WARNING: The following contains spoilers for NCIS: Hawai’i Season 1, Episode 5, “Gaijin,” which aired Monday October 18th on CBS.
After cases involving espionage, bombings and gang violence, this weeks’ episode of NCIS: Hawai’i got back to a good, old fashioned crime of passion. The offense was the murder of a Japanese sailor, named Shogo Oto, who was stabbed in the heart with a small blade. At the end of the episode, the killer’s identity was extremely surprising, in part because of how he framed a very easy target -- someone with a proven mental disorder.
The sailor was part of Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Force, so while NCIS took over the case, it was a delicate matter with international implications. The matter was made worse when Special Agent Tennant found out about the sailor’s girlfriend, Yuki, who was killed in Okinawa a year earlier, with the same MO. The investigation there seemed to point to an American named Abby Nelson as the only credible suspect, but the American government got her out of the country, which effectively ended the investigation.
Things got weird, though, when Nelson showed up at NCIS claiming that she didn’t commit either of the murders. All of her answers in interrogation seemed extremely calculated to Tennant and Jessie. Something just felt off. That notion was only compounded when they gave her a polygraph test, and all of her answers triggered the same, even when they knew that she was lying. That meant that she was a someone with Anti-Social Compulsive Disorder, meaning that she didn’t experience enough emotion to trigger the lie detector test one way or the other.
Their first conclusion was that Nelson had killed Yuki out of jealousy for Shogo, but that started to fall through when they found Nelson’s diary. That, combined with her disorder, seemed to indicate that she wasn’t the killer. She was Yuki’s friend and was trying to emulate her in an attempt to be more "normal," so it was starting to look like Nelson wasn’t the killer after all.
They broke the case open, though, when a medal was found amongst Shogo’s things – a medal from ten years ago. In fact, it belonged to the Japanese Naval Commander Nisa Tanaka. Tennant showed that medal to Nelson, and knowing that they didn’t think that she was the killer, Nelson finally told them the truth. Shogo had told her how Tanaka had killed Yuki before he was killed.
All that was left to do was to get the Tanka to confess. So, Tennant sent Nelson, who was wearing a wire, to the commander during a banquet. With a little bit of prodding, he admitted that he had killed Yuki because she had chosen to be with Shogo over him; then, he had killed Shogo to make sure he wasn’t found out. It was really a great set up, especially considering he asked the US government to covertly remove Nelson from Japan, thus, making it look like she had fled her crimes. It didn’t matter, though, because as soon as Tanaka had confessed, Tennant’s team rushed in and arrested him. So, at the end, it was the woman with the mental illness that he tried to frame that ended up saving the day.
To see what Jane Tennant’s NCIS team does next, watch NCIS: Hawai’i on Monday nights at 10 p.m. ET.