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  • Anti-Climax Boss: After all of the damage he'd done to the Los Angeles division of the NCIS across multiple seasons, the moment the team get a bead on Ferris' location as he holds Kensi hostage, his cohorts are down in seconds and Deeks double-taps him in the skull right in the middle of his threat to harm Kensi. A similar problem happens to the rest of his allies, who fall for an extremely obvious Hetty trap and get blown up or shot for their stupidity once they finally reveal themselves and think they've got her at their mercy.
  • Arc Fatigue: Granger and Kensi's mission in Season 5, which just drags on and on and on. Of course, Daniela Ruah's pregnancy meant she would otherwise be written out for most of the season. Part of the problem is that this storyline is relegated to subplot status until Kensi gets captured by the Taliban.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Everything about Anna Kolcheck is divisive with the fanbase. Is she a sympathetic loner who, much like Callen, has problems integrating in society and needs to be coaxed to help others, or is she a manipulative sociopath who goes out of her way to purposefully screw over and manipulate the team? Is she a uninteresting character or an intriguing Anti-Hero? Is the romance between her and Callen believable and genuine or a case of Strangled by the Red String? To say it's very difficult to find a unanimous answer for these questions by the fanbase is an understatement.
  • Complete Monster: See here.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Fanfic Fuel: The RED team introduced during a Poorly Disguised Pilot (which was surprisingly not picked up for 2013-2014) in Season 4.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
    • In Portugal, most promotional materials and ads for the show focus near exclusively on Kensi (played by Portuguese actress Daniela Ruah) to the extent that you'd think she was the main character.
    • The above example is at least natural given that her nationality, but there is a weirder one with Henrietta in Spain. The series, which has a significant following in the country, is popularly known there as "the spy show with [insert colourful description of Linda Hunt]", and the ads often capitalize on it too.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Coupled with Irony: In one episode, Callen jokes that when Hetty dies, Granger will have her stuffed. Now that actor Miguel Ferrer has preceded everyone else to the Great Beyond...
    • Kensi comments to a terrorist suspect in Season 4 ("Chosen One") and that if she was being held by jihadists, her only right would be to have her head cut off. Come Season 5 ("Zero Day" and "Spoils of War"), she is indeed captured by the Taliban while on assignment in Afghanistan. As revealed by deleted scenes ("Spoils of War") that is exactly what her captors threatened to do.
    • Season Four "Wanted" sees Michelle Hanna (Sam's CIA operative wife) wearing headphones while cleaning the house, mistaking Sam for an intruder and nearly taking his head off. It's played for laughs about Sam being overprotective and not trusting she can take care of herself. Come Season Eight "Uncaged" she is kidnapped from her home for real and killed.
    • In "Crazy Train," Granger is revealed to be suffering from cancer from Agent Orange - this was less than three months before Granger's actor, Miguel Ferrer died from cancer. It gets worse: Ferrer died four days after Granger is stabbed in the back.
    • "Ninguna Salida" ends with the team ending up in a car accident after the cartel fires a missile below the car. Two months after the episode aired, Linda Hunt herself ended up in a car accident and got injured. Due to her recovery, she is absent for most of Season 10.
    • Kirkin's death in Season 12 gets even worse due to the death of his actor Ravil Isyanov on September 29, 2021.
  • Hate Sink:
    • There is next to no redeeming qualities about Undersecretary of Defense Duggan. Between his Smug Snake attitude, his constant condescending attitude towards Granger and Hetty and actively working to undermine them on every possible occasion (Even after he becomes aware they are not the moles), he spends almost all of his screentime being an unrepentant obstacle to NCIS. Needless to say, not many people were saddened when he was sniped and killed by one of the moles.
    • Same with Kensi's stalker David Kessler, who is nothing more than a cheap Hannibal Lecter wannabe. Fans are desperately waiting for the team to bite back and give him a very painful and well-deserved Humiliation Conga and are begging to stop torturing them with his screen prescence.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Everyone's mockery of the idea of Nate in the field. Considering how awesome he is in the field now ...
    • "Purity" (Season 4, Episode 21) establishes that Kensi is....ambivalent at best about children and spends most of the episodes taking crap from her team members about it. Roughly a month later her actress announced she was pregnant.
    • Deeks talking in gratuitous Japanese in a NCIS Op to arrest a Japanese national is funny when you realize Eric Christian Olsen did study Japanese while in university.
      • In "Lost Hair Down", Deeks suggests to the team that he's planning to put a Zen garden and a Japanese tea house.
  • Ho Yay: Of the Buddy Cop variety.
    Hanna: I really look forward to having Dom as a partner.
    Callen: You'd miss me. I complete you.
    • This immediately after Callen asking Hanna if he had a history with their suspect, and Hanna responding with "We weren't dating, if that's what you're asking."
    • Kensi once asked Hanna how long he and Callen had been married. At what point does it stop being subtext?
      • Probably one episode before that when Hetty suggests Callen take out the attractive treasury agent, and then take Sam out the next night so he "doesn't get jealous."
    • Guest characters have also asked how long Callen and Sam have been a couple. When total strangers have them pegged like that...
    • The Ho Yay between Sam and Callen has just been increasing over the past few seasons... or at least, the implications on Callen's side have, culminating in the 4th season finale, where The Chameleon singles out Sam as his target to hurt Callen with, going so far as to refer to him as Callens "beloved partner".
  • Informed Wrongness: Kensi loses her temper hard with Deeks after she's taken hostage at gunpoint and Deeks refuses to take a risky shot that might endanger her. It's to the point that it actually puts their relationship on rocky enough grounds to really hinder the Will They or Won't They? status, and it's all to set up a Call-Back payoff at the end of the arc when he doesn't hesitate the second time around. Except police officers are trained to not shoot in situations like these, and Deeks is still very much LAPD whereas even this NCIS branch are still effectively Navy police. It ends up making Kensi look like she's throwing a gung-ho, relationship-ruining tantrum over a perceived slight that Deeks doesn't care that much for her when his care is why he hesitated in the first place, and especially compared to caring very much when he domes Ferris with a Double Tap when he has a buzzsaw to Kensi's neck. Incidentally, a similar problem would occur years later with the parent series.
  • Iron Woobie: Hard not to see Callen as this after everything he's gone through.
  • Moe: Both Kensi and Nell have shades of this.
  • Moral Event Horizon: The CIA squad over the course of the entire "mole" arc that took multiple seasons to resolve. Their response to their operations in Afghanistan being messed with by the NCIS Los Angeles team? Quietly infiltrate their region, make it look like multiple moles are running amok to drag their name through the mud in the eyes of the government, and doing everything within their power to Frame-Up each operative and Hetty while using Duggan and local authorities as well as multiple terrorist organizations to try to undermine and even get them killed. They even put Ferris in charge of the operation knowing his murderous grudge. There's Interservice Rivalry and there's being so maliciously petty that going rogue and committing some of the worst treason in the entire franchise is apparently fair game; the fact that all but one of them ends up killed with absolutely no sympathetic traits only highlights just how far they crossed the line.
  • Narm:
    • One recurring trend throughout the series that's carried over from the parent show is the Complexity Addiction of certain antagonists trying to do horrible things through ridiculous and elaborate means, albeit with the more action-focused pacing of Los Angeles it tends to become just that more ridiculous. Such as the antagonist in the Hawaii Five-0 crossover deciding that they'll create a lethal pandemic across the world, by targeting a multinational school event through lacing event t-shirts with smallpox.
    • In the newer opening for Season 10, a bunch of out-of-context clips are used to highlight the cast as per usual - up until Kensi peers through a rifle scope, showing Deeks just randomly smirking and pointing at something off-camera in an awkward attempt to tie two random scenes together for their shared highlight.
    • "Superhuman" deals with a super combat armored suit being The Juggernaut, to the point that after plenty of sustained fire from even rifles, Sam only drops it and the user through mag-dumping his handgun into the neck at point-blank. Despite it being a simple bodysuit, an "armored" gauntlet that makes stock mechanical sounds to portray its Super-Strength, a thick sleeveless combat vest and a motorcross helmet with a light attached. It looks and acts so impractically that it undermines the badass credentials of the heroes for failing to overcome it until the last minute.
  • Narm Charm: In general, the series is a touch more Denser and Wackier with some of its plots than the parent series ever was, as not only does it have Deeks and a particularly dorky support team, but it deals with elaborate terrorist schemes and spymaster conflicts that put the police procedural elements of the original to shame. And yet it's part of the series charm that has kept it going longer than NCIS: New Orleans, and when it gets serious, it really gets dark.
  • Nightmare Fuel: At the end of "Under Siege," Sullivan prepares to cut off Kensi's legs as revenge for shooting him in the leg, and you hear Kensi screaming for him to stop as he revs up his saw, but nothing is seen.
  • Older Than They Think: The motive and method of the Big Bad in the Hawaii Five-0/NCIS: Los Angeles crossover was to save the planet by killing off much of humanity with an engineered plague. Tom Clancy had the same plot in the book and video game Rainbow Six... and engineered plagues pre-date that by over 20 years.
  • One-Scene Wonder: DEA Agent Panuelos from "Black Budget." He owns his two minutes of screen time.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Henrietta in the earlier seasons was not particularly popular for a variety of reasons, such as purposefully withholding information from the team that could help their case and manipulating the team on multiple counts for her own agenda. However, in the laters seasons showing several of her Badass and Chessmaster abilities while also showing that she truly does care for her team and everything she does is for the greater good, she has gained a lot of love from the fans.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Granger's replacement Mosley, big time. The events of the ninth season finale did not help: She, in an effort to find her son, breaks protocol and tortures a man, implicates the whole team in a host of crimes, fires Deeks for questioning her, and threatens Hetty. This results in Callen, Sam, Kensi and Deeks getting hit with a rocket that nearly kills them, the team and herself all packing hits on their head from the Mexican cartel, and Hidoko being given a Cruel and Unusual Death unceremoniously.
  • Special Effects Failure: While the practical effects of the show are incredibly impressive, the CGI effects leave much to be desired. Justified in that it is a TV show, not a movie and thus only has a small CGI budget.
  • Ship Tease: G and Anna, courtesy of Sam who wants to get them together in anything to see Arkady's reaction.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Harley Hidoko. Introduced as the right-hand woman of Shay Mosely, who clearly has an agenda that involves disbanding the OSP. Hidoko seems like she's willing to help Mosely do just that, but then she starts developing a relationship with the team. In particular, Sam, as they're Birds of a Feather who know what it's like to lose a spouse. So, if Mosely were to put her plan into action, would Hidoko still go through with it, or would her newfound bond with the team lead to a change of heart? Also, should the team find out about this, how would they then feel about Hidoko? Would they see her as the enemy, or acknowledge her dilemma? And would she and Sam have a shot at being together? As it turns out, none of the above, as she gets burned to death in Mexico.
  • The Woobie: Deeks in the Season 2 premiere.
    • Actually, make that Deeks full stop- he has a tendency to look so utterly broken and exhausted even when he's still going that it's almost like he's got a giant flashing neon sign around his neck that says 'I'm A Woobie'.
    • Then Deeks gets tortured. Jesus.
    • Callen, whenever stuff about his family comes up.
    • Sam, thanks to his wife's death.
    • Kensi, due the fact that she is struggling with getting pregnant and her stalker Kessler is after her. You can't help but want to give this poor girl a hug for what she is going through.

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