SEAL Team - Boarding Party

The SEAL Team is called into action when a research tanker is hijacked in the South Chinese Seas. By the time the team is able to mobilize the pirates have taken the ship to the Philippines where they plan to sell the hostages. Despite getting into a firefight with the pirates' unexpected back-up, the team is able to retrieve the hostages and make it out without any casualties. As we've seen in previous episodes, the highlights of the episode all come from the mission (both planning and execution) while the B-stories continue to suffer in comparison. The return from the mission does offer a nice moment between Davis (Toni Trucks) and Ellis (Jessica Paré) and explain why the CIA agent purposefully remains detached from the unit as much as she can given the situations she's forced to place them in, sometimes with limited intelligence. Sadly we get less of Paré this episode and more of the soap-opera home-front misadventures.

Other plot threads of "Boarding Party" involve Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz) doing some investigating when he's ex-wife finds a burner phone in their dead friend's toolbox and suspects he may have been cheating on this wife in the week's leading up to his death. Despite knowing that little good could come from delving into the situation, no matter what the truth ultimately turns out to be, Hayes decides to poke around anyway. We also get more of SEAL wannabe Clay Spencer (Max Thieriot) who is more dickish than usual, even to his small circle of friends, after he gets put on the short-list of those likely to wash-out of the program before earning and assignment. Other than filling airtime, neither storyline does much to add to the story.