NCIS: Los Angeles Review: Driving Miss Diaz (Season 7 Episode 3)

Typically, on NCIS: LA, I don’t care about the cases. Sometimes they’re interesting, sometimes they’re not, but they’re never the reason I watch. No, in this show, I care about the people I see week in and week out. I care about the team.

Surprisingly enough, for an episode with such a cheesy name, this week NCIS: LA pulled off the impossible. They made me care about the case as well.

Catalina Diaz is not exactly the type of character I expected to care about. She’s rude, pampered, and defensive. She’s also clearly hiding something, even if that something isn’t that she was an unwilling witness to a twenty year old massacre.

At first, it seems like our guys really do have it all figured out. Douglas Weston returns as Alex Elmslie, a man we didn’t really like in Season 3 when we first met him, and that we still don’t like now, but a man whose whole crusade is something we can understand.

Because the massacre they depict as happening in Peru twenty years ago could very well be the one that happened in Mexico last year. NCIS: LA has never been shy about drawing ideas from real life, and maybe that’s why this case works particularly well. We care about these characters because we care about the situation. And we care about the situation because it feels current.

Kensi and Deeks get a chance to interact the most with Miss Diaz, and they take advantage of it. Deeks get to play Catalina’s driver, a position that affords him the chance to look like an actual human being while undercover, instead of a bum. Kensi is her agent’s assistant, and she looks so good in a pantsuit that Catalina testily tells her to put her hair up, because she can’t look better than her. (She does anyway). They spend the episode driving her around, being nice without being too pushy and generally being the adorable couple they now are.

Callen and Sam, meanwhile, get to play hardball with Elmslie, and oh, yeah, go undercover as tech guys. It’s not up to standard for them, but what’s really up to standard so far this year is their banter. Oh, yes, the good old days of Callen and Sam almost being able to rival Kensi and Deeks in banter are back. How we missed them.

Of course, since this is NCIS: LA, there’s a cleaning lady who is actually Catalina’s long lost mother trying to set her house on fire, her brother-pretending-to-be-her-boyfriend, and all of them being actual witnesses to the aforementioned massacre, with enough information between them to topple a presidential candidate. It’s all in a day’s work for our favorite agents.

(Never will I understand how they get enough cases to actually have a team, much less an office. If people with military connections get killed so often, how is there a military?)

It all comes to head with plenty of gunfire, people speaking competent-for-a-TV-show Spanish, Callen finally getting the best of a bad guy, and the family reunited and ready to testify against the man who caused all their misfortunes.

As I said, all in a day’s work.

Other things to note: 

• I like the style-by-pillow look that Deeks has going on, don’t get me wrong, but it wouldn’t hurt them to like, actually style it a bit every once in a while. How can he be a successful undercover operative if he always looks the same way?
• Eric and Nell have had almost no screen-time early in the season, and though I don’t exactly miss them, they could do more with those two characters. Way more.
• I still don’t understand why Granger is even around. What does he do that Hetty can’t?
• Competent! Deeks is a thing of beauty. Please don’t make him go back to lost-puppy-following-Kensi-around.
• If you’re going to bring back a character like Elmslie and expect me to remember him you gotta give me more than what I got.
• Sam is like a rickety old lady, he really is, but you can’t help but love him. He’s a big, strong teddy bear. You sorta want to hug him, but you’re afraid he’d crush you.
• Does Callen still have a girlfriend? We’ve  heard nothing from her in ages.
• I love the Sam/Callen banter, but I felt an undercurrent of something else in their interactions this week. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like they’re building towards something with these two.

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What did you think of this week’s episode of NCIS: LA? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

NCIS: LA airs Mondays at 10/9c on CBS.

Lissete Lanuza Sáenz

Lawyer. Writer. Columnist. Geek. Falls in madly in love with fictional characters. Hates the color yellow, misogyny, and people who are late. Can always be found with a book. Watches an absurd amount of TV every week, often, while eating coffee ice cream. She has no regrets. You can check out her blog here: Absurday. Lissete is a senior writer for Tell-Tale TV. Follow @lizziethat