NCIS's tenth season premiere dealt with the fallout from the bombing of NCIS headquarters in the Season 9 finale. As much as one might want to, I couldn't empathize with the characters' emotions in the wake of the bombing because it was a fictitious terrorist act. The show wanted me to feel the grief and anger anyone might after a 9/11-like event, but I couldn't, because I experienced the real 9/11. Angry, afraid, and powerless, I watched a terrorist attack unfold on live TV news. I'm in no mood to relive it for a TV drama.
Gibbs caught up and killed the terrorist, the disgruntled father of a dead serviceman, but not before the terrorist bombed a team of pursuing FBI agents. All of it felt hollow. Fictitious catastrophes simply remind me that I'm watching a TV show, that any empathy I feel is engineered by writers. It's no position from which to buy into an episode, much less a season of repercussions.
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