NCIS: Sydney Season 3 Episode 11 Review: Baby Blues, Trigger Badassery & Break-Ins

Critic’s Rating: 4.1 / 5.0

4.1

You have to love NCIS: Sydney.

They’ll start the hour with something as fun as bowling shenanigans, deliver a twisty case with hints of Mackey insight, and then drop the ultimate bomb on us at the end.

We’ve been wondering when they’d revisit the great Mackey conspiracy, and NCIS: Sydney Season 3 Episode 11 delivered on that.

Just Say No to Trigger and Evie

So, the real bummer is that Trigger went out of his way to set up a bowling hangout with the team, and he even did it to accommodate the Americans, but what did he get in return?

He got only one person showing up, Evie, and a crazy hangover.

But we also got the series toying with her emotions because did Evie and Trigger hook up or not?!

DeShawn has his fun, and he’s as nosy as the rest of us, but he dropped the ball on actually getting all the details, and I’m disappointed.

Give me the chisme, man!

Trigger and Evie wouldn’t have been on my radar if not for the end of NCIS: Sydney Season 3 Episode 10, and as a Trigger/Blue girlie, I’m bummed that they even teased the idea of them.

However, I don’t believe the two of them actually hooked up. Evie isn’t someone who’d be forthcoming with that type of information, and Trigger’s whole thing is being an enigma, so he wouldn’t say anything about it either.

But most likely, they both got super drunk and spent the evening fighting for their lives after a result. Also, it’s played out a bit to have the drunken hookup thing happening.

The DeShawn and Evie Ambiguity and Fun Continues

More than anything, it’s a bummer that we actually didn’t get to see the full team, just committed to that bowling hangout

I would’ve loved to see them in that type of environment, and it would’ve been great for some laughs, low tension, and not as obnoxious as JD and Trigger playing with toy guns in the middle of the bullpen.

DeShawn going into protective mode had its amusing moments, though.

It was killing him that he couldn’t piece things together, and the series continues to play with the idea of their relationship oscillating between sibling-like and something else entirely.

NCIS: Sydney excels at playing both sides of the fence when it comes to this pair, and they do it rather well.

Baby Mama Drama

The case was more interesting than I anticipated when it first started.

Some of the crime scenes have been gnarly, and that was a wild opener with Curtis crashing through the roof of that flower truck.

But then we got into the messiness of IVF, forbidden romances among colleagues, and illegal surrogacy.

From the moment they found that paternity test, it was easy to piece together what happened, especially when Mackey and JD met up with Curtis’s friends.

Chloe was shifty when they spoke to her, and even though she didn’t look like she was presently pregnant, it’s shocking how easy it is to hide a pregnancy sometimes, especially depending on someone’s body shape.

I vividly recall a close family friend who went her entire nine months barely showing because she carried most of the weight in her hips and derriere, and she mostly looked bloated.

What was interesting was seeing how Mackey instantly picked up on what was happening, even though she wasn’t explicitly explaining every step to JD.

Motherhood Was an Important Theme

She knew that Chloe and Curtis’ relationship would have been forbidden, and they’d get in trouble if anyone found out about it.

And she also understood what Chloe was facing as a woman who seemed to want both her baby and her military career.

They used the case to give us great insight into Mackey, since we don’t get much about her background, especially regarding her son.

The series takes its time feeding us that information, and what’s nice about it is how much you can tell JD values it.

He leaps at any opportunity to learn more about Mackey, her past, and how she has come to be who she is now.

And he wasn’t missing any of the parallels between Mackey in this case and motherhood and service.

I love the sympathetic tone he uses, and the genuine curiosity that sparks within him when it comes to her, and how he prods, but never in a way that feels overly intrusive.

And in taking that approach, he gets so much more out of Mackey than she’d typically share.

Hurt People Can Hurt People

The case itself certainly got convoluted once we figured out how David and Alicia factored into everything. One could easily sympathize with Alicia, especially after nine miscarriages and everything else she endured in her efforts to have a child.

But it really was disturbing that anyone would agree to this surrogate situation. For one, it was illegal since Chloe wasn’t of the legal age of 25 to do it. There was also the power structure in play.

She lived with these people, and they were her landlords. As JD pointed out, she’s a young woman in a totally different country, dealing with some difficult things.

She didn’t need this couple taking advantage of that. They were fragile because of their own experiences, sure, but so was she. I don’t care how much she supposedly insisted.

Plus, by the end of the hour, it was clear that she wanted to keep her baby anyway, so this was always going to be a mess, and it could’ve been so much worse.

They went out of their way to falsify documents and make it look like Alcia had been pregnant at the same time.

Everything was to back the couple. So, Chloe didn’t even have the same safeguards that women who typically partake in surrogacy have.

The Logistics Are Questionable

She would’ve changed her mind, and she had no protection, and Alicia would’ve snapped or something.

What I’m curious about is how little old Alicia managed to throw Curtis over the overpass. I would’ve liked a flashback to how she orchestrated that.

Killing him was clearly an accident after that confrontation in trying to envision his hotel room, but disposing of his body as she did? I kept trying to envision the logistics!

Imagine if she did all of this while still earning that fake baby bump!

The entire situation is sad. Clearly, Alicia was upset after realizing that she’d lose another shot at having a child, and she snapped. It’s hard not to sympathize with her a little.

And David is distraught over losing his wife in this way. He tried to protect her, but what she did was indefensible as well.

But now Chloe has to raise her baby alone. Even if she has a circle to lean into, as Mackey said, it’s not the same.

Badass Trigger FTW

The hour really leaning into motherhood was great, given the cliffhanger we had. Those final few moments were so unexpected.

Every time they mentioned the doors weren’t working and there were programming issues, I wondered if something else was happening.

From early on, it sounded like someone was tampering with the system, and that was concerning.

Then they went and confirmed it with those masked, armed men breaking in and holding Blue at gunpoint.

They’ve put Blue through the wringer this season!

But as a Trigger fangirl, can we take a moment to appreciate and talk about how hot Trigger was kicking ass? He held his own against the one attacker, and fortunately, Blue was able to fend off the other.

He was so clever posing as the deliveryman to get the upper hand, and he directed all the attention on himself rather than having them fixate on Blue.

The Mackey Conspiracy Put Everyone in Danger

What’s interesting is that they weren’t planning to kill anyone.

There were multiple times when they should’ve had a shot and could have taken it, but they didn’t. They were clearly there to extract information.

Why specifically are they looking for? It’s hard to say.

But taking that photo of Mackey and her son is a clear sign they were sending a message, and I wonder to what extent her kid is in danger because of all of this.

The biggest issue is that Mackey has been keeping this from everyone, and now it’s seriously impacting the people she works with and putting them in danger.

They deserve to know the truth, at the very least, so they can protect themselves, but especially so they can have her back, too.

She’s not going to get through this without the team, but she can risk ruining her relationship with them and their trust if she doesn’t tell them the truth.

Over to you, NCIS: Sydney Fanatics. Let’s discuss that cliffhanger. How do you think this Mackey conspiracy will play out? Is her son in danger? Sound off below!

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