Warning: SPOILERS ahead for NCIS: Hawai’i season 3, episode 7!
NCIS: Hawai’i director Daniela Ruah has explained a major twist regarding Jane Tennant that happened during the latest episode of the crime procedural. During the episode, Tennant is injured and takes refuge in a cabin, only to meet a mysterious woman who discusses the episode’s case with her using details she shouldn’t know. Suddenly, she wakes up, realizing no one was there at all, and the woman she was speaking to was her mother, looking the same as she did when she left her as a child.
Speaking with TV Insider, Ruah explained the purpose behind Tennant’s visions of her mother in the latest episode of NCIS: Hawai’i season 3. The director explained how the vision of her mother reflected the inner thoughts the agent had about her past, while also revealing what it was like keeping the woman’s identity a secret throughout the episode. Check out what Ruah had to say below:
We even made the choice, for example, that world when she goes into the cabin, that’s her perception of the world, and she hasn’t seen herself in the mirror. So if you’ll notice, she doesn’t even have a cut on her head. But then when we come out and see that she’s alone in the cabin, she does have a cut on her head because that’s the reality and she can’t see herself, so therefore she doesn’t see the blood. Therefore it’s not there in her world that she’s creating in that moment.
It was a fine line between tipping your hand too soon and making it so weird that the audience would be like, ‘This doesn’t seem right. This is probably a flashback, or this is probably something in our head.’ So we had to be careful to shoot it as normally as possible without tipping our hand. But then the way that the scenes were written, there’s this amazing crescendo of weirdness. It just gets weirder and weirder every time we go back to the cabin, and it just allowed for me to do something different, especially when Mom is starting to really question her about the guy in the woods, and she’s like, ‘How do you know about the guy in the woods? How is that even something you know about?’ And I had them speak into camera so that it’s just that she’s really speaking into her soul.
It’s really, really important, the sense of, maybe her mother saw her as a bother, and so that’s how she perceived this woman who opens the door and she’s like, ‘I don’t want you here. I want you to leave.’ “Because maybe that’s the sensation she feels of why maybe her mother left, ‘Was I a bother to my mother?’ Whether those things are true or not for that character, those are the things that we had to discuss. The showrunners are still are exploring this journey for Jane Tennant, so there aren’t a whole lot of concrete answers. So I just had to figure out what made sense for this episode and leave enough open that they can keep building on it.
More to come…
Source: TV Insider
