The focus in this post is Ziva David. This post wil be somewhat jumbly as it´s exam season for me so bear with my ramblings and spelling mistakes.
Ziva is in my personal opinion, one of the more interesting characters on TV right now and is played wonderfully by Cote de Pablo (a great Chilean actress).
And she is the only Israeli, Jewish character on TV. She comes from a country that is completely different from America, has Hebrew as her native language, was shaped by her extraordinary circumstances growing up as the daughter of the director of Mossad and in war-torn Israel. Not to mention that her brother was a terrorist and she lost her sister and mother early on. And she was trained by Mossad and was in the Israeli military. She has some pretty advanced survival skills and tactics, is very beautiful and speaks a multitude of languages.
This makes her sound like a superwoman character and indeed, she could be pretty flat and uninteresting but somehow the NCIS folks managed to make her both lively and interesting. She has an intriguing past and I have always liked how the writers have woven her childhod and nationality into the shows. The characters has been shown speaking Hebrew several times which I love as it´s so refreshing to hear another language than English spoken. Her Jewish faith is regularly incorporated and they have been very succesful in displaying the complication of it. The character has been predjudiced because of her faith multiple times (one scene sticks out when was called a Nazi loving feminist). But there have also been times where the difference of her faith and the Muslim faith have come up and the difficulties of it are acknowledged and the Israeli sistuation (I will not disclose my opinion of Israel and Palestine).
When she first arrived at NCIS she didn´t adjust immediately and without trouble, but the clear opposite. She didn´t get on with Abby for a long time, had difficulty communicating with Gibbs and figuring out how to interact with McGee and DiNozzo. Her past played a part and it took a while for things to settle. And she had a notorious difficulty with figuring out English. In so many shows, it seems that a new character just adjusts to new things without any trouble at all when in the real world it is not so. I have always found it refreshing to they incorpoated Ziva´s difficulty in adjusting to NCIS into the show It seemed realistic and made me enjoy the character far more to see she wasn´t just some superwoman but that she was actually realistic and well nuanced.
I have always enjoyed Ziva as a character and still do now. She is very well executed, has had some wonderful storylines (the arch with her and Tony and her subsequent trip to Somalia is my firm favourite).
The way her character has developed throughout the season has been a treat to watch and is an example of good storytelling.
Next up for dissection is Tony.
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