NCIS: Los Angeles Season 14 Episode 15 Review: The Other Shoe

We had to get one more episode with Detective Whiting, right?

The recurring guest-star farewell tour continued on NCIS: Los Angeles Season 14 Episode 15.

It was the consistently abrasive Whiting this time out. And for once, Whiting asked for Deeks’ help, not the other way around.

Whiting’s surprise appearance at the Deeks/Blye residence saved Rosa from an endless round of good parent/bad parent as she prepared to go out on “not a date.”

We had to get this obligatory scene of the new parents interrogating their teen daughter while attempting to do so with a light touch.

Kensi and Deeks don’t want to be “those parents,” but really, did they have a choice? 

Whiting’s late-night arrival may have saved Rosa from her parents’ questioning, but it caused her non-date to be canceled, apparently with no explanation. Not cool!

Whiting’s reputation almost got this case derailed before it ever started.

It was brought to Kilbride by his least favorite agent on a Saturday. Also, as Kilbride pointed out, NCIS had zero jurisdiction in a dispute involving LAPD.

But Whiting wove an intriguing theory about her investigation of rogue LAPD cops protecting fentanyl dealers. So those cops had reason to get her out of the way by framing her for murder.

Since a sketchy APB was out on Whiting, Kilbride grudgingly agreed to allow Deeks to run a soft inquiry into her claims.

But no one on the team, except maybe Deeks, was buying what she was selling. But the more they looked, the more what they found didn’t fit the official LAPD version.

Why was Rountree so down on Whiting? Yes, she echoed the official LAPD line. But she also leaked to him the weak punishment that would be assessed to the racist cop who stopped Rountree and his sister.

So you would have thought he would have felt more positive toward her when he was forced to babysit her at the Boat Shed. (With Whiting, Rountree, and Deeks on the LAPD crap list, that didn’t leave many who could investigate in the open.)

A lot of that resulted from Whiting being as caustic as she is. As she admitted, she doesn’t care what other people think of her. She couldn’t be a delicate flower and work in Internal Affairs.

Yet she knew exactly what to say to get Rountree to take her out into the field, expressly against Kilbride’s orders. Fatima even agreed to cover for him, although she knew better.

So what did person-of-interest Whiting do without bothering to explain things to Rountree? She has them stake out and tail a corrupt narcotics detective.

That paid off as he met with a member of a drug-dealing gang, accepting a payoff. Kilbride was pissed when he discovered that Rountree had taken Whiting out but backed off when he heard about the gang’s fentanyl connection.

Sam and Deeks were finding out how the case against Whiting was falling apart. All the security cameras near the murder scene had been sabotaged, leaving only one bit of surveillance to be released to incriminate Whiting.

Then the medical examiner placed the cop’s time of death to be two hours before Whiting received the text, which set her up.

Whiting’s hunches looked really good at that point, weren’t they?

The gang member Whiting and Rountree caught was a regular fount of information, telling about the gang’s mysterious leader, Odin, and the underground fights which the gang held.

Much to Sam’s displeasure, Rountree quickly volunteered Sam to go undercover as a fighter. But no one else fit the profile, whether Sam liked that or not.

Sam quickly determined that the man-mountain he was fighting was Odin, then Kilbride ordered the NCIS/DEA squad to crash the fight club, seizing all the fentanyl.

Whiting found herself out from under that murder charge. But one of the dirty detectives threatened that she was still in danger. That isn’t very likely, with only a few episodes left until the series’ conclusion. There’s far too much else to clean up by then.

There was a peek into Kilbride’s past when he longingly reminisced afterward with Sam about his long career as a boxer.

He added that he gave up boxing to spend more time with his young family, which he still failed to do.

Fentanyl being part of the case made it more important to him because, besides claiming too many sailors, it was one of the drugs with which his son, Alexander, has struggled.

Apparently, he had the phone conversation with Alexander that he promised he would to his ex-wife Elizabeth on NCIS: Los Angeles Season 14 Episode 13. Now when do viewers get to meet Alexander?

At least viewers saw the childcare chaos inside Kensi and Deeks’s home as they had to work a case on the weekend.

Why were they attempting to track down the ever-eccentric Roberta to watch Rosa? That was even before the LAPD detective showed up looking for Deeks.

So why not just take her to the office and leave her with Agent Castor, like they do with everyone else?

Besides, Rosa is much more mature than at least one of her parents. It was sweet of Kensi to want Rosa to enjoy her teen years, but Rosa has already seen so much that little would faze her. Not knowing what’s going on would be worse.

To revisit Whiting’s interactions with NCIS, watch NCIS: Los Angeles online.

Were you glad to see Whiting again?

Did the team treat her appropriately?

Do Deeks and Kensi treat Rosa too much like a kid?

Comment below.

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