Our favorite agents tackle a mysterious murder that may have an out-of-this-world explanation.
Did… didNCISjust drop a Top 10 episode of all time?
By the end of the encounter, hes dead.
Sean Murray, Brian Dietzen, Gary Cole, Katrina Law, and Wilmer Valderrama.Robert Voets/CBS
The lack of evidence on the scene confounds the team.
Okay, show of hands: who thinks its aliens?
Parker (Gary Cole) asks, prompting Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) to sheepishly raise his.
Does it count if I justhopeits aliens?
ApparentlyCocoonis Torres' favorite movie, which is way too old for that too-cool-for-school Millennial.
Lets pretend he saidMen in Black.
So do we have a UFO murder?
Actually, let me stop you right there.
First, the preferred term is UAP, as in unidentified aerial phenomenon, and second, maybe!
Greene just testified before Congress about a UAP encounter he had on a recent flight.
Ives says its believed to be a new Russian aircraft codenamed Pantheon.
I think they prefer aliens, Parker says.
Maybe they want to eat us, maybe they dont.
All those new organs.
All those new smells.
Silcotts a typically surly tech genius who says he and Greene were in the same UAP watch group.
Also, everybody in the UAP watch group hated the lieutenant.
Knight (Katrina Law) and McGee go undercover with Torres, surveilling from his car.
Knights a pretty unbelievable believer despite her I believe T-shirt, but McGee spins a darn good lost-time story.
In the end, though, its Torres who loses time.
Or, you know, White Out.
(Both Parker and I have so many questions about Torres relationship with his grandma and her tootsies.)
But hey, its a great clue!
Theres an abandoned correction fluid warehouse near the abduction site.
He was hired to do just that to Greene, but the transaction was anonymous.
Tracing Quinns text exchanges leads the team back to Silcott, who admits to hacking Greenes phone.
Im the one who built it, he says.
In the end, the AI was indistinguishable from the child himself.
But the company was actually a gray-market weapons developer that disappeared with the AI program.
He and Greene were about to go public when Greene was killed.
He asks the childlike AI about having bad dreams and suggests imagining that theyre hugging.
I know who you are, the AI says, and so do we.
Silcott had a seven-year-old son who died in a car crash.
He trained the AI on every last scrap of digital evidence that his son existed.
Then his virtual son was stolen and repurposed into a killing machine.
But shes interrupted when Parkers phone chimes with an unfamiliar ringtone.
Its the AI asking to talk to its father.
The AI is his son, and hes been protecting his son.
Thats what a father does, he says.
I cant lose you again.
A weeping Silcott unleashes the code and loses his son all over again.
How did the fun little alien episode leave me in tears?
I mean, how dare,NCIS?
The team is equally subdued, and theyre also a little unnerved.
We were barely ready for nukes and Instagram.
I dont know if were gonna be ready for whats coming next, Parker says.
And that wasbeforeKasie arrived in the big orange room to announce that she was wrong.
The lab never actually succeeded in making element 116, which means it truly doesnt exist… on Earth.
