NCIS recap: Baking Bad

It likely came as no shock to viewers that Parker’s favorite pastry vendor is a gorgeous woman with enviable hair. 

No, the bigger surprise is the body in her kitchen, the cocaine in her meringues, and the Breaking Bad callouts. Let’s recap!

When Parker (Gary Cole) swings by Kostakis Bakery to pick up some pastries for the office, he finds the shop manned only by new employee Virgil (Jordyn Owens), who’s flustered and speeds through their transaction. And the instant Parker’s out the door, a gloved hand holding a gun appears from the kitchen.

Although Parker thought the encounter was a little strange, he doesn’t realize the gravity of the situation until the team descends on the pastry box like locust and removes enough goodies to see the message Virgil wrote on the bottom: “Help! Call 911.”

This sends Parker and company scrambling back to the bakery, where they find Virgil’s body facedown in a vat of batter. There are signs of an attempt to open the safe, which would make it the fourth attempted robbery in this area of late. 

But what puzzles the team is that the cash register was cleaned out, but Virgil’s wallet’s still in his pocket. And although there’s a bullet embedded in the wall, he wasn’t killed by a  gunshot. Parker’s furious that he missed what was happening under his nose. 

Enter Eleni, the baker so talented that Parker brought her great buns (his words!) into the office six days in a row. She fights her way through the police standing outside the bakery and is horrified at what she discovers inside. 

She’s also shocked to learn that Alden (her words!) is a federal agent. He says he didn’t tell her because he didn’t want to scare her off, prompting her to ask, “Scare me off from what?” Yeah, Alden. Scare her off from what?

Okay, back to the dead man. Virgil had a felony conviction, but Eleni wanted to give him a fresh start. She tearfully describes his novice baking efforts and says he probably tried to fight off the robbers because money’s been tight at the bakery.

Although the local PD should have jurisdiction over the crime, Parker wants to handle it himself, so he and Knight (Katrina Law) pay a visit to Virgil’s parole officer (Joel Damany Stiengold). He says Virgil was on the right path after serving two years for grand theft auto, and he and Parker then bond over Eleni’s amazing baked goods.

Meanwhile, the smell of those baked goods draws Vance (Rocky Carroll, who also directed this week’s episode) to Kasie’s (Diona Reasonover) lab, where the contents of Eleni’s kitchen have been sent for analysis.

He gives Parker permission to keep working the case, but when their eyes fall to the goodies on the table, Kasie sharply warns them away. Those meringues they were salivating over? They’re made of a mix of 33 percent sugar and 67 percent cocaine. In fact, she found $100,00 worth of the drug mixed into the bakery’s sugar supply.

This means Parker has to pull his crush in for questioning, especially when they learn that she’d recently received an unexplained $25,000 deposit from an offshore shell account. (“That’s a lot of dough,” Knight says — and please note that this comes after her “this one takes the cake” crack to describe this inventive new drug-smuggling scheme.)

Eleni’s starting to realize the gravity of her situation when her sleazy lawyer Leslie Walker (Ken Garito) arrives to bluster about jurisdiction and procedural missteps.

As he tries to hustle Eleni out the door, Parker quietly asks if that’s what she wants. Her answer is clear: “I want to not be in the same room with you.” Understandable, but ouch!

Time to look into Eleni’s background. McGee (Sean Murray) reports that she’s a second-generation Greek immigrant and, on paper, doesn't exactly look like Walter White. When Parker adds that she’s the only one of her five siblings who didn’t move to Greece when one of their sisters got sick, everyone silently absorbs the level of personal information their boss knows about their suspect. 

Awkward, then, that it was Eleni’s lawyer who got a man named Charles Barbieri off on drug charges and that it was Eleni who delivered a shipment of cocaine meringues to Barbieri worth the exact amount of that mystery deposit at the exact time that Virgil was being murdered.

This sends Kasie to her lab’s equivalent of an Easy-Bake Oven as she tries to master the art of cocaine meringues in an attempt to prove that a newbie baker like Virgil could’ve made them. (Cocaine melts at 208 degrees, but meringues bake above 200 degrees. It’s tricky!) 

When Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) picks up her blow torch, she yells at him to be careful around the powdered sugar because it’s highly combustible. Then she brings up this week’s huge personal reveal: Torres’ secret girlfriend is Robin Knight, Jess’ sister. 

Earlier in the episode, Knight loudly lamented her sister’s mysterious new boyfriend and complained about being the one who’d have to clean up the inevitable mess. (Lest we forget, the one time we saw Robin, she was with her fifth fiancé, who turned out to be a murderous psycho who ruined Thanksgiving.)

Torres then confided to Palmer (Brian Dietzen) that he’s the person Robin’s seeing, and Palmer promptly sold him out to Kasie for the low, low price of 11 peanut M&Ms. Although Torres insists that the relationship’s not serious, Kasie insists that he come clean with Jess or she’ll do it for him.

Speaking of messy personal connections, Parker turns up at Kostakis Bakery to ask about Barbieri. Eleni snips, “He’s just a customer, Alden. Same as you.” Double ouch!

Despite her anger, he calmly starts helping clean up the messy aftermath of Virgil’s murder, but when he picks up a child’s drawing with the name “Manny” written on it, Eleni snatches it out of his hand and tells him to drop it before someone else dies. No pastry for you!

But Eleni’s warning was too late, and Virgil’s parole officer calls Parker to an alley near the bakery, where police have found the bodies of Barbieri and a rival gang member, along with a blood-spattered Kostakis Bakery box.

When Eleni disappears and the team learns that her attorney had helped move money for both sides of this gang war, they bring him in for questioning. Batter call Saul, amirite? Walker suggests that Eleni needed to find a new place to cook — er, bake — since her kitchen’s now a crime scene.

We then get a marvelous exchange between Palmer and Torres about Jimmy’s inability to keep a secret. “I think Kasie’s been conditioning me,” Palmer admits. “She’s been giving me M&Ms every day at 11:30 a.m. I’m like Pavlov’s dog!”

Knight walks in on this not-at-all suspicious conversation with the news that Barbieri’s body contained traces of a discontinued food production substance that can be traced to a now-abandoned factory. (Where would any Hollywood bad guys do crime if not for abandoned factories?)

When Knight and Torres arrive at the building, he starts to come clean about the “work conflict” he has with his new sort-of girlfriend, and Jess’ face is a mask of dawning horror as she starts to put it all together. But her flurry of aggravated slaps to his torso is interrupted when they realize they’re not alone in the building.

Nope, Eleni’s there, having been Jesse Pinkman’d into baking her cocaine meringues for the terrifying Arturo Jimenez (Carlos Javier Rivera), who’s got millions of dollars of product to move. As Walker explains at NCIS HQ, Eleni asked him for a loan, and he hooked her up with Arturo, who didn’t take it kindly when she told him she had no interest in being his drug chef.

The dominos start falling fast. Kasie discovers that Eleni didn’t need the money for her bakery, but to pay a protection bribe on behalf of a prison inmate named Manuel Lopez. Walker was Manny’s lawyer, which is why Eleni went to him for help.

Some help. Arturo’s got her literally chained to her mixer, complete with a Walt-and-Jesse-style respirator. But she bravely barters for Knight and Torres’ lives, telling Arturo that she’ll bake the product faster if she can use them as her assistants. 

He agrees, and as they crack eggs, the two agents quietly plot their escape and argue about Robin. Torres then spots a big bowl of powdered sugar, and an idea forms.

When Knight’s phone rings with a check-in from Parker, Arturo threatens them all with his big gun. Jess calls Parker “boss” and she reports that they found nothing of interest at the old factory. This sets off Parker’s alarm bells since she’s never called him that before.

He and McGee arrive at the factory just as Torres puts his plan into motion by tossing the powdered sugar into an open flame, causing the explosion Kasie warned him about. Yeah, Mr. Torres! Yeah, science!

The good guys are rescued, and Eleni tells Parker that Manny’s her sister’s nephew and the reason she stayed in the U.S. It’s also the reason she hired Virgil, Manny’s friend from lockup who had no idea about the cocaine.

This fact raises one final question for Parker: why would Arturo kill Virgil but leave $100,000 of cocaine in a kitchen destined to become a crime scene?

Answer: Virgil’s real killer had no idea about the drug operation.

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That leaves Virgil’s parole officer, who’d been extorting the families of prisoners in a protection racket and killed Virgil to warn Eleni to pay up if she wanted to keep Manny safe. That’s two different crime rings, busted. Good work, team!

But there’s still some business left. First, Torres tries to talk to Knight, assuring her that he didn’t tell her about Robin because there’s nothing serious to report yet. Jess warns him that Robin’s probably already planning their wedding, and although she insists that she’s happy as long as Robin’s happy, she turns down his offer to grab dinner.

Parker’s also in a strange place with Eleni when he arrives at her bakery, having baked baklava for her. But the tension between them has melted away like cocaine in a 309-degree oven. Alden’s baklava turns out to be delicious, if a little thin, and he opens up to her a bit about his mother and her sweet tooth. Eleni takes his hand and thanks him for saving her, then offers to help him with his baklava technique.

Stray shots

• No matter how tempting it might be, do not toss powdered sugar onto an open flame! Sugar really is highly flammable.
• Is it wrong to want a judge to knock, like, a day off of Arturo’s sentence for quoting GBBO during this episode’s technical challenge at gunpoint? 
• Aww, Parker and Eleni. Although the episode ends with her breaking the news that she and Manny are headed to Greece when he’s released the following month, hopefully she’ll make her way back to the States to continue adding deliciousness to Parker’s life.
• NCIS really did the work of setting up Nick and Robin. We’ve got Torres attending the rager for her graduation from that online hat-making academy where Jess had so much to drink that she ended up going home in an unknown man’s jacket. Who knows what sparks were flying that night? Certainly not Knight! And then, of course, Jess specifically said she had plans for Christmas with her dad — no mention of her sister. The clues were there all along… 
• Who else could really go for some meringues right now?