'NCIS' Season 17 Episode 9 highlights the dark side of gaming platforms and retirement homes through a strangely connected murder
This article contains spoilers for season 17 episode 9: 'IRL'
According to the official synopsis of tonight's episode 9 'IRL' of NCIS' season 17, "The team investigates a petty officer’s murder that was live-streamed on a popular gaming app." It's all very new age horror like where the genre encompasses the harrowing realities of technology and artificial intelligence. An online gamer dies and his murder is live-streamed? That's straight out of a Blumhouse plot. But wait, things get murkier when you find out who the actual murderer is and what their prime incentive behind the crime was. It will really make you reconsider the idea of elderly retirees being harmless!
The deceased Petty Officer - Isaac Rojas' murder was accidentally live-streamed on a gaming platform as he was killed while recording himself gaming. For Rojas, his real-life as a Petty Officer, and his online life were pretty separate and compartmentalized. In that, despite his fame on the online forum, nobody in real life knew who or how acclaimed Rojas was in his gaming-field where he moonlighted as the 'NAVYgamer-z'. So that gave the NCIS team zero ideas on why anybody from the gaming world would want to kill Rojas, even though the murder scene was staged to resemble a game that Rojas was a pro at streaming himself playing.
That was until they tried to round up their suspects among those close to Rojas in his final days. Rojas had an online gaming friend who went by the moniker 'Florida C.O.W.' and on Rojas' final day, he had spent time speaking with this Florida guy. Florida revealed that he was talking to Rojas about how the retirement center he lives in has a glitchy WiFi and when Rojas tried helping Florida out, he found from the home's computer system that someone was scamming the elderly residents of the place of all their money. This man, called Elmer, was stealing from the other residents as he himself couldn't afford the cost of living at the home. Rojas was on to bust this guy and that's how he ended up getting taken out by Elmer, who decided to hide the murder weapon in his garage.
Pretty smooth, right? That's 'NCIS' for you!
'NCIS' season 17 airs on Tuesdays at 8 pm only on CBS.