It’s so sad to think about the good times (when your girlfriend’s body ends up in a vat of acid).
What would possess a twitchy guy to lock himself into a mobile blood donation truck and go all Nosferatu on 46 bags of the red stuff? The answer lies in the missing 47th bag, of course. Let’s recap “Bad Blood”!
NCIS gets involved in the blood heist when a Navy lieutenant dies trying to stop the blood bandit (John Ahle Kellar) from fleeing the scene.
Thanks to McGee’s (Sean Murray) efforts to win his twins’ fundraising drive this year, the team is fueled by high-octane coffee as they investigate. (The proceeds go to new school lab equipment, and if it lets McGee outsell rival dad Brendan Banks, so much the better.)
Kasie (Diona Reasonover) in particular benefits from the triple-caffeine brew, and in record time she’s analyzed all the DNA in the truck, which looks like the blood rave from her third-favorite movie, Blade. This… is a surprisingly accurate description, actually.
The dead lieutenant had a street version of fentanyl on her body, likely transferred from the blood bandit as he fled after destroying all the blood bags in the truck to try to cover up his theft of one bag in particular.
Kasie’s extremely! focused! analysis! shows that the missing bag belongs to Lauren Hawthorn, and when Parker (Gary Cole) and Knight (Katrina Law) arrive at her house, they discover Lauren’s bones swimming in a vat of acid. Not the end-of-life decision any of us would make.
Lauren’s house was wiped clean of all physical evidence, right down to stray hairs in her drain, which is really salt in the wound. The only help her neighbors can provide is an overheard argument with an unseen man around the time of her death.
Rule 39 pops up when the team learns that Lauren had just started a job at Life Sequence, a health startup that uses DNA to personalize health plans. A DNA-based job, you say? No coincidences here.
At Life Sequence, McGee and Parker get a tour from Holly (Eliza Blair), who explains that the company uses digital wrist sequencers to monitor, well, everything, which allows for real-time updates to each subscriber’s health plan. It’s being beta-tested on volunteers in peak physical condition, and the CEO plans to roll it out publicly in a few weeks.
Said CEO is hideously familiar to the team. It’s Fletcher Voss (T.J. Thyne), the inventor of Bandium who accidentally-on-purpose got Vance shot for trying to kill the contract on the alert system.
“Why the hell aren’t you in prison?” Parker bellows through the glass of Voss’ oxygen bath pod. The smarmy billionaire explains that spending three months in lockup cost him everything. (Emotionally, that is; his finances are fine.) But it forever changed him, and now he wants to give back.
Voss chokes on the smoothie Holly brought him when he hears that Lauren was murdered, and no wonder when back at the lab, Kasie uses Lauren’s discarded hemoglobin prick test to confirm that she was pregnant and Voss was the father.
Vance (Rocky Carroll) is not pleased to see Voss again and tasks his people with providing an airtight murder case against him this time. Fair! Getting shot by a sniper goaded into action by Voss’ online trolling would make a really deep cut!
Unfortunately, one lead dries up when the blood bandit turns up dead from a fentanyl overdose. Palmer (Brian Dietzen), fired up that the guy ruined all those blood donations when there’s a critical shortage, does all kinds of angry investigative work, which reveals that someone using a burner phone hired him to steal Lauren’s blood.
Suspicion falls on Voss, of course, so the team plots to access his digital data by sending an agent to Life Sequence as a beta tester. Gee, if only they knew a physically perfect specimen with undercover experience…
Enter Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), who undergoes a punishing run on Life Sequence’s treadmill under the watchful eye of Doctor Donovan (Nick George), the medical person in charge, while McGee and Kasie remotely access the data they need. (Don’t worry; they have a warrant!)
Torres ends up in the top percentile of testers, which he will undoubtedly never shut up about, and the sequencer evidence shows that Voss was at Lauren’s house around the time of her murder.
In questioning at NCIS HQ, Voss insists on being allowed access to his high-alkaline smoothie, one of six he drinks every day. He admits that having a child with Lauren would’ve been a costly wrench to his divorce proceedings, but he insists that he loved her and was only at her house that night to take her to dinner, but she wasn’t feeling well.
Then he collapses, splashing his smoothie on Parker. Doctors determine that he had a hemorrhagic stroke, and just as the team starts speculating that this medical crisis wasn’t an accident, Palmer comes in with evidence of an odd clotting agent in Voss’ blood.
Evidence cut from Parker’s favorite shirt (RIP!) reveals traces of the medicine. It’s not enough to be immediately lethal, but six times a day for a few months would do the trick, which means somebody was poisoning him.
Cut to Holly, the actual inventor of the Life Sequence technology. Three years ago, Holly signed away the rights to Voss for cheap in a contract that reverts it all back in the event of Voss’ death. Holly insists that a) the technology doesn’t actually work, despite Voss’ insistence that the company push forward, and b) Dr. Donovan is the one who provides the ingredients for Voss’ smoothies.
So Voss faked the studies but stuck Donovan’s name on them, and to avoid his own personal Theranos, Donovan was slowly poisoning the CEO to shut down the release. Alas, Lauren shared smoothies with her baby daddy, and the blood thinner interacted with other meds she was on, killing her. The only solution, naturally, was for Donovan to dump her body into acid and stage the blood bank break-in to cover up all evidence of a crime.
When his dastardly deeds are revealed, Donovan bolts, but perfect physical specimen Torres is there to chase him down.
Lest we forget about Voss, he ends up needing a blood transfusion to survive the murder attempt, and McGee’s rare blood type is the only thing that’ll save him, thanks to a blood shortage made worse by events set in motion by Voss. Again.
At Vance’s urging, McGee reluctantly agrees to donate his blood, and Voss wakes up a changed man. Again (again).
Voss mourns the loss of what used to be mad love with Lauren and wonders what kind of father he would’ve been. McGee, who’s disappointed to have lost yet another fundraising race to bougie Brendan Banks, says kids don’t care about your cool job or your track record of wins. They care about the time you spend with them. He then asks Voss to call him Tim, which leads to the best exchange of the episode.
Voss: “Maybe I’m a good person too, now that you’re inside me.”
McGee: “Please don’t ever say that again.”
They bump fists over being blood brothers, and I’m hoping this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Fletcher Voss so we can see whether those changes will stick!
Stray shots
Even though he’s TV’s nicest man, a chill ran down my spine at Palmer’s, “You can’t imagine the things I know about you, Special Agent Timothy Farragut McGee.” Kinda makes you wonder what kind of files he has on his other coworkers…
The team was absolutely correct this week. As far as school fundraisers go, coffee is far superior to wrapping paper, coupon books, and vegan candles.
So what are Kasie’s No. 1 and 2 movies? In my headcannon, it’s No. 1 Blade: Trinity , No. 2 Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert movie.