, presumably in another coffee shop (never mix caffeinated business with caffeinated pleasure) and their relationship quickly blossoms.

McGee shows renewed confidence in himself thanks to this new relationship (and some self-help tapes). He handles Tony's intrusions into his personal life with nonchalance (although it is interesting to note that Tony correctly guessed he was dating a redhead and is on point about his "interactions" with Amanda all throughout the episode). Abby is curiously awkward in her handling of this news. She seems happy for McGee, but also reserved, even dumbstruck. She mentions Eric, the computer geek agent from NCIS:LA with whom she has a bit of a phone-flirtation going on, but when she mentions it to McGee he doesn't acknowledge what she's trying to get across. He's too busy and too anxious for leads and information. It seems like the ships are passing in the night on the Tim-Abby scenario yet again, but this time with more of a regretful and slightly exposed yearning from Abby while it's McGee who is a bit oblivious to it all.

We also get another "bathroom conversation" between David and DiNozzo (you know, others will start to talk if this keeps up) that involves DiNozzo's jealousy about a flirty comment made by Agent Dunham (Todd Lowe, who helped save Ziva in Season 7 episode 1 and briefly returns here to help out with the Kai investigation). Ziva informs DiNozzo that she is not looking for someone like Dunham, a nomad...so...who is she looking for? Hmmm.

Anyways, back to "Yay, McGee finally has a girl!" Don't get too happy too fast, though. In most procedurals, "chance" meetings are never quite chance-and as it turns out, this meeting was planned and connected to the Kai situation. It turns out that Amanda was a plant. Her real name is Juliet Tippen, a South African national hired by the North Koreans. She meant to get close to McGee in order to find out Kai's location and then kill her before she revealed any information to the U.S. government. After McGee confronts her about how she knew he worked for NCIS when he mentioned it, McGee's girl shows some "TLC" by taking out a gun and demanding to know about Kai. The pseudo-girlfriend bites the dust at Kai's hands, shooting her and saving McGee's life, then disappearing into the wind. Poor McGee...

It turns out Kai's killing is not random acts of terrorism, nor is it sponsored by the North Koreans. Kai was part of an "Assassin Farm" of sorts, an orphanage of Korean girls who were bred for espionage and killing by Pak Su Ji, a North Korean lieutenant, but now retired. This is her final and desperate gambit to obtain vengeance for those wrong doings, to meet justice out to those who did this to her and others like her. The doctor she killed whose body was discovered in the beginning of the episode was one of the men who worked in the camp. Ji was the man in charge of the program.

Vance is not the target, but rather the constant in Kai's life and she wanted him to be there at the end of her road. She wants him to kill her. Vance's offer to help her instead is very gracious, but she realizes it is already too late. The standoff at the end could have been deadlocked forever, but for Jackie Vance. She takes decisive action and must live with it for the rest of her time on the series.