"Stolen Valor" is an episode of NCIS: Hawaiʻi that first aired on October 3, 2022. Written by Amy Rutberg. Directed by Tim Andrew.
Foreign national Vessela Toska (Olivia Jordan) backs out of her assignment to impersonate U. S. Navy Lt. Commander Audrey Garrett (Kate Miner), a supply officer stationed in Hawai'i responsible for stocking Navy ships that come to port.
Garrett's impostor dies in a suspicious car accident soon after sending a text message that she doesn't want to continue posing as Garrett.
NCIS Agent Lucy Tara and FBI Agent Kate Whistler are sparring at the gym when Tara gets the call to go investigate Garrett's death. The team quickly find that the deceased is not Garrett.
Agent Tennant and Agent Holman go interview the real Lt. Commander Garrett, who is not only alive but also pregnant. Since Garrett's been on maternity leave, someone stole her identity and used it to order some specialized medical equipment.
But now that the impostor is dead, there seems to be no way to figure out why Toska was impersonating Garrett in the first place. Unless... the team can find someone else to impersonate Garrett.
So Whistler goes undercover as a down-on-her-luck Canadian immigrant to the Happy Housekeepers office, where she convinces Lydia Petrov (Kathy Searle) to give her a job as a cleaning lady.
After a couple of days cleaning houses, Whistler is given the assignment of impersonating Garrett. It turns out that Bulgarian terrorists wanted to steal Cs-137, a radioactive isotope of cesium, out of a special medical machine in order to use it in a dirty bomb. Lydia Petrov is not the leader of the operation, Malkie (Oksana Platero) is.
The terrorists almost succeed, except Whistler's on the case and the NCIS team are not far behind.
Tropes
- Artistic License – Cars: Soon after communicating her refusal to continue impersonating Garrett, Toska finds herself unable to apply the brakes on her car. The brakes must have been disabled remotely by a computer hacker. In the dialogue it is said that this can be done with vehicles built after 2016. But the car Toska was driving is a 2011 Honda CR-V.
- Bait-and-Switch Accusation: Whistler goes undercover to infiltrate a Bulgarian theft ring by going to a job interview. The following day, she meets an angry Ms. Petrov and her goons in the storage room, the latter accusing her of lying. We're lead to believe that her cover has been blown, but it remains intact. The lie is one of omission, where Whistler's cover identity failed to disclose felony convictions.
- Balkan Bastard: The Bulgarian ring is full of them. Ms. Petrov is the only one to avert it, and Malkie is a gender inversion, given that she is the ringleader. She orchestrated the theft of cesium-137 in order to sell it to Eastern European seperatists.
- Continuity Nod to 'The Game': Agent Whistler won't be playing poker in her undercover assignment. That's a reference to Agent Tara going undercover as a Texas debutante to a secret high stakes poker game in that earlier episode.
- Full-Name Ultimatum: Played with, in that she's not in trouble, but Lucy is training Kate in hand-to-hand combat, the former who addresses the latter as Katherine Marie Whistler, telling her to stop holding back just because they're a couple.
- In the Back: While onboard a larger boat, Malkie shoots Ms. Petrov after the latter realizes their boat skid past them.
- Janitor Impersonation Infiltration: The Bulgarians disguise themselves as housekeepers, uniforms and everything, to infiltrate the homes of unsuspecting people, many of whom are privy to matters of national security.
- Shout-Out to Cinderella: Malkie's nickname for Whistler.
- Spies In a Van: Boone, Holman and Tara monitor Whistler undercover from a van parked nearby.
- Spotting the Thread: Inside the crashed car, Holman notices something's off about the woman's uniform. For all her effort to impersonate Lt. Commander Garrett, carefully aligning the ribbons and putting on the correct shoulder boards for a lieutenant commander, Vessela Toska neglected to put on the correct uniform cover (hat). Toska had in her car a cover with a single anchor emblem, which is the correct emblem for senior enlisted, e.g., a chief petty officer. But commissioned officers like Garrett wear a cover with a more elaborate emblem: an eagle perched on a shield in front of two crossed anchors. Toska even had a reference photo of the real Garrett wearing a cover with the correct emblem. Whoever stole Garrett's identification card and military medals neglected to also steal one of Garrett's covers, so instead they had to buy one, and they bought the wrong one.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Poor Ms. Petrov gets this treatment, courtesy of Malkie.
