Sunday, January 5, 2014

The Writing Scribe - Season 5


Sara Servi is writing the story for NCIS LA for the first time in the capacity of Writer. Previously she worked for NCIS LA as Writer’s production Assistant for Matt Pyken and Tim Clemente in Season One for their stories ‘Keeping it Real’ and ‘Blood Brothers’ respectively. I loved Matt Pyken’s work back then. Seems Sara Servi is finally promoted to being full time writer. And I have to say, she did a good job with R S Gemmill.


R S Gemmill is one of the master backstoppers for NCIS LA stories. He has previously worked on JAG series, through which NCIS spin off came and which now gives us NCIS LA. He gives us action packed procedural drama involving Navy professions in the crime dramas. In Impact, Gemmill created a backstopping for the story arc on Private Companies like D7 who may have been involved in war crimes in the name of War on Terror in Afghanistan. Although D7 has taken all steps to keep itself clean by wiping all evidence away, the investigation from NCIS team continues and it might surface in season’s future episodes. He also launched the Love Story Arc for Keeks or Densi which was Shane Brennan's idea for Season 5.

In Impact Gemmill seems to apologizing to character Deeks when he makes him share his thoughts about what he feels when people make jokes on him being “shaggy-like” or treated as “schizophrenic” because of his tendency to talk and ramble on. It was a revelation about how Deeks has felt deeply all along inspite of him taking the sarcasm for his physical appearance and his characteristic traits in a sportive manner. No one could bully him, but people could make fun of him and that hurt him. Personally I had never liked the jokes and hence felt sad that Deeks has always taken those jokes about himself; from Sam and Kensi especially; rather stoically, but when he is at the weakest moment of his life with his traumatic state, those characteristic traits that he is made fun of has actually made him lose confidence on himself. The physical trauma that he underwent actually took away his mental resilience against the hurt inflicted by Kensi’s stabbing remarks on his character because of his undercover case with Monica and by Sam’s condemning remarks on his appearance and his style of doing things and having no trust on his abilities as Cop or part-Agent. Gemmill restores Deeks confidence through parallel building of love story for Deeks and Kensi through the blessing of Hetty. If Hetty had not taken matters into her hands, Deeks very well could have drifted away from NCIS LA team. Kensi would have forever waited for Deeks to return to OSP Ops...had not she made the visit to Deeks apartment.

Kyle Harimoto is the new writer hired by the show creators this season. He writes for Hawai Five-O and this is his first episode on NCIS Los Angeles this season. Going by the action sequences, we can see that he is big on action sequences and goes for explosions like Joseph C Wilson. He is learning the nuances of the character traits of the NCIS LA team but has not perfected them. He evidently does not know Kensi or Deeks or for that matter any of them and hence his joking traits taken from early period onwards for the characters comes off as shallow and losing the depth developed for the characters throughout the seasons. Omni was badly done for Kensi with the bangs and teeth joking when clearly that was one of the trauma point for Deeks. With Callen, he repeats the trait from 1x01-Identity. The level of the maturity of the story and the crime is not very deep in 5x03-Omni's case and it could have belonged to LAPD except the fact that Norris Biotech had funding from OMNI, a group from Bosnia, which is a second time choice country for Kyle Harimoto. In 5x11, he improved. Especially the screenplay is racy where you won’t analyse much except go by what the writer shows. There’s no hidden meaning to be unravelled.  And the scripting was very good to shift in parallel about the two storylines of LA mission and Afghanistan Mission. For ex: When Eric asks Hetty is Kensi is gone for long and the immediate next cut we have is for Afghanistan set. That enables great editing. And Lily's banter was throwing off the hints of what's to come next.

Yet, Kyle Harimoto failed to please me on the 1st ever Phone conversation between Kensi and Deeks post their going official in 5x11-Merry Evasion. Its the season of the Love Story. The conversation had the trepidation in the tone for Deeks and all the right dialogues, but it doesn't let me trust that Deeks and Kensi would have talked in this manner if it was some other writer who nurtured Densi Love Story. Nevertheless the Tone Meetings and Table Reads at the prepping should have identified this. If the rest of Writing Scribe did not find any issues, then I have no choice but to believe that this is how the love story has to go.

Joe Sachs -Seeing him from last two seasons since Season 3 when he joined the team, I am seeing that Joe Sachs has good grip on the NCIS LA characters. He knows all of them. He is the Consulting Producer for the show and previously worked as the writer for ER along with R Scott Gemmill. He is a doctor by profession, but writes stories on varieties of subjects. On the NCIS interpersonal dynamics, he takes care of the partnership dynamics without compromising the story needs. He adds resolution of the emotion towards the actions that the characters perform. The reason in terms of the emotion is addressed and depicted. On the story side, he picks up sensitive movies or books and along the same sensitive lines, develops his story, using the same title albeit weaving the story differently. In his stories, the subjects are very important. They are responsible but frustrated human beings trying to make a point, fighting the system as the Higher Power governing them has cheated them, failing to protect them and instead doing the exact opposite for believing in them. They are remorseful of their drastic action that they are reduced to take and would not wanted to take this approach, but feel that they have reason enough to go for the drastic step to teach the lesson to the Higher Power. His stories are poignant portrayals of ideals gone wrong, passions and dreams of people belied and the individuals effort to make it good, fighting with the last straw they have.

So far I have liked all Joe Sachs stories. In this story, Joe Sachs has taken the title from Barbara Garson’s book, “All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work” and David Fenster’s movie “The Livelong Day” The movie is actually based on Trains and is about passionate people for whom Train is a way of life, who cannot see Trains being taken away from them.

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