NCIS: Sydney’s third episode airs on CBS. To be honest, I had some trouble following it. (Maybe an audio description narrator lady could help me?) However, after seeing it again, I was able to connect the dots. The members of the upcoming “NCIS: Sydney” squad were also revealed in the third episode of the show, however there wasn’t much drama involved.
The “Brothers in Arms” case was set in motion by a tour group’s discovery of a severed arm floating in the Malabar Ocean Pool. Since said arm was sporting a Navy dive computer favored by SEAL Team members, Mackey and JD first checked in with an Australian Defence Force detachment that had been training with some SEALs, but no one had reported a missing (or armless) comrade.
The arm was identified as belonging to a PFC Coleman, a former SEAL whose benefits were currently being transferred to a nearby diving shop which he co-owned and operated with three other men. Posing as a couple, Evie and DeShawn visited the shop where the former found dive tanks loaded with narcotics instead of air. When JD called the dive shop guys in for interrogation, they immediately admitted to being drug mules. However, JD pointed out that they were lying because he had made up the story that he had found cocaine inside the tanks rather than MDMA.
So what were they really up to when Coleman disappeared or died?
Blue used the severed arm’s dive computer to track where and when Coleman had stopped breathing. Then, she clocked the appearance of a UUV/drone in that same area — but which was gone come morning. Said drone was found stuffed into a nearby breeding cave for sharks, though the data drive that recorded its video surveillance is oddly missing.
JD theorized that Coleman and the other dive shop guys had stumbled across the drone and laid eyes on its footage. The drugs were then planted on them as leverage, to turn over the data drive. Evie found the data drive in the dive shop fish tank, after which Mackey & Co. saw that the video was of the underside of a Collins-class RAN submarine parked in Sydney Harbuor.
When the rest of Coleman’s body washed up, Doc Roy reported that the PFC had been whacked in the back of his head with a sharp object, after which his scuba suit was zipped back up. JD presented the three dive shop guys with a scenario in which the one of them that was on the dock with Coleman killed him and fed him to a shark, and a brief scuffle ensued.
The actual killer got hauled away, but JD let the other guys go free — in part to see who they might meet up with, as in the mystery man hot to reclaim the drone footage. The two dive shop guys nearly drowned the buyer, given his role in Coleman’s death, but NCIS showed up in time to save him. Alas, before they could question the buyer, who shows up like a bad penny to claim him but Colonel Richard Rankin, the DoD attache that Mackey and JD locked horns with in Episode 1.
Mackey speculates that the person with the resources to make it happen was behind the drone when Blue reveals that the MDMA planted at the dive shop was taken in a DEA bust (but not destroyed). After that, she and JD go to Colonel Rankin’s office and suggest that the CIA was keeping an eye on the Australian submarine. Naturally, Rankin dismisses the idea, and Mackey and JD clarify that he will not tolerate the remaining diving shop owners, failing which their CIA theory will be featured on the front pages of the print publications that the DoD official adores.
After transferring a call from her injured predecessor, McNamara, to JD earlier in the episode, Blue was worried about the lack of RSVPs for her own goodbye party as the third episode came to a close. However, it transpires that JD was only seeking McNamara’s approval when he recommended Blue continue on as their forensics expert. Cue celebration and a “WELCOME” cake shaped like a ship! (However, why is Doc Roy depressed?)