'NCIS: New Orleans' Season 7 Episode 2 Preview: Carter, Gregorio in danger, will we have more shocking deaths?
Last season on ‘NCIS: New Orleans’, fans got the shock of their lives. In season 6 episode 6 of the show, titled ‘Matthew 5:9’, the show eliminated one of its main (and well-loved) characters. Special Agent Christopher LaSalle (Lucas Black) was killed while trying to avenge his brother Cade's murder. LaSalle was shot and killed as he attempted to track a drug ring in Alabama that he suspected was responsible for his brother's death.
The death of LaSalle was altogether unexpected and, for many, unnecessary. But it also opened the door for the show to eliminate important characters rather drastically, making fans nervous about their favorites. Who can be safe now? Who could be the next one to die? Would it be our hero, Dwyane Pride (Scott Bakula)? Or would it be one of the others? The whole team is full of lovable people who now seem to be at risk of getting killed off for shock value.
There is also the question of “when”. Last season, LaSalle’s death also felt shocking because it arrived pretty early in the season -- episode 6 in a list of twenty is not at all when anyone would expect a major shift in a story arc. All of this is reason enough to have some anxiety about the characters in this season. At the same time, season 7 has one extra reason for fans to be worried about -- the coronavirus pandemic.
This season started off with the pandemic as its central focus. And that is worrying. Because to show the real-world consequences of the disease, what if the show resorts to killing one of the main characters? But there are other reasons to be worried as well.
In episode 1 of season 7, we saw Special Agents Tammy Gregorio (Vanessa Ferlito) and Quentin Carter (Charles Michael Davis) board a humanitarian ship run by the NGO Eternal Hope, after a Navy Lieutenant called Paula Cooke winds up dead. At the very end of the episode, we see Carter and Gregorio, while retracing Cooke’s steps, face an explosion of sorts. They see fire all over a section of the ship. And while we see them recover from the explosion, we don’t know what kind of peril they might be in right now. We don’t know the extent of the fire. We don’t know what set it off. And we certainly don’t know if there are chances of it getting bigger than it already was -- and it was pretty big.
What makes this more ominous is the fact that in the episode, we saw Carter and Gregorio get sort of pally. Carter, who arrived in the team after LaSalle, seemed to have a somewhat difficult time with the rest of the team. No one was hostile. But the teams seemed to be unable to accept that there could ever be a replacement for LaSalle at all.
Carter also maintained a cool distance from everyone, unwilling to be vulnerable to the team as much as the other members were with each other. The fact that Carter only got around to being somewhat friendly with them at the very end of last season -- and friendly is a bit of an overstatement -- may be a bad sign. Shows have a tendency to make us like a character more right before eliminating them, just to make the elimination more potent.
But one can’t discount Gregorio being in danger either. She has been a favorite of fans for a while. And last season, towards the end, we were given several aww moments between her and Sebastian (Rob Kerkovich).
One can always hope that ‘NCIS: New Orleans’ won’t dare remove another important character -- especially not after how much fans felt sad about LaSalle. But hope is all that we have.
‘NCIS: New Orleans’ airs every Sunday at 9/8c, only on CBS.