'NCIS': Gibbs and company celebrate Halloween with liquid nitrogen

I can tell you quite honestly I was thrilled that the Halloween teen pranksters got the scare of their life at the start of tonight's "NCIS." Sure, no one deserves to get scared by a dead body, but Halloween pranksters come as close as anyone can. (No, I'm not 80, I just sound that way.)

Before we go any further, I know there was no recap last week, but go Ziva, way to become a real and true NCIS agent! Sadly, tonight we didn't get that much story about our characters; we mostly ended up with the single murder. At least it was a good murder, even if the ending wasn't terribly satisfying.

Korby, our dead guy, was a Halloween prankster himself, although that didn't really explain why the guy was frozen solid. Even by the end of the episode it didn't. You'd have to hate Halloween pranksters a whole lot more than I do to take a guy out like that, and our murderer mostly seemed to choose that method of death because... well, if they explained why, I missed it.

I initially liked Tony's idea that the wife, Sara, did it, although once we met her, she instantly struck me as the non-murdering type. Tony should have junked his idea as soon as he saw her, too. It did seem odd Korby wanted to ditch Sara right after getting back from being overseas in order to play with his Halloween toys, but that didn't make her the killer (even if her husbands did have a nasty habit of turning up dead).

Most people seemed to hate Korby's pranks, so why would the wife have been responsible? Why did Tony keep going after Sara once it became clear so many people didn't like Korby? And don't tell me that as soon as Singer showed up at Korby's with flowers for Sara you didn't know that the two of them were having an affair (or contemplating one). You knew it just as well as I did.

The best fact of the night in the case was the Code Red, which I mostly liked because Gibbs could not only handle the truth, but identify it as well. Anytime I hear that "Code Red" phrase a smile appears on my face as I think of Jack Nicholson and poor young Noah Wyle. Oh, and that Cruise fellow.

Mr. Rogers was my candidate for killer. I don't like Halloween, but that guy was living in the Land of Make-Believe: Completely ignoring the holiday is an impossibility. Anyone who can stick his head in the sand that far about the world in which we live might just be odd enough to commit murder (at least on television). Once Gibbs worked out the inconsistencies with the seat position, I thought maybe Mr. Rogers had in fact done it. (He was short.)

I was, however, wrong (not the first time). The step-daughter doing it for the cash kind of came out of nowhere. The plot certainly seemed to hold together (except for the bit where Korby didn't realize what he was about to drink before he drank it), but that may only be because we really didn't get all that much in the way of specifics. I forgive the show.

Bits o' fun for Halloween:

• Liquid nitrogen with the pumpkin... fun!
• The incredibly brief cider break... fun!
• Tony being wrong... fun!
• Shaving cream in the keyboard... fun!
• Blue teeth from the coffee... fun!

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