#and just Adam gibbs talking lol

[haikyuustuffs]

THE HAIKYUU S4 BOX SET IS SO PRETTY 😭

Counting down the seconds until I can go back home, crawl in bed and watch the dub until I pass out...which will probably be 1 ep in cuz your pal Ash only got 2 hours of sleep lol)

EDIT: I am now realizing there are some fallacies in this plan. I do not, in fact, have a Blu-ray player in my room.

[pro-bee]

While we’re on the subject of “Family First” (lol were we?), watching it now for the first time since “She”/”Daughters”/Season 17, with part of the pain dulled knowing that the ship was righted, as it were, and that everyone is now safe and sound and together at last--

What is really striking, when you unpack the unbearable grief of it all, is just how palpable Tony’s love of Ziva is throughout the whole episode. 

From the moment in the previous episode that they figure out that Ziva is on Jacob Scott’s hit list, to the last scene in FF where Tony makes his exit forever, you see just how unbreakable that bond is.

At this point in the series, he hasn’t talked to Ziva in almost three years, has had no indication from her that she wants any contact, has ostensibly tried to “move on” for his own sake (even though it took him actual years to get to that point). But the second he realizes Ziva is in danger, he’s vaulted right back into her orbit. The guy who’s gone to the ends of the earth for her (twice) rears his head, and nothing is going to get in his way. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t heard from her in years, could believe she wants nothing to do with him, could be protected by people closer to home. When he knows she might be in trouble, he’s the wild card.

[cut because this got waaaaay long]

And it’s even more revealing, because this isn’t like season 10, where they had a rift over Adam, but were still forced to be together and deal with their shit, as ugly as it was. So even if he was angry with her, it was still easy to tell Parsons that Ziva was his best friend and he would protect her at all costs, even when she hurt him. By season 13, they really may as well have been on different planets. We know he loved her, loves her, will always love her, but he’d resigned himself to the fact that she was gone and wasn’t coming back, and he was going to have to figure out a way to live without her. He wasn’t happy about it, and wasn’t doing a good job about it because even when he tried dating again, it was obvious how goddamn lonely he was. He didn’t make sense without her. And while he was trying his best to grow as a person and help himself heal, which was admirable, he was on his way to living with a wounded heart for the rest of his life. 

But then they see her name on that screen, and it’s like no time has passed, and they’re back on a mission to save her from the boogeyman yet again. Then Trent Kort comes in and pushes all the right buttons with the “girlfriend” crack, because he knows them, too, and again, it’s like we’ve been launched back into season 9-10, even without her physically there. 

It’s everything. From the way he goes after Kort in the bullpen (and no one tries to stop him) when he thinks he’s willfully putting Ziva’s life in danger (I mean, good call, Tony), to the way the pin drops at the end of “Dead Letter” when he sees the news about the fire at her farmhouse on TV and you see his vision tunnelling. From the way he says, “If that’s Ziva, I’ve gotta go” like nothing else exists in that moment, to the way Gibbs is already ahead of them and pushing him to go, and McGee already has his plane ticket ready for him because they know there isn’t a force in the world that’s going to stop Tony from going after Ziva. How he’s antsy at the apartment, packing for a trip that must feel way too familiar like he’s been thrown back three years, but can’t shake the feeling that she’s still out there, somewhere, because she always is. And when McGee and Abby break the news to him that she’s gone, his whole world shatters. And not in the big, dramatic breakdown (which comes next), but in the absolute shock that takes over his body that his worst nightmare is coming true.

Of course, there’s the “All hands on deck” scene, which wrecked us all, and is still probably one of the best moments of acting of Michael Weatherly’s career. (I go back and forth of my favourite moment of his being that scene or the orchard scene in PPF.) It’s not just the visceral pain of it all, the anger and the anguish. It’s that it’s so, so raw and primordial. Tony is running on pure id, all emotion and no rational thought at that moment. He’s drowning and he doesn’t want to come up; he wants to go down and be swallowed whole. You can see the absolute fear all over his face and in his whole body. This is his worst nightmare, has always been his worst nightmare since she came into his life. Somewhere you have to think that in the last three years, part of him has always worried that something would happen to her and he wouldn’t be there to help, or even worse, wouldn’t know about it until it was too late, and that has finally come to pass.

Tony isn’t a guy who loses control very often; he acts like a playboy or a class clown, but even that is often an act to hide who he really is. He keeps his emotions tightly wound, which is why the brief flashes we get occasionally (for instance, when he calls Ziva out on Adam) hit so hard, because he doesn’t usually get his feelings get the best of him, good or bad. But this scene throws that all out the window; Ziva is the one thing that makes him lose control, makes him follow his heart instead of lock it up tight. And the idea that she is gone forever unleashes every one of those feelings he’s repressed his entire life into the abyss. 

It’s in the way he slams his fists on his desk because he hurts and it’s in his warpath. it’s the way his eyes are absolutely wild like they’ve never been, unfocused and unhinged. It’s the way he will yell at anyone in the vicinity because every ounce of pain is begging to escape from his chest. It’s the way his voice hitches when he gets brought back down to earth, because the anguish constantly wrestles with the anger. And this time, I noticed that once Senior shows up and tells him to come home to catch his bearings, just for one night, he subtly shakes his head, almost like a child, because he cannot, absolutely cannot, believe what he is hearing. And going home, alone, is only going to bring it home that this is very, very real. It’s masterful. (Makes me wish MW had gotten more meat like this during his tenure on the show, because boy, can he bring it, when given the chance.)

Then, of course, there’s the Tali reveal, which is a while other post -- it’s bullshit and we all know it, but it happened and all’s well that ends well, now -- and again, we get all these subtle glimpses into their relationship, even through other people. The way nobody doubts that if Ziva had a daughter it could be anyone’s but Tony’s, because, of course they would have a baby. And it may be three years, but Tony knows Ziva and he knows that whatever they had, it was real, which is why he doesn’t doubt for a second that Tali is his. (I resent the fact that I have to write this sentence out because IT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN THIS WAY SHOW but it is what it is) It’s been years, and if he’s moved on then maybe she has too, but he realizes how old she is and how the dates line up and he knows how Tali came to be. They may be fucked up, but they had something that summer and that fall and it was theirs alone.

There’s only a slight tinge of anger when he finds out; I’m sure there was a lot more of it later on, when the dust settled and the shock wore off. But his first reaction isn’t to lash out: his first reaction is to embrace Tali and devote himself to her wholeheartedly. (The first scene of them together after he introduction is the two of them playing like they’ve known each other her whole life. They could have played up the awkward new dad route until the photo scene, but instead kid-phobic Tony instantly bonded with Tali.) Even if Tali weren’t his, she was absolutely Ziva’s, and that alone would have been enough for him to love her and want to protect her. The fact that she was theirs, that made them two halves of a whole.

From that moment on, Tony no longer keeps his Ziva feelings inside anymore. To be fair, he’d actually been pretty open about them ever since he came back from Israel in season 11, from his discussion with Gibbs about feeling like he made the wrong choice coming back (only it wasn’t him who made the choice), to the one with Abby about missing Ziva but needing to move on, to every little moment in between where he refers to his healing and his terrible year without her and how he feels restless (the subtext meaning, without her). But whatever tenuous lock was on his Ziva-fault, her loss breaks it open, and every feeling bubbles to the surface. 

We see the unbearable grief at her death (or, “death” -- THANK YOU SEASON 16), absolutely played like that of a lover and not just a friend. (See the different reactions of McGee or Jimmy or Ducky or Abby, compared to Tony’s.) The shock and betrayal of finding out he’s a father and had no chance to be one, but still seeing the importance of stepping up and almost relief because at least he still has part of her to hold onto. The way he smells her scarf, an act of such intimacy you almost feel like a voyeur watching him breathe her in. The way he slowly comes to terms with it when he’s with McGee -- the reality setting in and the doubts creeping in about why Ziva kept Tali from him, how maybe she didn’t fully trust him, but that doesn’t matter, because he loved her. Goddamn, did he love her. McGee may be shocked about what Tony and Ziva were getting up to after hours, but one thing he does know is that they absolutely loved each other.

We see it in how tender he is with Tali; Tony is a good man and would do right by any orphaned child who needed protection in a scary time, but knowing Tali is his daughter and Ziva’s daughter makes her the most precious thing in the world to him from the get-go. From the moment he meets her, you can see that he vows to take care of her the way Ziva would have wanted. Because he loves her and while he just met Tali, he knows instantly that he loves her, too. And loving Tali is how her can honour his love of Ziva.

I absolutely hate the scene where they take down Trent Kort. I will always hate it. I may hate Trent Kort, but I hate unnecessary use of force even more, and always have, and this has always been a scene that horrifies me. That being said, the important part of it is when he declares that “[ZIva] was my family.” It’s important that he says it to Kort, because Kort has always needled both he and Ziva about their relationship since his first appearance, and he used that against Tony in the previous episode. He needed Kort to see just what he destroyed by (supposedly) killing her, that this was not at all a professional beef that was about to go down, but absolutely a personal one. 

And it’s finally an admission of what he and Ziva were to each other. They weren’t just colleagues, or partners, or even friends (although they were all of those things and they were all important). They were family; they became intertwined in a way that made them inextricable from each other. Season 10 showed us this in spades, and “PPF,” while a punch in the gut, was basically an hour-long tribute to it. (As much as I hate how Ziva left, the orchard scene and the tarmac scene are two of the most beautiful scenes of their relationship. They are acts of devotion.) They were everything to each other, and all Tali did was become a representation of it. Becoming parents didn’t make them a family, it only entrenched it. They were each other’s family long before that. By the time Abby implores him to understand, he’s realized that in his own way, he did know. It just got lost for awhile.

In a way, “Family First” is a bookend to “Past, Present and Future,” albeit not necessarily in the way want. In PPF, Tony was so desperate to commit to Ziva, to make a home with her and love her the way he knew was ready for, to make a life with her, but she wasn’t ready, and that was the tragedy of it all. In FF, he does finally get to make that commitment to her, by way of Tali. Like he tells Gibbs, he’s now everything to her, and by doing so he’s finally everything to Ziva, too. It’s all backwards, of course, but Tali is everything he wanted in that orchard: she is their family. All those moments where he doubted whether he made the right choice, whether he should go back and ask Ziva to give them another chance, if staying would have made them happier-- ultimately, Tali makes that choice for them, and he does go back to find their home. It’s not in the way he, or any of us, wanted, but she is his answer. And he knows how much Ziva loved Tali, and that must tell him that somewhere, she loved him, too. And while the weight of his grief must press on him like a boulder, another weight that had been on his shoulders since PPF lifts, because he knows, finally, that he is loved.

Of course, the infuriating thing is that it took MW’s exit for the show to finally acknowledge it. And it took them killing off Ziva for them to get ready to show it. I can’t help but think how much the show would have benefitted if they’d leaned into these feelings and developments years earlier, how much richer the story would have been, how many amazing performances we could have witnessed, when every dangerous situation would have even deeper layers by virtue of the added weight of Ziva and Tony’s love for each other. I’m not talking about them making out all the time (although I wouldn’t say no ngl), but every dangerous situation, every life-threatening mission, every near-miss or serious injury to unfold-- we could have gotten some grade-A performances from these actors. Imagine even a fraction of MW’s range in the “all hands on deck” scene in a situation where Ziva’s life is threatened? Imagine Ziva’s barely-contained rage if someone harmed Tony? Imagine episode codas where we get those quiet moments of love as an antidote to whatever horror happened in the case, how much the characters could expand from acknowledging the love and support they have, instead of dancing around the word?

So, in conclusion, it sucks that this is how we had to see it, but if they had to make MW’s final episode all about Ziva, I’m glad they at least acknowledged the elephant in the room, which was that Tony was hopelessly in love with Ziva and had been for ages, even when they were oceans apart. We saw the beginning of it in PPF where he begged her to come home, where she told him he was loved-- but finally we saw the words out of his mouth, not that we needed them. But what I’m saying is that the show finally let Tony say those words out loud, voice the emotions he was feeling and lay them out in the open for everyone to see. 

Luckily, now, we can watch the episode through a different lens. It still hurts, because this was not the way it should have been. There was no way Ziva should have been pregnant and alone and raised Tony’s child without him for nearly three years, and there was no way Tony should have been deprived of that and only found out after she died. But now we know that the show basically wrote its own fix-it fic on itself to try to salvage some of this story, and I’m grateful. None of this is the way we wanted it, but on the other hand, they could have let it be. They could have doubled-down on it and made her really, really dead and have Tony move on without her. Instead, it’s canon that they love each other and are finally together for their happy ever after, so I’ll take what I can get.

Because Tony really loves Ziva, and Ziva really loves Tony, and that is the thread that holds this whole thing together.

[camelely]

i did figure that sarah was up to no good but since i never registered her name was sarah i didnt guess she was sahar until the scene with adam when I assumed it would be her without knowing the name lol gotta pay more attention to the names. I wish they had introduced more then one character into gibbs’s life so when adam looked at him and said you know her he would have more than one person to think of. I also wish the sink scene with the cut was in a different episode to the flashback to him noticing her cut would play better

I guessed ziva was going to try and use the pole again since they talked about it so many times marked it with the word North and called the episode the north pole. I was pleasantly surprised when chekhov's gun didnt go off as expected. Although with them mentioning Ari’s name every five seconds and how ziva killed him i did guess that gibbs would return in favor in the same way. But just because it was obvious doesnt mean it wasnt a well shot and well acted scene.

The episode did felt kinda weird and I thought it has a few pacing issues that I hope they fix soon since the stories are pretty interesting