The season finale of NCIS: NEW ORLEANS continues its allegorical trip down “The River Styx,” also the name of tonight’s Part II episode. At the end of last week’s Part I, Pride (Scott Bakula) was on his knees living through the nightmare that has plagued him all season…his own death. In Greek mythology, the Styx is the river between Earth and the underworld, Hades. The underworld is guarded by Cerberus, a three-headed dog that prevents the dead from escaping Hades. The metaphor has not been lost on Dwayne. Since the surfacing of Walker and Apollyon, Pride has been barraged by dreams, visions and hallucinations of his own death, as if Cerberus, himself, is preventing Dwayne from escaping his spiral toward self-destruction.
Pride and Lasalle (Lucas Black) left NCIS: NEW ORLEANS for South Ossetia (part of the former Soviet Union) last week on a covert mission. Their off-book objective is to rescue Gregorio’s ex-boss, the FBI’s Raymond Isler (recurring guest star, Derek Webster) who was captured during a task force operation. Back in New Orleans, the NCIS team supports Pride and Lasalle from a distance and it works to locate the mole who is feeding information to Apollyon. Part I ended with Isler dying or dead in a boat and Pride’s nightmare evolving into reality…Avery Walker’s (recurring guest star Tim Griffin) gun pointed at his head and Dwayne’s destruction brought about by Apollyon (recurring guest star Amy Rutberg). Will Apollyon, named after the angel of destruction in Greek mythology, drag NCIS: NEW ORLEANS into the abyss, starting with Pride? Or will the river, like the Styx and the Greek goddess for which the river is named, rush to the aid of Zeus (aka Pride) and deliver him from destruction.
If Pride survives, will his tendency to act as if he is invulnerable, push him toward more reckless behavior? Perhaps Pride will heed the story of Achilles, who had been dipped in the River Styx as a baby to make him invulnerable. Unfortunately for Achilles, his mother held on to him by his heel during the dip, leaving that one spot vulnerable and ended up being his undoing. During the Trojan War, his enemy shot him in the heel with a poisonous arrow, killing the almost-immortal Achilles. The Greek poet, Homer, expounded the anger and pride of Achilles in his epic works, THE ILIAD and THE ODESSY. How’s that for a season metaphor? A man named Pride and a team that is his Achilles’s heel.
“The River Styx, Part II” was written by Christopher Silber and directed by James Whitmore, Jr. The season finale of NCIS: NEW ORLEANS airs tonight (May 14) at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on CBS in the U.S. and at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT on Global TV in Canada.
