'NCIS: Los Angeles' Season 11 Episode 9: Hetty's brilliant comeback proves why she should be calling all the shots
This article contains spoilers for season 11, episode 9.
In tonight's episode of 'NCIS: Los Angeles', a lot goes down as “Callen and Sam travel to San Francisco to search for Eric after he’s kidnapped during a clandestine mission for Hetty." We have Eric returning after his NCIS sabbatical for the first time, and things immediately go off-hand for the man who has had zero field experience so far. But with Callen and Sam watching out for their team member, what actually comes into light is Eric's sheer capability in handling himself, and Callen stepping up at all the right times, eventually proving why our lord and savior Hetty was right in handing Eric the task of joining a startup and giving Callen the job of replacing her.
The episode starts with a home invasion at Eric's San Francisco apartment, which he successfully managed to escape despite a bullet grazing through his arm. Unfortunately, in the process, Eric ended up vandalizing a police car, accidentally while attempting to catch the police's attention, which led to him getting arrested and taken in for questioning. Things, however, get more twisted, when two agents pretending to be NCIS turn up at the police station and Eric gets handed to them because the police didn't bother checking further. The fake agents turn out to be Eric's kidnappers, and as he is once again held hostage by them, tension builds up in the NCIS: LA office as the team wonders if Hetty piled more on Eric than he could take up at a time.
In all this commotion, with Callen and Sam finding out in San Francisco that he has been kidnapped, Hetty stands by her decision to sign off Eric's joining letter for the start-up he had been working in. Nell reminds Hetty of Eric's zero field experience, and even though the start-up refuses to talk to Callen and Sam, Hetty's faith in Eric remains unwavering. It's quite daunting watching Eric go through the things he does in the second round of kidnapping, as the bullet that grazed through his arm was spiked with hallucinogens. But he manages to prove Hetty right by escaping from his kidnappers a second time and hiding out in dumpsters as he gets the drugs to wear off from his blood. He even had the smarts to show up in front of security surveillances that he knew Nell would be monitoring, and sure enough, things work out in the end.
At Callen's end, he is able to crack the code with the extremely sketchy start-up that just turns out to be a backend facade for a Chinese company trading intelligence to the US military. With all of this taken care of, Hetty finally comes out triumphant in establishing just why nobody should question the shots she takes.
'NCIS: Los Angeles' season 11 airs on Sundays at 9pm only on CBS.