Episode 2 of NCIS: Sydney briefly took us to Cowan Creek in New South Wales, where a tussle between two fisherbros was cut short by their discovery of a dead body stashed in a waterhole.
As Mackey, JD et al descended on the scene, the vic was identified as Sergeant Lee Mitchell, a compliance officer at the U.S. Naval supply depot in White Bay. Doc Roy reported that Mitchell had not drowned/been drowned, nor even died at the scene, but instead was felled by a snake bite — from a highly venomous taipan, Blue in turn reported. It turned out that just such a taipan, plus other exotic and highly valuable critters, had been taken during a recent break-in at a local animal sanctuary.
Mackey and JD shook some branches over at the U.S. Naval supply depot, where Mitchell didn’t seem to have any enemies at all — odd for a competent compliance officer, Mackey noted — while Evie (wielding Chekhov’s Gait Recognizer) and DeShawn found the crawlspace beneath a remote community center where Mitchell apparently had been trapped, along with the taipan, to die.
Mitchell’s recovered phone, highly encrypted but partially cracked by Blue, led the team to realize he had been tracking a grunt from the depot; but just as Mackey and JD held that grunt’s feet to the fire, a sniper bullet to his bean removed him from the equation. The kitchen table in Mitchell’s apartment, meanwhile, beheld a hidden trove of math calculations. Blue, in her most Abby moment yet, put Mitchell’s music playlist in her headphones while poring over the numbers, and eventually deduced that the common factor among the calculations was ~130 kg. — or, the recently assassinated depot grunt’s body weight. Mitchell had gotten wise to a scheme that was robbing the depot of 130 kg. of goods at a time, most recently military-grade rifles.
Evie’s gait recognition gizmo put the final piece of the puzzle together, when it detected that the animal sanctuary lady was part of the robbery crew/scheme. Alas, just as Evie and DeShawn got that intel, the remaining baddies, in the middle of selling off the firearms, got the drop on them and tied them up inside the reptile house. After confirming that Mitchell’s depot supervisor was also in on the scheme, a fast-driving (albeit sometimes on the wrong side of the road!) Mackey and JD raced to the animal sanctuary and a standoff/shootout ensued, but DeShawn used Evie’s ankle-holstered pistol to free some snakes and spook the last gunman.
Things we learned/observed about the team members this week: Evie schooled DeShawn on white tail spiders, with a tale about how a nest of some effectively ended her relationship with a beau… DeShawn had a soft spot for some of the stolen animals found dead in a trash can, and as such asked Doc Roy to properly dispose of them… Blue was delighted by a macaw found alive among the stolen critters and kept it in her work area, until it inaccurately started repeating “MACKEY DUMBASS” over and over again…. And TVLine’s slang guide came in very handy, with mentions of “telling porkie pies,” “taking the piss” and “scissors, paper rock” and “nuffy.”