NCIS / Tropes A to M

NCIS contains examples of:

Tropes A-M | Tropes N-Z

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A-E

• Abandoned War Child: Played with in the Christmas Episode "Newborn King": the soldier is the single mother, a Marine who was impregnated by an Afghan tribal prince she fell in love with on deployment, who was later killed by the Taliban. This makes her child potentially the heir to the tribe, which sends mercenaries to kidnap her.
• Absence of Evidence: In Season Five's "Stakeout", Gibbs has Nikki Jardine check with her international contacts for chatter about the stolen radar system. She reports a big fat nada, but says that in itself is significant:
  Jardine: If top-secret electronics were out there for sale, or in the hands of a foreign operative, we would have picked up something by now. I think the silence speaks volumes.
  Gibbs: What's it saying?
• Abusive Parents: Eli David is basically an Affably Evil sociopath.
• Accidental Murder: One of the twin cases of "Alleged" is a sailor who died from a head wound. The team thought he had been attacked by a Serial Rapist due to offensive and defensive wounds onto his corpse because he reported that a female co-worker had been raped by an unknown assailant. They eventually figure out that the two cases are unrelated; the sailor was accidentally shoved head-first into a misplaced dumpster while being tossed out of a bar for being drunk and disorderly, and his skull happened to hit a delicate spot that happened to cause fatal internal hemmoraging. That being said, Team Gibbs probably wouldn't have gotten involved with the rapist case if that didn't happen.
• Action Girl: First Kate, a former Secret Service agent in the presidential protection detail, then Ziva, whose background with the Mossad was as a spy and an assassin rather than as an investigator.
• Action Mom: Dorneget's mother is a CIA officer. We get a hint of how action-y when she finds one of the people responsible for her son's death.
• Action Insurance Gag: Played for Drama in Season Ten's "Berlin" when Tony gets a car totaled by the Arc Villain. In the next episode, "Revenge", he's on the phone with his insurance agent, who informs him that, since this is the third car it's happened to, the company is considering dropping him as a client.
• Actor Allusion:
  • The shot of an aircraft carrier passing beneath a bridge that was used in early seasons' opening credits is from The Presidio, a film Mark Harmon starred in.
  • In "The Meat Puzzle", Kate asks Gibbs what Ducky looked like when he was younger. He responds, "Illya Kuryakin", who was David McCallum's character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. 40 years earlier. Later proven true in a Ducky flashback in season 12 where Adam Campbell as young Ducky is a dead ringer for McCallum during that era. Young Ducky even had Illya Kuryakin's turtleneck shirts!
    • In the penultimate episode of season 20, "Kompromat", Ducky informs the team of an old Russian spy who defected to the US and changed his name. He retained his first name, but the surname he chose? Kuryakin.
  • Gibbs once asked Tony for help with the Crossword Puzzle clue "TV Drama" and Tony answers "St. Elsewhere," which Mark Harmon appeared on.
  • Multiple references to Michael Weatherly's previous role as Logan Cale on Dark Angel:
    • In the Season Three episode "Light Sleeper" while on stakeout, Tony is reading an entertainment magazine:
      Tony: Damn, I can't believe this... Mick and Jessica broke up, I'm always the last to know.
      Gibbs: (over radio) Hey, DiNozzo... shut up!
      Tony: Shutting up, Boss.
    • Weatherly co-starred with Jessica Alba in Dark Angel, where their characters kept trying to hook up. In Real Life, they were briefly engaged, but their engagement was broken shortly before this episode was filmed.
    • Later, in "Hiatus: Part 1", Tony says "I've got a better chance of hooking up with Jessica Alba than these guys do of infiltrating Sea Lift."
    • In the episode "Obsession", Tony obsesses over a missing journalist who embodies all of what he finds attractive in a woman. When calling her on her cell phone, he says: "It would seem strange, but I feel like I know you". It's not so strange, though: the journalist is played by Ashley Scott, who also played underground operative and potential secondary love interest Asha Barlow in Dark Angel.
    • In Season Eleven's "Bulletproof", while Tony and Delilah are discussing cool film and TV characters in wheelchairs: Delilah mentions Logan Cale.
  • Harmon's turn as Serial Killer Ted Bundy in the TV movie The Deliberate Stranger is referenced by Fornell in "Smoked":
    Fornell: I was on the team that nailed Bundy, Gibbs. And I'm familiar with sick, charming bastards.
    Gibbs: That's probably why we get along so well.
    • Other references to the Bundy role include the episode where Gibbs kept getting mistaken calls about a Volkswagen Bug for sale. This was Bundy's preferred car.
  • In the Season Eight two-parter "Enemies Foreign" and "Enemies Domestic" (also the name of an episode of The West Wing in which Harmon appeared) Tony makes a reference to The West Wing by calling McGee "McBartlet". Both Mark Harmon and Michael O'Neill (who guest stars in these episodes) played Secret Service agents on the show.
  • A combination of Actor Allusion and Shout-Out: Tony (Michael Weatherly)'s father is played by Robert Wagner. Weatherly met NCIS producer Donald Bellisario while Weatherly was filming The Mystery of Natalie Wood, in which he played Wood's husband... Robert Wagner.
  • A retroactive one: In Season Seven's "The Inside Man", a Metro detective who annoys Gibbs is described as having "tugged on Superman's cape".
  • In the Season 9 episode "Newborn King", Jimmy Palmer, when explaining that his future father-in-law, Ed Slater, is visiting the NCIS building, he mentions that the first time he learned that Palmer was marrying his daughter, "[Ed Slater] laughed, and then he cried from laughing too hard". Ed Slater is played by Larry Miller, who himself used the phrase "I laughed, I cried" during his first Is This Thing Still On? moment as Principal Jindrake in the movie Max Keeble's Big Move.
  • In Season Five's "Recoil", Nick Chinlund guest-starred as a detective hunting a Serial Killer who murdered women and cut off their fingers. Sixteen years earlier, he played Donnie Pfaster on The X-Files - as a serial killer who murdered women and kept their fingers.
  • Ziva's codename in "Blowback" is 'Dark Angel'.
  • Season Nine introduces Dr. Samantha Ryan (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) as a psychologist and love interest for Gibbs. This is a reference to Freaky Friday in which she played a psychologist, frustrated with the fact that her unruly teenage daughter refuses to accept her fiance - named Ryan, played by Mark Harmon.
  • In Season 6's "Dead Reckoning", Vance says he would have handled the situation differently than Gibbs, "but in the last two minutes you've gotta let your quarterback call the plays." In real life, Mark Harmon was a starting quarterback for UCLA.
    • Later, in the Poorly Disguised Pilot for NCIS: New Orleans, "Crescent City: Part 1" the New Orleans ME asks Gibbs if he knows anything about college football. He says no.
  • Throughout her time on the show, Jenny and Gibbs frequently flashbacked to their romance. Mark Harmon (Gibbs) and Lauren Holly (Jenny) starred together on Chicago Hope, where their characters had a similar relationship.
  • When SECNAV Jarvis is introduced in Season Eight's finale "Pyramid", it's quickly established that he and Vance are old friends. Matt Craven and Rocky Carroll both played officers on the U.S.S. Alabama in Crimson Tide.
  • In Season 11's "Homesick", Ben Vereen guest-stars as the estranged father of Vance's late wife, who has come back trying to make amends for abandoning her and her mother when she was young.
  • It is established in Season 13's "Sister City: Part 1" that Gibbs knows American sign language, as did Mark Harmon's character in the early 90's TV show Reasonable Doubts.
  • In Season 13's "Loose Cannons", it's mentioned that McGee is a Navy brat who lived in Japan for a while. One of Sean Murray's earliest roles was a US Navy Ensign stationed in Japan in JAG.
  • The Season 13 episode "Reasonable Doubts" shares its name with that of an early 90's TV show Mark Harmon starred in.
  • In Season 18, Fornell mistakenly addresses reporter Marcie Warren as "Mindy". Marcie is played by Pam Dawber, Mark Harmon's wife, who played the second title role on Mork & Mindy.
  • In Season 19's “Docked”, Alden Parker tells McGee that “I come from a big family, like Brady Bunch big.” Alden Parker is played by Gary Cole, who also played Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie.
  • In Season 19's “Starting Over”, Alden Parker says “What I'd give to never have to fill out another TPS report again,” and then is corrected that it's a TBS report. TPS reports were central to Office Space, in which Gary Cole played Bill Lumburgh.
  • When confronting a runaway perp with a knife, Jessica Knight breaks off a broom handle and employs skilled martial arts moves to take him down, spinning around the makeshift staff with ease and precision. Guess Katrina Law remembered all her lessons from her time with the League of Assassins.
• Affably Evil:
  • The merchant of death, René Benoît.
  • The Reynosas, a Mexican Brother–Sister Team that declared a feud on Gibbs. They are actually among the series' most sympathetic villains.
  • Eli David, Ziva's father.
• The Alibi: One 11th season episode uses "Alibi" as a title. A Marine is killed in a hit and run. The vehicle owner is suspected. Said owner uses attorney/client privilege to secure his alibi. The attorney checks out the alibi and confirms it. The attorney promptly points Gibbs at a second crime without directly connecting it to her client. Turns out, he was across town, committing a different crime at the time. See the trope description for why the attorney/client privilege would only have been a stopgap if the case went to trial.
• All for Nothing: The perp of "Tell-All" killed his wife and a naval officer because of a mysterious book and gun, thinking they were having an affair and trying to screw him over in the process. They were actually cooperating on tracking illegal guns to bring them into proper government supervision, meaning the husband murdered them and tried to burn/hide their work out of covering his own ass, all over a perceived slight in their marriage.
• All-Loving Hero: Played straight with Abby, with a couple exceptions (she thinks anyone who abuses children or animals is an evil scumbag.) One episode suggests she even loves trees.
• The Alleged Boss: Gibbs tends to run roughshod over NCIS directors. Type 3, and with Vance it seems to be diverging into Type 4.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Ziva is a tall, beautiful woman who is a definite Ice Queen to her teammates. She mellowed out considerably to the rest of the team by season 7, however.
• Alternate Universe Fic: There are stories where Caitlin Todd is not killed by Ari and is still with NCIS, more often than not alongside her (in the original universe) replacement Ziva... which has led to several fics detailing explicit love scenes between the two. There are also rewrites of the transcripts for all season three episodes so that Kate was still alive and having passionate sex with either Abby, Tony, or Gibbs.
• Always Gets His Man: Gibbs... because, well, he's Gibbs.
• Always on Duty: Gibbs' team appears to be the only agents at NCIS headquarters who handle investigations, any others having been killed, transferred, or vanished into thin air over the years.
  • Gibbs is also a workaholic so he comes in early and stays late and his Death Glare is more than enough to keep his team at their desks as well, to McGee and Ziva's displeasure.
  • Tony might complain about being tired, but he actually puts in even longer hours than Gibbs, coming back to the office even after his boss has gone home.
• Alone with the Psycho: Usually resulting in a Redundant Rescue. Sometimes, it's been subverted, as the obvious person in danger isn't actually. In one case, an undercover Ziva killed the guy before help arrived and moped for the rest of the episode. Also, this seems to happen to Abby about once a season.
• Amicable Exes: Gibbs and Wife #2 Diane, and Fornell with Diane. They can get along civilly and work together, if things get a bit stressed at times when baggage comes up.
• Amoral Attorney: The frequency of this would make you think anyone attempting to defend a criminal would likely be in cahoots or outright bedding them. There are a handful of exceptions contrasting the sheer number of people who are usually in on the schemes or even using the perp to commit a crime for them. Usually the exceptions then get targeted or even outright killed.
• Amusing Injuries:
  • All the Dope Slaps
  • In "Hiatus: Part I":
    • When Ziva and Abby are both upset about what happened to Gibbs, Ziva makes an insensitive comment and Abby slaps her. The two get into a full on slap fight.
    • Tony is trying to get the two of them to make up. He says they should shake hands and hug (which they do, reluctantly) and then says they should start deep tongue kissing. The two girls respond by punching him together, enthusiastically.
      Tony: Now we feel better.
• And Zoidberg: When the team is broken after Jenny's death at the end of Season 5, McGee is sent to the Code Decryption Unit in the basement. In "Last Man Standing", Gibbs goes to visit McGee, who tells Gibbs he misses working with him and Ziva. When Gibbs mentions Tony, McGee replies "Yeah, him too."
• Anyone Can Die: Chris Pacci, Kate Todd, Paula Cassidy, Jenny Shepard, Mike Franks, Eli David, and Jackie Vance... and three of these were in the opening credits.
• Arcade Sounds: Subverted in the episode "Honor Code". The sounds heard from the Nintendo DS are, in fact, the sounds of the user's info (date, time, etc.) being entered into a brand new Nintendo DS.
• Arrested for Heroism: In "Semper Fortis" a retired Navy Corpsman renders aid to three people who were in a car accident and finds herself arrested for practicing medicine without a license (due to a peculiarity of the law - at least in the show's universe - Army and Air Force medics are considered licensed EMTs but Navy Corpsmen are not). In the end Gibbs, with the help of the families of the people involved in the accident, get her sentence reduced to community service. This would not happen in reality, as she neither pretended to be a doctor nor charged for her services. As such she has as much of a right to assist as any other bystander.
• Artistic License – Law Enforcement: NCIS is depicted in the show as being headquartered in the Washington Navy Yard. While many USN functions are located there in real life, this does not include NCIS; it's actually located at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, some distance away from Washington DC.
• Artistic License – Geography: NCIS erroneously believes Chechnya to be Russia's neighbor, apparently in-universe invaded in some sort of Russian anti-terrorism police action, and while it is surprisingly regular in recognizing Chechen insurgents as terrorist groups, it stubbornly refers to Chechnya as if it were an independent country, with its own passports recognized by the international community, and so on. The only way to enter the United States from Chechnya is carrying a Russian Federation passport with a U.S. visa, because Chechnya has been a province of Russia for the last several hundred years.
• Artistic License – Law: Every perp caught at the end of an episode, whether it be on the field or in the interrogation room, is treated as caught with a finality. However, unless an episode makes a rare exception to confront the matter, many of these criminals are nailed with rather flimsy justifications; numerous confessions are coerced or produced in pressured circumstances without any lawyer present, most gun-toting baddies are killed in self-defense with no further investigation into the matter, and NCIS regularly brushes off use of force until it's time for an individual agent's drama. Gibbs in particular would likely be even more of a nightmare for the agency than the series already makes him out to be.
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • In Season Two's "SWAK", Ducky describes the variety of plague that Tony has contracted, pneumonic plague, as by far the worst. There are three main varieties of plague - bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic - and the last (which involves the plague bacilli infecting the bloodstream) is regarded as the worst.
  • Most of Season 18 takes place during the COVID-19 Pandemic and is referenced in multiple episodes. However, the show barely attempts to showcase the cast living in the same lockdown conditions as real people are. Masks are rarely worn on the show and nobody employs social distancing procedures, either inside or outside. There are also multiple scenes set in hospitals where nobody, whether visitors or staff, are wearing masks or face shields or anything of the like. The characters also mention how much they're sick of being locked at home, but given how little we see of the characters' home lives, it rings hollow since they work like normal. The only indicators we get that COVID has an effect is the addition of a clear divider in the interrogation room and having every other seat taped off in the diner Gibbs frequents.
• Artistic License – Military: NCIS is—for a dramatic television series—fairly accurate in terms of military protocol and procedures. However, as one may reasonably expect, Rule of Cool and Rule of Drama always take precedence above accuracy whenever it benefits the story.
  • Case in point: The episode where an undercover FBI agent fails to outrun a 500 pound air-dropped bomb on a range more fit for hand grenades.
  • Hollis Mann, a Lieutenant Colonel, is seen actively investigating and supervising Army CID investigations. In reality, commissioned officers merely command CID units while enlisted personnel do field work under the supervision of warrant officers. She's also seen investigating in uniform when Army CID personnel operate in civilian clothing.
  • Aside from protocol issues, many ships that appear in the series have names that don't fit with US Navy naming conventions and hull numbers that belong to another ship, though this might be a form of Bland-Name Product, so as to avoid directly associating active-duty ships with fictitious events.
  • NCIS apparently employs only one medical examiner with one assistant, and only one forensics lab tech with no assistants. While it's suggested there are substitutes for when they are not at work, they are still called in on emergency cases in their off hours, and more often than not are seen working on only one case at a time- usually for Gibbs- even though they are apparently handling the workload for NCIS as a whole. In reality, both departments would have a large amount of staff just to handle all the work. Compare this to a show such as Quincy which tends to show numerous medical examiners and lab technicians doing the same work.
• Assassin Outclassin': Frequently.
  • In Season Three's "Under Covers", Tony and Ziva go undercover as a married assassin couple who were hired for One Last Job. It turns out to have been a trap set by their clients to take them out. The assassin hired by said clients is himself outclassed when Gibbs flattens him with one punch.
  • In Season Six's "Dead Reckoning", two hit men storm into a safehouse to kill a witness Tony and Ziva are guarding, only to run headlong into Ziva with a gun in each hand.
    Gibbs: (over the phone, hearing gunfire) Ziva! What's going on there?! Talk to me!
    Ziva: (holsters her guns and picks up her cell phone) Under control.
  • In the Season Eleven premiere "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", the team learns that Ziva (currently at a family estate in Israel) is in danger of assassination. A rescue team rushes there to rescue her only to find that it's too late — Ziva already killed all the assassins, and has moved to some other location.
  • In the Season Eleven finale, "Honor Thy Father", Gibbs turns the tables on two assassins sent after him by Alejandro Reynosa. Both assassins are careful to wait until Gibbs is not carrying his pistol, but a loose electrical wire and a partially jacked-up pickup truck make handy Improvised Weapons.
• Asshole Victim: A frequently visited theme with this series. Just go here and scroll down to the NCIS entry for a fairly comprehensive list.
• Atonement Detective: Gibbs.
• Audit Threat: Both Tony and Gibbs occasionally make one.
• Author Appeal: When Shane was producer, the Abby fanservice sharply increased while the Abby/McGee interactions decreased.
• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • Inverted by Gibbs in 7x09, "Child's Play", when he asks the savant girl the episode has revolved around to calculate the odds that Ziva will miss a shot at the bad guy... who's holding a gun to the girl's head. She calmly works it out at 97.6%. Gibbs gives the bad guy one more chance to surrender. He doesn't. BIG mistake.
    • Though really, the bad guy was just taking the genius kid at her word. According to her, there was less than 1 chance in 40 that Ziva could hit him.
    • Except Ziva lied to the girl that she hasn't shot anyone ever. 97.6% is the difference between a Naïve Newcomer and a cold-hearted professional assassin.
  • In 7x22, "Borderland", Abby's presenting at a law enforcement symposium in Mexico. One woman insults her fashion sense by asking her who told her that the Day of the Dead was in May. Abby retaliates by providing very detailed facts about the woman based solely on observing her, leaving said woman speechless.
    Natalia: Anyone could tell I have a cat.
    Abby: One orange tabby, and two calicos. You're allergic to citrus. You went bowling last night. You're vitamin D deficient. Oh, and you're ovulating.
• Backstory:
  • All characters have some, such as Gibbs having lost his first wife and daughter and his multiple divorces.
  • In a Running Gag, Ducky is always interrupted when commenting on his life stories.
  • Several characters' backstories, including Vance's, are brought into sync during the episode "Enemies Domestic".
• Badass Adorable:
  • Abby is irresistibly cute and perky but has shown on multiple occasions that she can hold her own in a fight, specifically in the season three episodes "Frame-Up" and "Bloodbath".
  • Ziva may be small and cute but she is also a Mossad-trained secret agent. In a few episodes some suspects underestimate her due to her small size and try to lay a hand on her, with predictable results.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • In the season 9 finale, Harper Dearing succeeded in using Director Vance's car as a car bomb at the NCIS parking lot, and caused some deaths besides that of Jonathan Cole, who was caught in the explosion trying to defuse the bomb.
  • Subverted in the season 10 premiere, as it turns out that only Cole and a few others were killed by the bomb, and none of the main characters were killed. Also, Dearing faked his own death (the remains found in the car were his brothers) and Gibbs eventually tracks him down and kills him.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy:
  • Up 'til the sixth season, characters on the autopsy table had their genitals blanked out by a bright "light", unless they were so mangled that it wasn't necessary. From the sixth season on, they simply had a towel covering them.^note The change came about because the production team likes to use real people (who enthusiastically volunteer to appear on TV's number one show) to play cadavers whenever possible but the bright lights used to blank out the groins would start to burn those lying on the examination table.
  • Female cadavers are usually shown with their chest cavity already opened so that they do not have to cover their breasts too. That's right: open chest cavities are apparently less offensive than bare boobs.
• Batman Gambit: In the eighth season premiere, and in order to put a stop to the Reynosa Cartel, Gibbs and Vance trick a crooked Mexican government official into killing his own sister, who runs the cartel. They do this by "accidentally" leaking where Gibbs and his father are, and allowing the official to find out that she'd been "killed". The plan, however, required him to arrive while the sister was searching the safehouse, and to react to that news by shooting the shit out of said house indiscriminately.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: In Season Five's "Identity Crisis", the terrorist mastermind's henchman masquerades as a restaurant delivery boy. In his apartment, they find an assortment of messenger uniforms, confirming that this is how he's raided various government agencies and private corporations for information. Lampshaded at the end by Tony, who remembers attending a high-security party at a gated embassy, when a guy just walked through the front door with a paper bag and a t-shirt that said "liquor store" on it.
  Tony: And he goes, "did anybody order, uh, a bottle of vodka?"
  Ziva: The places you can access when you look the part.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Two rather unusual In-universe examples:
  • In "The Tell", Palmer asks an Samantha Ryan if she's seen The Graduate. She replies with "Do you want me to seduce you?" which isn't even close to right (it's "You're trying to seduce me, Ms. Robinson, aren't you?") Oddly, he replies "Is that a quote or a question?", implying he doesn't know the line either.
  • In "The Good Son", there's an even more bizarre bit where Tony says "I think it was Mae West who said "if you've seen one sailor's anchor you've seen them all." Not only did she never say this, what quote he's trying to refer to (if any) is unclear, as searching for that sentence only turns up results about this episode.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: The team averts it regularly, but especially in Season 7's premiere. Team Gibbs rocks the dirty and blood-caked look.
• Becoming the Mask: Tony in season four.
• Berserk Button:
  • For Gibbs:
    • Trying to harm anyone he cares about, especially if it's a member of his team, and especially if it's Abby.
    Gibbs (to Abby's stalker ex-boyfriend): The only reason you're still able to walk is because I just found out about you.
    • Abby actually lampshades this in the same episode.
    Gibbs: Why didn't you come to me, Abby?
    Abby: Because, Gibbs, I wanted him restrained. I didn't want him beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat!
  • People who do harm to kids, especially their own.
  • Messing with his coffee, although his reaction to this is fairly minor in comparison to the others.
  • In "Lost and Found", we learn through her conversation with McGee that Abby's two biggest pet peeves are people who claim to be vegetarians but still eat chicken, and poorly-handled evidence.
    • Also:
    Gibbs: Abs, are you okay?
    Abby: Do I look okay? What is Abby's rule number one? Do not lie to Abby!
  • Beat the crap out of Ziva, she's okay with it. Shoot at her... fine. But don't, don't call her "Ma'am", and never ever hurt Tony. She also doesn't enjoy being groped, as displayed in "Singled Out".
    Ziva: Remove your hand, or I will rip off your arm and beat you to death with it!
  • Ducky shows a couple of his own:
    • In "Seadog", he goes ballistic on a local LEO who contaminates a crime scene so he can get in good with the news reporter on the scene.
    • In the beginning of "Identity Crisis", Ducky leads a class of med students in a sample autopsy, only to find mercury in the dead body's brainstem. He is quite livid at the medical examiner who okayed the body for the demo autopsy without noticing that the body had been murdered. That said, Ducky calms down when the examiner apologizes and explains that, soon after finding the dead John Doe, they had a rush of bodies from a bus crash and he got lost in the shuffle.
  • Agent Maureen Cabot, the leader of the NCIS Family and Sexual Violence unit, hates Victim-Blaming, to the point where she actually slaps the serial rapist in "Alleged" for attempting to use it to save his skin despite the massive pile of evidence against him.
    Gibbs: You've been saving that one, Mo.
    Cabot: You have no idea. [scene cuts to Abby and Director Vance behind the one-way mirror, cracking satisfied grins]
• Beware the Silly Ones: Tim and Tony may seem a bit off-beat but they are skilled interrogators. They once used Christmas cookies to catch a guy lying.
  Veil Tupolev: I will stop eating cookies.
• Big Damn Kiss: Tony and Ziva, after 8 seasons of Will They or Won't They?, get theirs at the end of Ziva's farewell episode and it is glorious.
• Big Secret:
  • "One Shot, One Kill": after his initial alibi (that he was running on the base's track) is exploded, the suspect admits the truth rather than be charged with murder: he was visiting a squad mate's wife;
  • "Lt. Jane Doe": The suspect, a Navy officer, admits that he was "seeing" another officer at the time of the murder, but refuses to give the name. Gibbs says there's no crime in two officers seeing each other if neither of them is married. Under pressure, the suspect says that as far as the Navy's concerned, it is a crime... because both officers are men.
  • Subverted for Laughs in "Incognito": the suspect, who's both a Marine Drill Sergeant Nasty and a Scary Black Man, asks if he can reveal his alibi out of earshot of the recruits: Tony and McGee oblige him, and he confesses he was rehearsing in his local theater troupe's upcoming production of La Cage aux folles.
• Bilingual Bonus: A small one in "Once a Hero." Spanish-speaking viewers will know that the maid found a body on the bed before Gibbs figures out where it is.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition:
  • In "Newborn King." The poor woman gives birth in the backseat of a broken down car, parked in a gas station garage, in a blizzard, on Christmas, during a shootout with Russian mercenaries who want to kill her and kidnap her child, with Gibbs as the midwife. This is interspersed with a desperately outnumbered and outgunned Ziva singlehandedly defending them against an onslaught of Russian mercenaries.
  • A variation occurs in "Shabbat Shalom". The team are going through old things they used on undercover ops and find a picture from an unseen mission when Ziva masqueraded as a pregnant woman. She keeps the photo and even shows it to her father when he shows up. At the episode, both her father Eli and Jackie Vance were dead.
  • "We Build, We Fight" ends with a murdered homosexual Seabee's husband consoling his partner's ex-squadmate who blamed himself for the killing the ex-mate was addicted to drugs, the Seabee found out and was killed by the dealer when he was going to the police to report him while Palmer's wife gives birth to a girl in the same hospital.
• Black Comedy: ...including having the team cracking jokes while examining a body.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The team's big monitors often tune in to the cable news network ZNN.
  • The "Hot Fresh Coffee" cups have an almost-identical logo to Starbucks, with the mermaid replaced with a coffee cup.
• Blood Knight: Ziva is viewed as this by the rest of the team, though this is more of an Informed Attribute, as for the most part she isn't any more bloodthirsty than the rest of the team.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The 2015 Christmas episode had Bishop breaking up with her husband and Ducky discovering his younger half-brother Nicholas is alive but with severe Alzheimer's disease (Ducky: I'll take it). Fortunately Nicholas does remember his big brother.
  • The ending of "Skeletons":
    Mann: You made the right call letting the girl go. It seems you always make the right call when it involves a case.
    [They open the door and find said girl chopping up a corpse]
    Mann: Oh son of a...[end credits]
  • "Reasonable Doubt"'s B-plot involves a homeless woman who is obviously not well mistaking DiNozzo Sr. as her father. When he gets her checked out at a clinic, it becomes clear that she has dementia and needed professional help, but she leaves the clinic before Senior can get her to a hospital. When he and Tony track down her last known address, the super tells them that the homeless woman's father disowned her when she turned out to be gay and had died a few years back, and she never found out about his death which is why she believes Senior is her father. By the time the two of them finally find her and get her to a hospital, the doctors discover that she has an inoperable brain tumor and she only has a month at the most to live. DiNozzo Sr. decides to continue to play along with her delusion for the remaining time she has and apologizes on behalf of her birth father for rejecting her homosexuality, allowing her to die believing that she finally reconciled with him.
• Bluff the Eavesdropper:
  • While Undercover as Lovers, Tony and Ziva have (simulated) sex because they know the room is being filmed.
  • In "Twilight", Tony listens in on what he thinks is a conversation between Kate and McGee about Kate's feelings for him, but Kate is fully aware that Tony is listening in and ends up dumping a water bottle on his head.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: One of the show's Running Gags was Ziva's frequent mangling of metaphors, which Tony rarely failed to lampshade..
• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger:
  • Season 5 ended with the entire cast getting reassigned. Less fatal than the other situation, but the same effect of being able to write any character they want out.
  • Season 6 ended with Ziva captive in Somalia. On a list of places a Jewish woman would not want to be a prisoner, that's pretty high up there.
  • Season 9 concludes with a real whopper. Harper Dearing's bomb goes off directly in front of NCIS headquarters while most of the main cast are still trying to flee from it. On a beach somewhere, Ducky gets a call about the explosion, and while he's giving instructions to whoever's on the other end, he suffers what appears to be a heart attack and collapses.
    • Apart from Ducky's heart attack (which he recovers from), the only major cast member to be injured is McGee, who gets some glass stuck in him and also recovers.
  • "Berlin" ends with Tony and Ziva in a car crash. While they survived, with Ziva sustaining minor injuries, the previews heavily implied her death. The fact that Coté de Pablo was in contract negotiations led to massive speculation that she had, in fact, been killed off.
  • The final episode of Season 10 has Tony, Ziva, and McGee all resigning, and 4 months later, Gibbs is in the middle of an apparent failed undercover sting, training his sniper rifle on Fornell. We later find out that he was not aiming at Fornell, but at his protectee, who was involved with a terrorist organization that had made attempts on the lives of the team. Ziva, shaken up by the events, decides to remain in Israel for good.
  • Season 12 ends with Tony, Gibbs and another attached agent searching the streets of Iraq for a boy recruited by a terrorist group. Gibbs finds the boy holding a gun. The boy then shoots Gibbs. More than once.
  • Season 14 ends with Gibbs and McGee facing off with a Paraguayan militia group to allow Torres and a number of abducted children to escape in a helicopter.
  • Season 15 ends with Vance captured and bound aboard a private jet flying across an ocean.
• Bookends: Season 3 starts and finishes with the team mourning the death/injury of a member, struggling to keep their emotions in check while investigating among a Gray Rain of Depression.
• Bottle Episode: Quite a few. "Trojan Horse" takes place largely in NCIS HQ, aside from a few location shots of Paris and a hospice. "Detour", "Witch Hunt" and others take place in multiple locations, but over the course of only one day.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted, as the show generally keeps a tight count on the number of rounds any individual team member fires. Whenever they're shown firing all their rounds, they're also usually shown reloading with a spare magazine (like McGee does when pinned down behind the car in season 2's "Twilight").
• Boyfriend Bluff: Hilariously subverted in "Designated Target." Ziva asks Tony how to tell someone you no longer wish to see them (while talking on the phone), and Tony tries to help...only to find out the conversation is not what he thought it was.
  Tony: Listen, dirtbag, this is Ziva's husband. I have your phone number now, I can find your address; if you ever try to contact her again, I will reach down your throat, grab your intestines, rip them out and drive over your head! Lose this number or lose your life! [hangs up, hands the phone back to Ziva] You're welcome.
  Ziva: That was my Aunt Nettie from Tel Aviv. She was trying to stop seeing her eighty-six-year-old mah jong partner.
  Tony: Why didn't you stop me?
  Ziva: Too stunned.
  Tony: Where do I send flowers?
  Ziva: If you communicate with her again, I will kill you.
• The Boxing Episode: Episode 6x18, "Knockout". Director Vance uses the NCIS team to investigate the death of a boxer.
• Brain Bleach: Episode 4x5, "Dead and Unburied" Tony wonders if a victim of a murder who apparently had three fiancees was special down there. Unfortunately for him, the instruments were in a state of extreme decay. Tony asks Ducky if there is a psychological way to "unsee" something.
• Brains and Bondage: Abby frequently wears typically goth clothes to work and listens to metal and heavy electronic music while working, and is extremely intelligent and a forensics expert.
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • In Season Six's "Love and War", the victim, a computer genius, was hacking into the Department of Homeland Security using a "phreak box" made from a "Beary Smyles" talking doll (an expy of Teddy Ruxpin). McGee explains that the electronics in the toy are so old that modern computer systems aren't designed to defend against them.
    • Bonus points for Tony mentioning that "phreak boxes" themselves are considered outmoded, having learned about them from The '80s movies like WarGames and The '90s movies like Hackers.
  • Starting in Season 14, Gibbs occasionally replaces his usual sidearm with a Colt M1911 that belonged to his father.
• Break Them by Talking: A typical stratagem for Gibbs and his people to receive either confessions or withheld evidence from reluctant persons.
• Break-Up Bonfire In Season 5, Tony throws a letter from his love interest into a bonfire after the relationship went way south due to him Becoming the Mask.
• Brick Joke:
  • When arms dealer Agah Bayar asks Gibbs what to get at the diner in the episode "The Lost Boys", Gibbs recommends the fries. When Tony and Bishop speak to him later, he comments about how good the fries are.
  • In "Bounce", Tony makes a passing remark that he doesn’t plan to go to Arizona anytime soon. In the next episode, "South By Southwest", guess where Tony and Gibbs go.
• Bring My Brown Pants: in S 12 Ep 5, "San Dominic", Team Gibbs is facing a ticking time bomb in the cargo bay of a ship. Gibbs has disarmed the detonator, but the timer is still allowed to count down. Tony comments that he didn't bring any clean shorts.
• Broken Pedestal: Tony, to the basketball coach at his final boarding school who straightened him out as a teen (and is implied to have started his love of movies after explaining what "leave the guns, take the cannoli" means) because the coach failed to disband the abusive morality patrol even after he was made provost because "it was tradition", "[he] didn't get to be in charge by affecting change", and because the school had done a great deal of good in spite/because of the group's harsh discipline (said "discipline" involved harassing a female cadet until she killed herself). At least he wasn't the killer of the week and after he apologized to Tony he said he would resign.
• Bulletproof Vest:
  • In "One Shot, One Kill", Gibbs and Kate go undercover as a Marine sergeant and his commanding officer, hoping to entrap a Serial Killer who has been sniping Marine recruiters. Tony gripes that Gibbs is being too reckless:
    Tony: (over radio) Just tell me he's wearing his vest.
    (Kate glances at Gibbs's vest, shoved out of sight into a corner.)
    Kate: ...He said it was visible under his shirt.
    Tony: I knew it! If the sniper doesn't kill him, I will!
  • Used and subverted in "Twilight". Former Presidential-detail Secret Service agent Kate jumps in front of a bullet for Gibbs... who was also wearing a vest at the time. Moments later when the team is joking about it, Ari snipes her in the head.
  • The season eleven episode "Bulletproof" has the team investigating a number of defective vests that were worn by soldiers who died or were crippled in combat. The vests were from a batch that should have been destroyed, but were sold as surplus body armor on the grey market instead. When confronted by the NCIS agents, the person who sold the vests gets in a shoot out and finds their own vest, from the same batch, to be entirely useless.
• Bullying a Dragon: This seems to happen a lot with Ziva, probably due to her small size. Often times a suspect will lay a hand on her, with predictable results
• Bunny Ears Lawyers: All of Team Gibbs! You have Abby the Perky Goth Misfit Lab Rat; Gibbs the regularly-does-stuff-that-would-get-a-real-agent-fired-if-not-arrested guy; Tony, the sexual harassment Karma Houdini; Ziva the weapons nut (including any motor vehicle), and Ducky, who uses any excuse to wax poetic about his past and tells amusing but irrelevant anecdotes to his corpses... as he's dissecting them. This even freaks Gibbs out. And, of course, "Elf Lord" McGee. At this point they're in flipping bunny suits.
  • Which is why they often have to watch their mouths around each other.
  • Justified in Ducky's case; talking to the corpses preserves their humanity and helps him keep sane.
• Bury Your Gays: Ned Dorneget is killed in Season 12 in a Heroic Sacrifice, which is used to motivate the team into finding the season's antagonist.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Jeanne Benoit makes a reappearance in the Season 13 episode "Saviors".
  • Patrick Labyorteux reprised the role of Bud Roberts 11 years since last playing him on JAG. Since that series ended, Bud has continued his career in the Navy and is now a full Captain (O-6).
  • Ziva Whether or not she was dead remained subject for debate for years until she reappeared in season 16.
• Butt-Monkey: It depends on the episode, but usually it's McGee for Tony, and Tony for multiple characters.
• Caffeine Failure: The "Engaged Part 1" episode has the team having to work overtime on the Mystery of the Week, and Gibbs at one point walks in on Abby's lab to see a huge pile of empty Caf-POW! cups on her desk. She says she's written an algorithm to determine how long she can go on like that and that she's got about five minutes before she becomes "Zabby or zombie Abby".
• Call-Back: Numerous occurrences.
  • Two to JAG:
    • In season 6, Tony is Agent Afloat on the USS Seahawk, a ship commonly seen in the parent series.
  • In chapter 4x17, "Skeletons", two bodies are found in a tomb, and the only thing that is still intact are the bones. Ducky and Palmer start organizing the bones in the two bodies. When they discover that they have three right hands, they make a reference to episode "The Meat Puzzle".
  • In S 10 Ep 11, Tony dons his street busker hat and soul patch from his surveilance assignment way back in season 3 or 4.
  • In a late season 10 episode, Rear Adm A J Chegwidden is Gibbs' lawyer.
  • Another one involving Ducky, he reveals in the 2015 Christmas episode that the reason he's so well-traveled and wound up in the Afghan refugee camp where his patient was tortured to death to torture him was because he was searching for his younger half-brother and was devastated by after being told he was dead.
  • Season 12's "Check", where the Big Bad taunted Gibbs by replicating the murders of Jenny Shepherd (occurred in Season 5), Mike Franks (occurred in Season 8), and capped it off by luring Gibbs and ex-wife Diane to a rooftop. Cue Gibbs' (and the viewers) dawning horror as he looked at the surroundings and realized Diane was about to be sniped down just like Caitlin Todd a decade earlier (Season 2). For added benefit, the killer was the half-brother of Ari, a terrorist who. . . terrorized the team as early as Season 1.
  • It's explained in season 13 that Tony got his very nice apartment for cheap because it was the site of a triple homicide. This was the basis for the plot of a season 14 episode when the apartment's new occupant, McGee, is nearly killed by two intruders seeking loot left behind by the original murderer (they were all involved in a smuggling operation).
  • As Tony packs up to leave at the end of Season 13, one of the items in his box is a photo of him and Kate, murdered at the end of Season 2. In that same episode, having learned of Ziva's supposed "death", Gibbs gazes at the memorial wall, which indeed features the names of all the agents who have died in the line of duty over the show's tenure.
  • At the end of the Season 12 episode "The Lost Boys", after escorting Dorneget's body home, Gibbs hallucinates him standing along with Mike (killed at the end of Season 8), Jenny (killed at the end of Season 5), Paula Cassidy (killed halfway through Season 4). Kate (killed at the end of Season 2), and Chris Pacci (killed halfway through Season 1).
  • Abby's final episode features several flashbacks to key moments of hers, plus the reappearance of several criminals she specifically helped folder put away (oddly, there is no mention of her stalker ex from Season 3, nor Chip, her assistant who tried to frame Tony for murder).
• Call-Forward: The episode "Baltimore" has flashbacks to how Gibbs and DiNozzo met each other. There are quite a few call forwards to episodes and show tropes.
  Tony: Be a Navy cop? I'd rather have the plague. ^note Not only did DiNozzo become a "Navy Cop", but he also contracted the plague during SWAK in season 2.
  Tony (after getting his first Dope Slap from Gibbs): Did you just physically assault me? Don't make a habit of that..
  Chris Pacci: I'm telling you, this stomach is going to be the death of me.
• Canine Companion: In "Seek" the team briefly gets one in Dex, a bomb-sniffing dog whose handler's death they are investigating. At the end of the episode Dex catches a bullet (saving Gibbs' life in the process) while taking down his handler's killer, gets a medal and an honorable discharge, and is taken in by his handler's widow.
  Gibbs: That's not a dog. That's a Marine.
• Can't Tie His Tie: In "Institutionalized", Gibbs walks into the lab to discover Kasie attempting to tie a necktie. When Gibbs asks her what she is doing, she explains that an old friend had has a job interview and doesn't know how to tie a tie. She promised him she would tie it for him, only to discover she doesn't know how to tie one either. Gibbs takes the tie from her, ties it round his own neck, and hands it to her. Kasie's friend later turns to be the main suspect in the Mystery of the Week.
• Captain Ersatz: In-universe. McGee works on the side as a book author, and he bases the characters in his books after the members of the team: LJ Tibbs-Gibbs, Lisa-Ziva, Tommy-Tony. He even has Lisa and Tommy as the Official Couple.
• Caps Lock: While helping Gibbs' father search for a retired pilot who saved his life, Abby is analysing a letter from the pilot, which happens to be written in all capital letters, which naturally causes confusion since capital letters are used to refer to places and locations. The closest thing to a location the letter talks about is that he's heading "up to the blue sky", which doesn't help much considering his former occupation. Eventually, Abby discovers that "the blue sky" is the name of a retirement home that's north of his house.
• Captivity Harmonica: Tony is framed for murdering a woman and is held by the FBI because all signs seem to be pointing to him. McGee strolls past the jail cell playing a harmonica, then gives it to him as a "present". Tony later gives it to Agent Fornell (who was in charge of the case at FBI) when he leaves jail. Fornell instantly plays the harmonica to complete Tony's tune.
• Cargo Concealment Caper:
  • In the season 2 episode "UnSEALed", a petty officer who was imprisoned for killing his wife escapes (offscreen) by slipping into the laundry using a stolen ID card, then hides in the laundry and is taken out of the prison with a load of used clothes.
  • In season 4's "Singled Out", a well-organized team of robbers successfully steals a load of rare and valuable coins from a hotel safe, and gets them out of the hotel by hiding them in a loaded laundry cart. However, when the cart reaches the robbers' truck, it turns out that the NCIS team intercepted it; Ziva comes out from under the decoy laundry and takes down the leader in time to save the life of the robbers' hostage.
• Cargo Ship: Invoked; Abby loves "Major Mass-Spec":
  Abby: Ohhh, I love this machine! (to Gibbs) If Major Mass-Spec were a guy, I would totally marry him and bear his little mini-Mass children.
• Catchphrase: A few.
  • Gibbs: "Grab your gear", almost always followed by "We've got a dead [sailor/Marine] in [location]", "Ya think?", "What's the point, McGee?", "Yeah, Gibbs."^note his default phone answer, and "That's a good question, [Character]. Why don't you find me an answer?" "Is that a fact, [Character]?"
  • Tony, McGee: "On it, boss."
  • Abby: "I hate it when he/she/they does/do that."
  • Gibbs' "Never apologize; it's a sign of weakness" is used by multiple characters over the course of the series.
• Cat Fight:
  • S4 Ep 4, "Dead and Unburied," had a Marine victim who was revealed to have had two fiances. When they find out about each other, they're not too thrilled and attack each other. While Gibbs and Ziva rush over to break it up, Tony yells "Chick fight", and McGee proceeds to film it.
  • Ziva and Abby get into one in the first "Hiatus" episode; see Intimate Healing below for the resolution.
• Caught on Tape: The premise of the episode "Dead Reflection".
• Celebrity Is Overrated: It's a Running Gag that Gibbs is awarded NCIS's service medal year after year, but never even shows up to the awards ceremony, and Tony always accepts on his behalf. This was first introduced in Season Three's "Model Behavior", and made exceptionally poignant in Season Six's "Murder 2.0", after the team has just caught a serial killer who murdered three people in the flashiest possible way for the sake of "fifteen minutes" of fame. Lampshaded by Ducky:
  "It's very revealing the lengths to which some men will go to thrust themselves into the limelight, while others are content to live quietly in solitude."
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • In The Meat Puzzle, Kate asks Gibbs what Ducky (played by David McCallum) looked like when he was younger. His answer?
  Gibbs: Illya Kuryakin.
  • In “South by Southwest”, Tony mentions Scent of a Woman and specifically mentions Chris O'Donnell, who would soon become a regular on NCIS: Los Angeles as G. Callen. He would actually debut in the role just 5 episodes after this in the two part backdoor pilot “Legend”.
  • In "Missing", a bomb defusal instructor references MacGyver. This was six years before Hawaii Five-0 premiered, and eight before NCIS:LA had a crossover in the "Pa Make Loa/Touch of Death" two-parter. And eleven years before H50 itself would crossover with the MacGyver (2016). Incidentally, both versions of the character are former EOD techs. If the original MacGyver had existed in the NCIS universe, it's quite possible his legendary skills would've been passed down in Army myth. ^note The reboot Mac would've been too young to join in the first place, much less become legendary.
  • Nine years after the NCIS:LA crossover with H50 mentioned above, actress Katrina Law, who joined H50's team on later seasons as Quinn Liu, plays NCIS agent Jessica Knight in the show's season 18.
• Cell Phones Are Useless:
  • One early Running Gag involved Gibbs being unable to quite figure out mobile phones. This resulted in Tony (being taught about them by McGee) offering to teach Gibbs, who angrily exclaimed "It's all backwards!" It still comes up from time to time.
  • A later episode shows that each time Gibbs physically breaks his phone in frustration, he gives it to Tony or Kate to "reboot". They do this by replacing the old phone with a new one from the large supply of extras Kate keeps in one of her desk drawers.
  • Averted when Tony and Ziva are trapped in a shipping container in "Boxed In"; they need to MacGyver a way to communicate.
  • Justified in "Silver War" as the victim was locked in a Civil War Era coffin made from iron.
• Cerebus Retcon: In what may be record time, this show pulled it off in a 50 minute span. In one episode, Abby uses her refund check to buy everyone else iPods. Gibbs is less than enthused, because he only listens to five songs. This is treated as a joke until the end of the episode, where it's revealed that the five songs he listens to are recordings of his deceased daughter learning how to play the piano. Damn.
• The Chains of Commanding: Lampshaded by Gibbs in Season Seven's "Ignition", when McGee takes the lead in investigating the death of a Navy Top Gun who died while test-flying a jet pack. Unfortunately, being lead means he has to stay in the squad room while Tony and Ziva head out to interview the suspect jet pack engineer at his laboratory.
  Gibbs: The price of being in charge.
• Character Development: Everyone gets some, but in particular: Tony starts out as The Big Guy in the first 2 seasons, then becomes The Lancer during season 3 and during season 4 he becomes co-hero with Gibbs. McGee, at first, was the Naïve Newcomer, then during season 2 he became The Smart Guy and around season 4 developed into The Lancer, and then The Leader as of season 14.
• Characterization Marches On:
  • In the pilot episode, which takes place on Air Force One, Gibbs makes several references to the 1997 movie Air Force One. This contrasts with Tony later being the one who makes movie references.
  • In the episode "Minimum Security," Tony claims ignorance of both Shane and The Maltese Falcon (as well as drawing a complete blank on Alan Ladd). Some movie buff.
• Character Outlives Actor: Victoria Mallard, Ducky's mother. She had appeared in two episodes; Season 2's "The Meat Puzzle" and Season 3's "Untouchable." Nina Foch, who played her, passed away in 2008, but the character was referred to several times after. She's referenced after the actress's death in Season 6's "Silent Night" where Ducky says she's in a rest home and in Season 7's "Flesh and Blood". In S7 Ep 17, "Double Identity" Ducky says she passed away a month prior.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: Case of the week aside, the "dear departed" include NCIS agents in the opening credits (Field Special Agent Kate Todd, Director Jenny Shepard, Ziva David), their close relatives (Mossad Director Eli David, father of Ziva David; Jackie Vance, wife of Director Leon Vance); (Jackson Gibbs, father of Gibbs), other good guys (Mike Franks, Secnav Clayton Jarvis, Gayne Levin, Simon Cade, Chris Pacci, Paula Cassidy), and of course, bad guys (Ari Haswari, Rene Benoit, Merton Bell). And that's not counting the multitude of others in the NCIS universe, including the spinoff series, who have "jumped ship."
• The Chessmaster: René Benoît.
  • The leader of The Calling, an ex-DJ from London with bleach-blond hair, believes he's this, what with him and his tween recruits hacking and spying into government business (mainly their own parents'), planting bombs in heavily guarded resorts, almost killing Gibbs, killing an imprisoned member before he could make a deal, and hacking into a North Korean sub to start World War III to prove their worth as terrorists. Tony shoots him in the knee and the chest like Gibbs was, but fatally.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • When the team goes to Gibbs' hometown and meets his dad, a rifle is rather prominently displayed behind the counter of his shop. He doesn't use it in the present, but he did fire it into the air in a Flashback to break up a fight between young Gibbs and two other boys. He also killed a robber with it, offscreen, before the Christmas Episode when he visits Gibbs. The rifle is later used in season 11 finale "Honor Thy Father" to knock the support on a truck to crush an assassin hired to kill Gibbs.
  • One episode has McGee get a camera attachment for his phone and happily shows off its recording function. He's later asked by Ducky to secretly record the face of a suspect with it to test a theory about body language. The suspect smirks when asked a very critical question.
• Chekhov's Gunman: NCIS is a bit of a repeat offender on this one. If someone gets a line but doesn't seem to be contributing to the main plot otherwise, they did it. (If the writers try to hide their non-involvement by stuffing them into a romantic subplot with a main character, they definitely did it.) It was eventually subverted in an episode where the villain of the romantic subplot had not done it, even though he was suspected by a majority of the cast.
• Child Soldiers: "The Calling", who recruit troubled children over the internet.
• Choke Holds: One victim of the week died of this.
• Christmas Episode: In the tradition of JAG, NCIS started doing these in Season Six.
• Chute Sabotage: In "Hung Out to Dry", a Marine dies during a training jump. The investigation reveals that his shroud lines had been coated with an acidic cleaning agent, causing the fibres to disintegrate.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: The team's run-ins with the CIA througout the series have been typically unpleasant for one reason or another, but the season 10 finale heads fully in this direction, hinting at a grand-scale conspiracy going on within the CIA's ranks.
• Circling Vultures: The series has used the spot-the-vultures technique of finding human remains.
• Clear My Name: Practically contractually obligated for every member of the team, complete with Lampshade Hanging from Tony:
  Tony: And to think I almost made it an entire year without being accused of murder.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Abby plays the halves of the trope title separately with McGee. The "clingy" can kick in when she's upset or worried. The "jealous" can kick in if there's a non-team member around who pulls McGee's attention away from her (e.g. an ICE agent played by Jaime "Hustle" Murray). You'd swear at times that they were still dating...
• Clip Show: Season 12's "House Rules" is both this and a Christmas Episode. So is Season 14's "Keep Going", to a lesser extent.
• Cold-Blooded Torture:
  • In "Broken Bird", from an interrogator that Ducky had to work with during his RAF service in Afghanistan. Late in the episode, he reveals that his repeatedly torturing one particular person that Ducky kept patching up and that he knew had no information was actually killed to torture Ducky, as a means of breaking his spirit.
  • Ziva has been known to threaten use of this trope on multiple occasions quite convincingly (and hints to prior experience with it as a Mossad agent).
  • In the sixth season finale, Ziva is taken captive by terrorists and tortured for several months before being rescued.
• Cold Sniper: What Gibbs is best known for.
  • In the Season 7 opener, he takes out the terrorist holding Tony, McGee, and Ziva hostage from something like a mile away...and walks in the door about 15 seconds later.
  • Averted, however, when he took revenge for his murdered wife and daughter. Hard to be emotionless after that.
  • Ari is portrayed as one.
• The Commandments: The fifty-or-so Rules that Gibbs uses to run his team.
• Commuting on a Bus: Ducky spends most of Seasons 15 and 16 traveling, thus only really communicating with the team via Skype/Zoom. In Season 17, he comes back, but moves into a basement office to be the NCIS Historian. This allows him to still appear in any episode he is needed, but he stops being a regular cast member.
• Concealment Equals Cover: The climax of the episode Bulletproof has the team getting in a shootout with a bad guy hiding in a trailer home. As it turns out, the trailer didn't provide any cover whatsoever, which wouldn't have been a problem if the perp's Bulletproof Vest hadn't been equally useless.
• Confusing Multiple Negatives: This exchange also falls under I Know You Know I Know:
  McGee: Tony says if I really want to go [to Baghdad], then I shouldn't volunteer. But if he says I shouldn't volunteer, then he thinks I will volunteer, which means; if I really want to go, I shouldn't volunteer.
  Abby: That's...good, Timmy....Sounds like you're - not doing exactly what you - shouldn't.
• The Consigliere: It's revealed in one episode that whenever Tony is left in charge of a case, he secretly has meetings with Palmer to help point him in the right direction whenever Tony feels that he's lost on what to do next.
  • On a similar, if lighter note, after discovering that he has a daughter, it's Palmer we see baby-proofing Tony's apartment and helping him out—and inadvertently getting him to debate resigning when he asks Tony if he intends to keep working.
• Contamination Situation: The penultimate episode of season two, "SWAK", centered around Tony and Kate's exposure to the pneumonic plague, which was sent to the team in an envelope.
• Continuity Nod: The show is quite good about referencing things that seem like one-time gags in later episodes, making the series Better on DVD.
  • 'The Meat Puzzle' gets cameos in several episodes before getting its own explanation/resolution.
  • "Cloak" referenced "Bete Noire", "Trojan Horse", and "Stakeout"
  • A particularly meaningful one occurs when Ziva returns to the office having quit the team and then gotten kidnapped for several months. She's seen reading the same men's magazine that she and Tony joked about when she was first assigned to the team.
  • When Abby produces her ID in "Hiatus", she explains that she was wearing the more standard outfit in the photo (in contrast to the goth gear she was in) because she was heading to court. It's the same court outfit from "Bloodbath", two episodes previous.
    • Abby's court outfit itself is a continuity nod as the original JAG episode featured a Navy lawyer telling her that in court she should wear a pastel colored suit, glasses and her hair down so it hides her tattoo.
  • Ziva has repeatedly worn the orange hat of the late Lt. Roy from the episode "Dead Man Walking".
    • In a season 3 episode, she is also seen examining Kate's hat, wondering about the bullet hole in it; the hat received said bullet hole back in season 1.
  • "Enemies Domestic" is jam-packed with these. Two words: Anatoly Zukov.
  • The flashbacks in the Season Eight episode "Baltimore" include an appearance from NCIS agent Chris Pacci, whose death was the focus of "Dead Man Talking," a Season ONE episode.
    • In the same episode, Tony has a line that refers to the season 2 episode "SWAK": "I'd rather get the plague than be a navy cop". Guess what happens in that episode, when he's a navy cop.
  • In the first episode of season 5, the remains believed to be Tony were proved not to be because of the Y-Pestis he caught in Season 2 SWAK.
  • Throughout Season One, after Ari infiltrates NCIS, Gibbs is seen running a facial recognition search on him to find his identity. It is implied that he runs this search several times, despite each time coming up negative.
  • Early episodes included crossover characters from JAG, including Bud Roberts and three appearances by Lt. Cmdr. Faith Coleman, who only appeared once on JAG and who made such an impression in NCIS that it gave the impression she might have been in line to become a regular, but this didn't happen. Bud Roberts returns in the Season 14 premiere, eleven years after his last appearance, now having reached the rank of Captain.
  • Tony has a habit of getting framed for murder. Other characters tend to react with variations of "Again?" He's not above joking about it himself:
    Tony: And to think, I almost made it through an entire year without being accused of murder.
  • The high likelihood of Abby's assistant turning out to be the culprit has been pointed out:
    Tony: Like I said, it's always the maid.
    Ziva: No, you have said that it's always the janitor, or the butler, or anyone assigned to work in Abby's lab.
  • The PC's, the gang from S6Ep16 show up again in Season 7, episode 9.
  • A quick one in the S11 premier. Abby is thinking out loud that they should have done more to prevent the events from the S10 finale, like a hunger strike. Palmer says he couldn't do that because he gets lightheaded without a 4 o'clock snack, a nod to the character's diabetes.
  • Season 12's "Check", where the Big Bad taunted Gibbs by replicating the murders of Jenny Shepherd (occurred in Season 5), Mike Franks (occurred in Season 8), and capped it off by luring Gibbs and ex-wife Diane to a rooftop. Cue Gibbs' and the audience's dawning horror as he looked at the surroundings and realized Diane was about to be sniped down just like Caitlin Todd a decade earlier (Season 2). For added benefit, the killer was the half-brother of Ari, a terrorist who. . . terrorized the team as early as Season 1.
  • Very early in the show's run it's explained that Tony snagged a nice apartment for cheap because it was the site of a triple homicide. This is the basis for the plot of a Season 14 episode when the apartment's new occupant, McGee, is nearly killed by two intruders seeking loot left behind the original murderer (they were all involved in a smuggling operation).
  • As Tony packs up to leave at the end of Season 13, one of the items in his box is a photo of him and Kate, murdered at the end of Season 2. Earlier in the episode, having learned of Ziva's death, Gibbs gazes at the memorial wall, which indeed features the name of every agent who has died during the show's tenure.
  • At the end of the Season 12 episode "The Lost Boys", after escorting Dorneget's body home, Gibbs hallucinates him standing along with Mike (killed at the end of Season 8), Jenny (killed at the end of Season 5), Paula Cassidy (killed halfway through Season 4), Kate (killed at the end of Season 2), and Chris Pacci (killed halfway through Season 1).
  • Abby's final episode features several flashbacks to key moments of hers, plus the reappearance of several criminals she specifically helped put away (oddly, there is no mention of her stalker ex from Season 3, nor Chip, her assistant who tried to frame Tony for murder).
  • Speaking of Tony, since his departure, he's mentioned often enough that he may as well be The Ghost rather than truly gone.
• Contract on the Hitman: Tony and Ziva pretend to be a pair of married assassins in the beginning of the episode in order to find out who their target was. When its revealed that the couple was in fact the target, Hilarity Ensues.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • In Season 10's "You Better Watch Out" two robbers decided to hit a place without much security in the Washington DC area on May 2, 2011. This is the night the Navy SEALs took out Osama bin Ladin. As a result, Homeland would have increased satellite surveillance on the capital in case of retaliation. As a result, the robbers were caught on that tape.
  • In season 13 where Ducky finally finds his long-lost half brother, the criminals abduct a totally different Nicholas Mallard... who also happened to be British, the right age, AND living in the same city as Ducky's brother.
• Convenient Slow Dance: Tony and Ziva get one in season 10's "Berlin."
• Convicted by Public Opinion: "Day In Court" features a Petty Officer who faces this after a murder charge laid against him falls apart when he gets Off on a Technicality and requests that he be formally charged and tried so that he can be formally cleared.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: McGee tends to get these from Gibbs for major screw-ups. In the episode with Abby's stalker ex, Gibbs took McGee's chair away from him and made him earn it back. In another episode, Gibbs banned McGee from leaving the elevator.
  • Abby knows about the chair thing, and approves. In a later episode when someone who's pissed her off is in Gibbs's custody, she is incensed that "He gets a chair?!?"
• Cool Boat: Gibbs always seems to be working on one in his basement; it's implied to be therapeutic for him. When he gets the finished boat out of the basement, no one knows how he does it. Knocking down one of the walls is mentioned a few times, but it's never confirmed.
• Cool Car: Most of the cast members are seen driving a cool car of one kind or another at some point.
  • Ducky's Vintage Morgan. Complete with right hand drive. He restored it from termite-ridden near-rubbish to pristine condition.
  • Gibbs' 1971 Dodge Challenger muscle car his father had been hanging onto after restoring it for him.
  • Abby's 1930's Ford hot rod.
  • Tony's 1960's Mustang.
  • Ziva's Mini.
• Cool Old Guy:
  • Mike Franks, literally.
  • Jackson Gibbs is fairly badass in his own right although he's not really a grandpa anymore.
  • Ducky gets his own moments of this occasionally, like when he faced Ari at gunpoint and told him he would enjoy weighing his liver and had Fornell in a sleeper hold. And the time he was held prisoner and used a scalpel to very precisely cut one of his captor's arteries, giving him the options of surrender or dying within minutes from blood loss.
  • In "Broken Arrow", DiNozzo Senior has a small badass moment himself.
• Couch Gag: In the Season 12 opening credits. As the title flashes on the screen (with the exception of the lower right, which always shows Gibbs with a model Craftsman boat), the various panels show clips from the episode that is being broadcast.
• Creator Cameo: Donald P Bellisario's photo used to be on the NCIS Most Wanted wall and the distinct 'phmpht' sound that accompanies the black-and-white bookends to the show's acts was made by Bellisario puffing into a microphone.
• Creepy Child: Rachel from the episode Parental Guidance Suggested is a child sociopath who shot her own mother in the back.
• Creepy Stalker Van: In the second season premiere, Team Gibbs must rescue a blind child. When they find her, she remarks that she was in a vehicle with no windows, since she couldn't feel the sun on her face. After looking at security tapes, DiNozzo says they found a white van with no windows and that the plates came back as stolen.
• The Croc Is Ticking: Having been attacked by two previous lab aides, Abby once tried to convince a visiting intern to wear bells so she could tell whether he was sneaking up on her.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • Tony gives this impression, especially in the early seasons, but he's not at all incompetent...if he were, Gibbs would've never recruited him.
  • Palmer has a moment of this in the episode where he nearly gets shot. Towards the end, the guy who fired at him nearly gets away from the team. Palmer nixes these plans by smashing his car into the bastard's truck while screaming like a maniac.
  • Abby goes into this sometimes. One episode had her being kidnapped by a hired gun. Gibbs and Tony track her down and hear muffled screaming from the van she is in. They approach and find that Abby is repeatedly attacking him with her taser.
    Abby: And don't look up my skirt! *Taze*
  • "Frame-Up" (3.09) had lab assistant Chip attacking her with a knife while she was unarmed. By the time the others rush down to her lab, they find that she has hogtied Chip with duct tape all by herself.
    Abby: Now can I work alone?
• The Cutie: Abby, occasionally.
• Cycle of Revenge: Reynosas vs Gibbs. It ends when Gibbs tricks one Reynosa sibling into killing the other.
• Danger Takes A Back Seat: In "Crescent City" (the Back Door Pilot for NCIS: New Orleans), FBI Agent Doyle is killed by a murderer hiding in the back seat of the car.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: The Season 18 episode Sangre dealt with Nick Torres's father, Miguel abandoning Nick and his sister during their childhood when he did not agree with Manuel Noriega's corruption. In order to facilitate their safety, Miguel disappeared on them and became a CIA asset until the episode's murder case led to an awkward reunion with Nick. Despite having apparently reconciled with Nick, Miguel disappears on Nick again to carry out CIA covert operations.
• Dark Reprise: With David McCallum's passing and The Stories We Leave Behind opening with Ducky dying in his sleep, the opening credits are set to a Lonely Piano Piece of the main theme.
• Darker and Edgier: The Season 8 two-part finale was pretty much the darkest episode to date, as it dealt with a serial killer that was the result of Operation Frankenstein, a Navy project to create the ultimate assassin, and none of the usual comic relief exists.
  • Inverted by the fact NCIS in the series evolved from the NIS, Naval Investigative Service, which is depicted as being a covert, CIA/NSA-like entity that is shown conducting assassinations and "red tests" (agents being given assignments with the aim of them committing their first kill), and in one Season 8 episode is shown recruiting Leon Vance in a manner similar to how Sydney Bristow is recruited by SD-6 in Alias. Although modern-day NCIS is shown doing covert operations (particularly Tony's season-long deep undercover op), things like assassinations have so far not been part of the usual mandate. The spin-off, NCIS:Los Angeles, restores some of the NIS trappings, such as having a somewhat secret base of operations.
• Dead Guy Junior: Quite a few.
  • Palmer names his daughter after his mentor's late mother (Victoria).
  • Ziva names her daughter after her late sister (Tali).
  • McGee has two - a son named after his late father (John) and a daughter named after a police officer who practically died in his arms earlier that day (Morgan).
• Dead Person Conversation:
  • Monkey-wrenched every which way in "Kill Ari".
  • We see it again after (and even some before) Mike Franks gets killed.
  • Mike Franks returns to talk some sense into Gibbs while they deal with The Calling and the death of Agent Dornaget. After Gibbs is shot and on the operating table Mike chides him for being so trusting of the kid who later tried to kill him (the boy actually felt horrible about it and was relived to learn Gibbs had survived) and Kelly, Gibbs' daughter, also shows up to remind him he still has work to do.
• Death Glare:
  • Gibbs, bordering on Once an Episode in earlier seasons.
  • Karen Bright from "Smoked", when she's exposed as the actual serial killer. She flashes Gibbs and Fornell a look that would vaporize lead.
• Death Faked for You: Variation in the Season 9 Finale: Gibbs and the NCIS team has Jonathan Cole brought into NCIS, while also faking his escape from prison as well, in order to recruit him to act as a double agent for them in tracking down Dearing, and in exchange, they might give him a lighter sentence.
• Death in the Clouds: The pilot episode, "Yankee White", and "Jet Lag".
• Deep Cover Agent:
  • Tony in Season 4.
  • Trent Kort, the CIA agent who also infiltrated René Benoît's arms-dealing enterprise.
  • Agent Nick Torres, prior to his arrival in Season 14. He unintentionally followed his father, Miguel's footsteps.
• Defecting for Love: In S3 Ep14 "Light Sleeper" a North Korean spy who married a US Marine as part of her cell's infiltration of the US comes to love her husband and the daughter they had. She turns on her teammates and hunts them down so they cannot pull off the attack that is likely to come.
• Defiant Captive: In S11 E10, the villain of the episode kidnaps Fornell's daughter. She immediately manages to get important information to the team when contact is first made, and after he seemingly makes his escape after the exchange without any way of being followed (the burn phone he gave them to allegedly tell them her location turned out to have had all of its electronics stripped), she reminds them that she is a Fornell. Cut to the team tracking the bad guy down by a Bluetooth-enabled device that she planted on him.
• Defictionalization: Inverted in season 4, the team discovers that McGee wrote a crime 'fiction' book using all of them as characters with the names changed, but little else- and he never asked any of them for permission or warned them that he was writing about them. Unsurprisingly, everyone is pissed at him.
• Delivery Guy Infiltration: Used in several episodes. Lampshaded in the episode "Identity Crisis," when Tony comments on how he once saw a kid in a liquor store T-shirt and carrying a brown paper bag walk right into a high-security building.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The show was originally named "Navy NCIS", despite the N standing for Navy. This was most likely done to prevent confusion with CSI, something which the series lampshades occasionally.
• Derailing Love Interests: Comes up a few times for Tony and Ziva, notably with Jeanne (Tony) and Ray (Ziva). Ray gets as far as proposing before his fatal flaw is discovered and he is ushered off the show.
  • Jake goes from a loving, adoring husband to Ellie who becomes even more enamored of her after seeing her in action in "Grounded" to an adulterous one. The 180 is so abrupt and inexplicable that the show seems to lampshade it when Ellie tells McGee and DiNozzo about his affair and they ask "Are you sure?", as if they're as bewildered as the viewer.
• Determinator: Gibbs becomes one toward finding Ari over the course of the second season. A repeated motif is the one monitor on his desk that's dedicated to running a facial recognition program on Ari. After Ari briefly kidnaps Kate, Gibbs starts displaying Ahab-ish tendencies, which DiNozzo lampshades.
• Didn't See That Coming: Season 8 makes a big deal about trying to trying to protect Eli David in episode 8, only for a bomb to go off that wounds him and Director Vance. Turns out that for all the consideration of foreign threats the cast were attempting to account for, the following episode reveals it was little more than a petty power grab attempt from McCallister, a retired NCIS Special Agent that tried to kill Eli and Vance in one fell swoop for the latter's chair while framing it on Eli.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Any lawyer in this series is obviously an obstruction to the case, barring very rare exceptions. But if they start getting personally involved, going out of their way to be at a client's case or directly obstructing the investigation as much as possible, there's usually one of two things that happen: either they're so pragmatic for their case that they're completely blind to how Obviously Evil their client is and get blindsided by the case, or the lawyer is in on it themselves and get arrested in the end. Given this team's track record for arrested lawyers, you'd think someone would be more cautious.
  • The perp in Season 4's "Suspicion" took dirty bribes to transport a pair of what they thought were just "rich kids looking to party" from Iraq to the United States, having supposedly vetted them despite the risks that the NCIS team openly retort to the perp's face. When they go to apprehend the two illegal immigrants and have to defend themselves mid-arrest, Ziva then points Gibbs to a jihadist banner on the garage wall and active bombs being built. All of the already-arrested perp's claims fall apart showing they were Only in It for the Money rather than their false pretenses of caring for their country.
• Did the Earth Move for You, Too?: Parodied in the season 10 premiere, when Tony and Ziva are trapped in an elevator. After trying to escape (with Ziva using Tony as a human stepladder to reach the ceiling hatch), the elevator is jarred and knocks them both down. Then:
  Ziva: We slipped.
  Tony: Did we? I thought the earth moved.
• Did They or Didn't They?: Teased for Tony and Ziva on occassion.
  • Once in "Undercovers" in which they pretend to have sex while undercover as married assassins. It gets a Call-Back in season 8, when it comes up in conversation with Tony and McGee and Tony skirts around the question of whether it was all for show or not.
  • And season 7's "Jetlag" in which both Tony and Ziva lie about who took the couch and who took the bed.
  • In “Family First,” it’s revealed through the appearance of Tali, Tony and Ziva’s daughter that they did.
• Did You Just Have Sex?:
  • S7 Ep 07, "Endgame", has Tony doing this when McGee walks into the office extremely happy. Tony refers to it as "Pulling a Heston" in a reference to Planet of the Apes (1968).
  • Diana "suggests" this during an op with NCIS and the FBI. Fornell just angrily looks at McGee, the latter telling off Diana that her jokes need to stop.
• Dirty Cop: In "Baltimore", we learn that DiNozzo left the titular police department when he learned that his partner was one.
• Disability Alibi: In “Wide Awake”, all evidence of the week’s murder points to an insomniac marine who was hypnotized into doing it until Jimmy does another read-through of her medical records and finds out she’s severely allergic to peanuts. A large amount of peanut shells and peanut dust were littered all over the crime scene because the victim loved feeding the legume in question to his pet crows. If the marine actually did commit the murder while hypnotized she would have gone into a severe anaphylactic shock and would have died at the crime scene because she wouldn’t have been in control of her own body and wouldn’t have been able to have gotten medical help in time.
• Disappeared Dad: Jackie Vance's. She was too nice a person to speak ill of him so her kids thought he was dead. Vance, who despised him for abandoning Jackie and her brother, changes his mind about letting his kids meet him after he overhears Abby saying that it's Christmas and "forgiveness and charity is infectious!"
  • Miguel Torres, Nick's estranged father. Miguel is a former Panamanian police officer who rebelled against Manuel Noriega and abandoned his wife, son and daughter at a church to ensure their safety and became a covert CIA asset throughout Nick's childhood. After helping Nick solve a murder case in a Season 18 episode, Miguel disappears on Nick again despite making attempts to reconcile with his son.
  • And on the deceased side, three seasons in a row have had the father of a main character dying: Ziva's in season ten, Gibbs' in season eleven, and McGee's in season twelve.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In "Cadence", a member of a Military Academy Honor Corps (Basically a semi-official student group to haze undisciplined or underperforming cadets) put a girl through continual discipline details for any reason he could think of until she was Driven to Suicide... because she wouldn't date him.
• Distaff Counterpart: The CGIS team leader in "Jurisdiction" acts so much like Gibbs that it's essentially lampshaded by the entire NCIS staff. Tony even asks Gibbs whether he had any long-lost sisters or not.
• Distressed Dude:
  • Generally, Tony is the resident dude in distress, but he usually manages to get himself out of his situations by himself.
    • Quite obvious in season 8 episode 5, "Dead Air" in which the resident Badass Israeli Action Girl jumps on an oblivious Tony to save him from a bomb blast.
  • Dr. Mallard in the episode "Meat Puzzle".
• Distressed Woodchopping: In "Day in Court", Ellie finds out that Jake has been cheating on her; the episode ends with her taking a leave of absence from NCIS and returning to her family farm in Oklahoma so she can sort out her emotions over the infidelity without being distracted by Jake or work. The first time we see Ellie during the next episode, she's chopping up several logs into wood chunks to fuel the house's furnace.
• The Don: René Benoît.
• Don't Call Me "Sir":
  • Gibbs, right down to the "I work for a living" crack. It makes sense; he was a gunnery sergeant, which is a non-commissioned rank.
    • Abby uses this for a bit of fun with Gibbs:
    Abby: Thank you, sir.
    Gibbs: Don't call me sir.
    Abby: Thank you, ma'am. *walks off*
    Gibbs: *smiles a bit*
  • If you call Ziva "Ma'am"...
• Donut Mess with a Cop: In "Willoughby", the team ends up having a stakeout in the upper floor of a bakery, and the manager provides the agents with an unlimited supply of free donut holes.
• Dope Slap: Gibbs' favorite form of non-verbal discipline (besides his Death Glare), to the point that his team calls it the "Gibbs Slap". As he explains to Ducky in an early episode (paraphrasing), "A slap in the face is humiliating; on the back of the head, it's a wake-up call." It's revealed in a later season that Gibbs, as a probie, got the same treatment from Mike Franks; this is subverted in the episode "Hiatus Pt. 2".
  Franks: You got old, Marine.
  Gibbs: Have you looked in the mirror, lately?
  Franks reaches around to slap the back of Gibbs' head, but stops.
  Franks: If you weren't just in a coma.
  • Gibbs isn't the only one to use it; it's been done by both Tony and Abby on McGee, Tony on Ziva, Ziva on Tony...even characters on themselves when Gibbs is not around, but they know they've done something monumentally stupid. Gibbs has also done this to himself after he compromised evidence to let a Marine (who normally wouldn't have gotten in, due to health reasons) avoid confessing to a crime he didn't commit. In an episode where Gibbs had Trauma-Induced Amnesia, Ziva takes his hand and uses it to slap her own head, which triggers his memory recall.
    • Occasionally they dope-slap themselves in Gibbs' presence just to save him the trouble, usually preceded by a "This one's on me, boss."
    • In a crossover with NCIS: Los Angeles, Tony visits the LA team. By the end of the episode, Hetty Lange dope-slaps him, at Gibbs's request.
  • In one episode, the team had to attend a mandatory Sensitivity Training seminar. Tony casually asked if it would be okay to receive such a slap from a coworker, and received the predictable reply that it was workplace harassment. Cue a round of shifty looks from the entire team and a hasty backpedal from Tony when the presenter asked if such a thing had actually happened.
  • Gibbs even slaps Palmer in one episode as a form of congratulations. Abby is confused as to how liquid nitrogen used to kill the victim had traces of food in it, and Palmer is the one to suggest that the nitrogen was delivered via the victim's thermos. It's worth noting that Gibbs had just congratulated Abby with his customary kiss on the cheek and a "well done, Abbs," as is typical, and Palmer then leaned forward as if expecting the same. Of course, this is after the episode that revealed that Palmer likes such treatment...which is probably why it was used as congratulations.
  • It's also shown to be a sort of term (or slap) of endearment. Gibbs won't bother to head slap you unless he knows you're worth it. This is demonstrated in one of the early Ziva episodes where Gibbs gives her a light-hearted version and she takes it as a sign that she belongs to the team.
  • The amount of dope-slapping has been toned down as of late, because it's been reported that fans of the show were doing it to Michael Weatherly in public.
• Double Agent:
  • Agent Lee.
  • A conversation between Gibbs and Vance implies that Ziva was this as well, something that was treated as pretty much a given by everyone in her first season.
  • NCIS attempts to have Jonathan Cole act as this to them regarding Harper Dearing in the Season 9 Finale, which Cole agrees to in exchange for a lighter sentence when he gets back to prison. Unfortunately, Dearing was smart enough to realize what the NCIS was planning to do, so he instead has a waitress deliver the cellphone to Cole for him and then communicate with him via phone and relay a message to Gibbs.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Subverted in S3 Ep 14, "Light Sleeper". The initial suspect in the murder of a Korean-born woman is her Marine husband. Their neighbor claimed she frequently heard them screaming at each other, leading her to believe that husband was abusive. However, the husband reveals to Gibbs in interrogation that she was the abusive one and proves it by lifting up his shirt to reveal a large burn mark where she hit him with an iron. The team actually takes him seriously and release him shortly after the reveal.
• Double Tap: The show has almost without exception averted this; both here and in real life, Federal agents never fire only once or twice. They will keep shooting you until either you fall down or they run out of bullets, whichever comes first.
• Dragon Ascendant: Lampshaded in Season Six's "Nine Lives". Fornell ruefully recalls that he made his career taking down a New York crime boss, only to watch helplessly as one of his errand boys, Rick Azari - whom Fornell had dismissed as a "punk" of no account - take over the organization and build it back even better, to the point where the FBI and NCIS are both trying to take him down. After Azari is killed, the episode ends with a news report that two of his senior lieutenants have been killed, indicating that his chief bodyguard is following in his boss's footsteps, and the cycle is starting all over again.
• Dramatic Necklace Removal: Ziva gets one where a necklace her daughter made her wear gets ripped off her neck. When the jerk who took it has it wrapped around his fingers, she gets desperate when he is dead that she has to chop off the fingers.
• Dramedy: The series gets downright serious at times and Anyone Can Die, but it's an extremely popular Long Runner because of the liberal use of funny and heartwarming moments in the episodes.
• Dress Code: Forcing Abby to follow one makes her so uncomfortable that it actually hurts her analytical skills.
• Dress Hits Floor: Ziva in "Under Covers."
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Gibbs has shifted into this mode more than once to intimidate suspects, especially if they're Marines.
• Drives Like Crazy: Gibbs, Ziva, and Tony in the earlier seasons. When Kate is in a car that a very angry Gibbs is driving, this conversation ensues:
  Kate: Gibbs is driving.\\

Abby: I'm saying a prayer in many languages.

• A quote by Shepard about Ziva is telling (this is after she drove the team's van like a maniac and made Tony puke):
  Shepard: I forgot to mention, I think she may have been an Eastern European cab driver in a past life.
• Ziva tries to make this a Justified Trope by saying her driving style is good for avoiding ambushes and IEDs. It's pointed out to her that neither scenario is likely to be encountered in the US.
• In "Aliyah" we find out that even in Israel Ziva is regarded as a crazy driver.
  Eli: With traffic, I wasn't expecting you for another hour.
  Ziva: I drove.
  Eli: Enough said.
• We find out from Eli in "Enemies Foreign" that we have Ziva's mother to thank for it.

• Driven to Suicide: A flashback in "Hiatus" shows Gibbs seriously considering putting a gun in his mouth after the deaths of his wife and daughter.
• Driving a Desk: While this show is usually pretty good about avoiding this trope, In the Season 15 finale, Vance is driving a car that is clearly still in park.
• Driving Stick: Lampshaded by Ari, when Gerald attempts to use Ducky's car to make an escape.
  Ari: Obviously, Gerald does not have an intimate relationship with a standard transmission.
• Dude, Not Funny!: Palmer often gets called out when making jokes around the autopsy table, usually because they're not very funny or because the timing is terrible.
• Due to the Dead: Jackson Gibbs received a burial with full honors.
• Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • Jenny Shephard takes down five hitmen aiming to ambush her.
  • Mike Franks goes down fighting Jason Cobbs in a knife fight and does some damage along the way.
  My name is Mike Franks! I figure I got one more fight left in me!... You want it?
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Compare NCIS agents in series proper to the agents who would show up in the parent show JAG. In the parent show, they were shown as arrogant investigators who would overlook evidence and miss connections that Harm, Mac, Bud, and others would need to find so justice would be done. It is shocking in some instances when this is compared to the general appearance of agents who look into various leads and don't discount the implausible.
  • While Gibbs's astounding bad luck in the marriage department was well-known from the beginning of Season 1, it wasn't until the end of Season 3 that we learned about Shannon and Kelly and the immense trauma their deaths had on Gibbs.
  • At the start of the series, Gibbs was a lot more talkative, smiled more often, and had just as many quips as the other characters. He only started settling into the "functional mute"' character towards the end of the first season and it took a while longer for it to properly take hold.
  • Abby had a deeper, huskier voice in the beginning and was flirtatious^note with some serious sexual overtones with nearly every male character she interacted with (including Gibbs!). It took a while before she became the manic and cheerfully playful character most people know her as.
  • Early on, Tony had a more casual dress style and sloppier hair. He also wasn't as much of a movie nerd and wore glasses in his first appearances.
    • Most shockingly, he fails to recognize The Maltese Falcon early in the first season.
    • As late as "Call to Silence", about a third of the way through Season Two, he recommends that Kate go see Halloween: Resurrection (and he calls it "Halloween 8"). A film geek like Tony would never recommend that film (which was universally derided by critics and audiences, especially fans of the series), even as a joke.
  • In his first appearance in the first episode, Special Agent Fornell shows no recognition of Gibbs and it's clear the two men are not friends. Their friendship and its backstory was only developed in the season two finale.
  • The black-and-white shots that start and conclude each segment didn't begin until the Season 2 episode "Lt. Jane Doe". For those who started watching the show later in its tenure, watching the first season episodes with regular fade/cut to black can be very strange.
  • A great many of the recurring guest stars who show up at least once a season in the later years (as in, all of them other than Fornell) were introduced fairly late. Mike Franks? Season 4. DiNozzo Sr? Season 7. Diane Fornell? Season 8. Delilah? Mentioned Season 10 finale, first appeared on screen in season 11.
  • When we first meet Gibbs' father, we see an old photo of him with a black man in front of the general store, who we're told is named Leroy Jethro, an old friend of Jackson's and the man Gibbs was named after. He's spoken of in past tense and with fondness. In a later season episode when Gibbs finds Leroy's old war medal at a pawn shop, we learn his full name is Leroy Jethro Moore, he's still very much living and Jackson has a long-running grudge against him that results in him even barely acknowledging the man exists.
  • In season 1 and early season 2 it's implied McGee and Abby have some kind of relationship, but what exactly it entails is never explained and the whole thing seems to just be forgotten about by the end of season 2
• Easter Egg: In one episode, the team finds a voice synthesizer speaking individual words, including "...yankee, white...". "Yankee White" is the pilot episode.
• Elevator Conference: Gibbs frequently halts the NCIS elevator for private conversations. He typically does this to quietly confront people when they aren't being upfront with him. Though sometimes the elevator is used to pass information about security leaks or as a safe meeting place when the NCIS building itself is compromised. Apparently this is something Gibbs gets from Mike Franks.
• Embarrassing Hobby: In one episode, it's discovered that the Victim of the Week is a very prolific collector of vintage television lunchboxes. Though the victim is too... well... dead to be embarrassed by it at the time, he had been keeping his hobby secret from his neighbors and basically every member of the cast mocks him for it. Amusingly, due to the lack of any other leads at the time, they briefly investigate the possibility that he was murdered as a result of a lunchbox deal gone horribly wrong (he wasn't).
• Embarrassing Old Photo:
  • One of the sub-plots of S2 Ep 19, "Conspiracy Theory". While vacationing in Panama, Tony discovers a photo of Kate winning a Wet T-Shirt Contest there years earlier. He wasn't going to mention it, but then she decided to share his college nickname with everyone. He torments her with it throughout the episode. She uses photoshop to create an "old photo" of him. And then, once they've had enough of holding it over each other, they both decided to delete it at the same time, but both secretly planned to send it to Gibbs instead. Cue hurried rushes from the elevator when they hear Gibbs' computer give the "new email" chime twice in succession, and an amused expression when Gibbs looks at the emails.
  • In a season 10 episode, McGee finds a high school photo of Tony - with a truly horrific 80s hairstyle - and shows it to Ziva.
• Emergency Impersonation: Ducky impersonates the deceased English arms dealer to try to capture La Grenouille. (Ducky is the only 60-year-old Englishman they know.)
• Empathic Environment: After Ari kills Kate, it is constantly raining as the team grieves for her and Gibbs blames himself. After Ari is himself killed and Gibbs comes to terms with it, it becomes sunny again. This is actually a favorite trick of the director. In "Swan Song," a major Tonight, Someone Dies episode, the characters repeatedly comment on how it is they think it's going to rain.
• Enfant Terrible: Rachel Barnes, pretty much all of The Calling's child soldiers including one who gets the drop on Gibbs, long after he realizes he been played.
• Engineered Public Confession: Several. The most memorable one involves a druggie kid and his equally messed up mother who confesses while the kid is wearing a Hidden Wire.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Tony frequently has moments where he realizes he missed some obvious clue and solves the case.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Ari is implied to have cared for his late mother and believed his father is responsible for her death. He used that as his Freudian Excuse for joining Hamas, as his father was a Mossad director.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: invoked deliberately by Ziva at one point: while they people she's killed were all murderers, terrorists, and the like, she acknowledges most of them probably did have innocent family members who mourned their loss, a fact she finds immensely sad considering one such person was her own brother Ari, who wasn't always so evil and who she still feels bad about.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • From Season 10's "Gone" Miranda Pennebaker, who knows Gibbs, has a reputation for buying and selling pretty much anything, save people. Human trafficking is the one area she didn't get into but because of her connections to that world, Gibbs goes to her to help save an abducted a teenage girl likely slated to be sold as a wife or sex slave.
  • Similarly, Agah Bayar agrees to help the team pro-bono in Season 13's "The Lost Boys" because he believes in "women and children first".
    • From the same episode, one of a trio of radicalized Americans has no problem helping the team fight the splinter group recruiting Child Soldiers because they no longer have a religious purpose and just want to cause chaos.
  • In Season 13's "Deja Vu", a gang member is suspected of killing the Navy servicewoman who was scheduled to testify at his murder trial; he says he may be no saint, but his younger brother serves in the U.S. military, and he would never attack anyone else who does.
• Everybody Is Single: Though Gibbs has been married four times (Once widowed, thrice divorced), and McGee and Abby used to date. Tony frequently has one night/weekend/week stands, but was with René Benoît's daughter for most of that season. Most of the characters have brief flings, sometimes running multiple episodes (usually with characters that may or may not be seen on-screen), presumably brief due to the stress of their jobs. Averted by of all people, Leon Vance, who has a wife (until her death) and two kids.
  • In season 7, Palmer actually has a (offscreen) girlfriend that everybody knows about.
    • Not to mention the onscreen fling between Palmer and Lee
    • In the season 9 opening episode, it is pointed out that Palmer is getting married the following spring and is mentioned in the following episodes. Though the wedding is not shown, his bachelor party occurs in the penultimate episode of the season - as part of a stakeout.
  • Ziva dates a man named Ray for a few episodes. They go skiing together. In a later season he proposes to her and she responds by decking him and arresting him for murder.
  • Initially averted with Ellie Bishop, who is also married. We see her husband Jake for the first time in "Grounded", but she eventually breaks up with him after discovering that he's been unfaithful.
  • McGee ends up in a relationship with a DoD analyst named Delilah at the end of season eleven. At the end of season 13 they've moved in together and they marry at the end of season 14. They later have two children.
  • Alden Parker was married to an FBI colleague and later divorced her some time prior to his appearance on the show, and it was revealed in the Season 20 episode Bridges that he had an ex-girlfriend from his childhood that he never got over, which was the main reason why he got divorced.
• Everybody Lives: "See No Evil" from season two, and "Bait" from season three.
• Everyone Can See It: It becomes a Running Gag after awhile to have someone outside the team (or working with the team) comment on just how close Tony and Ziva are to each other.
  • After Palmer and Knight get a [1], in Season 19 the pair try to keep their relationship a low profile during Season 20. However, everyone else, including the Hawaii team (Ernie in particular) correctly guess that they are already a couple.
• Everyone's Baby Sister: The best way to make something personal for the entire team is to threaten Abby. This can be seen when you compare an episode like "Bloodbath," where someone is after Abby, to episodes like "Frame Up," "Reveille," "Probie," and "Recoil," where the threats against Tony, Kate, McGee, and Ziva are take seriously, but not as personally.
• Everything Is Online: Seriously. Everything. Including pacemakers.
  • Terrifying Truth in Television. Pacemakers actually can be hacked... and manipulated.
  • In one season 13 episode, a wounded Marine Gibbs is talking to hangs a big lampshade on this by commenting that he had looked Gibbs up online.
• Evil Laugh: Tony lets out an epic one when he discovers a picture of the prudish Kate taking part in a Wet T-Shirt Contest. The episode ends with his mad cackling as the camera fades to black.
• Eyes Never Lie: Gibbs is pretty much an infallible human lie detector. If you lie while he's looking you in the eye, he'll know. Lampshaded back on JAG when he was investigating Harm.
  Harm: How long you been doing this, Gunny?
  Gibbs: Seventeen years.
  Harm: And can you tell if someone's lying to you by looking in their eyes?
  Gibbs: Yes I can.
  Harm: Then why don't you just ask me, Gunny? Why don't you just ask me?
  Gibbs: *pause* Would you kill for your brother?
  Harm: *makes Oh, Crap! face*
• Exact Words:
  • Jimmy Palmer does this with Sexual Harassment Seminar by taking the "No touching other people" policy to its extremes, and the confused bureaucrat who doesn't know he's a coroner.
  Palmer: What if your job includes touching, ah, naked people...
  Woman: That is inappropriate at any time.
  Palmer: Even if they're dead?
  Woman: [sternly] Why are you touching dead naked people?!
  Palmer: Well, I work in autopsy...
  • Palmer has been targeted by an assassin and follows the team to the assasin's hideout. Gibbs sees him and orders him to stay in the car. Palmer sees the assassin trying to flee and uses his car as a battering ram against the assassin's truck.
  Gibbs: What the hell were you thinking?!
  Palmer: I did not get out of the car.
  Gibbs: Don't ever do it again!
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Gibbs keeps his hair fairly short, but in the second part of "Hiatus", while suffering from amnesia, he cuts his hair back to the much shorter crewcut variant he wore when he was a probie.
  • Gibbs having a longer-than-Marine-regs haircut gets made fun of in "My Other Left Foot" by a gunnery sergeant Gibbs met years before as an MP.
  Gunny: (trying to remember Gibbs) He was high and tight then.
  Gibbs: (rubs hair) Not exactly shaggy, Gunny.
  Gunny: I've seen sheepdogs shorter.
  • "Baltimore" reveals that, at the time that Tony joined NCIS, Gibbs' haircut was similar to his look from the first couple of seasons, if not as long.
• Eye Scream: Several.
  • In one episode, the victim's eye was missing. He pulled out his own eye and ate it!
  • One episode was kicked off by someone being sent a pair of human eyes.
  • In "Forced Entry" the guy who put together the fake online chats was found with his throat slashed and his eyes gouged out.
  • CIA agent Trent Kort got his eye gouged out by the Port-to-Port Killer.
  • In "Engaged, Part II" a thirteen year-old girl is blinded after terrorists throw hot grease into her face.
• Expy: The International Doctors Group for Médecins Sans Frontières in "Saviors". It's lampshaded in the episode itself with the former as a latter-type of group.

F-J

• Facial Dialogue: Gibbs can hold entire conversations with squints, glares, smirks, and Gibbs slaps. Every episode has at least one such scene.
• Fair Cop: The entire main cast. Sean Murray as Agent McGee would seem to be the only one to avert this, but then he lost a good amount of weight entering Season 7, and now we can pretty much include the whole crew.
• Fake Alibi: A series of similar murders lead the team to think they have a serial killer on the loose. Then they realize that two of the murders were smokescreens, intended to hide the actual motive for the third one. They have a suspect and a good circumstantial case against her, but she has a firm alibi with multiple witnesses and even a bank's security cameras. Only at the last moment does Gibbs think to check her background, whereupon he finds out that she has a twin sister.
• Fake First Kiss: Tony and Ziva kiss and have a simulated sex sequence while undercover as a couple. The episode was aptly titled Under Covers.
• Family of Choice: Unsuprisingly given a lot of the characters' family backstories, the team forms a family dynamic, with Gibbs and Ducky acting as father/grandfather figures for pretty much all the other characters. All the characters even acknowledge this in universe.
  Ziva: Are you lonely, Gibbs?
  Gibbs: You're never alone when you have kids. *kisses Ziva on the forehead* Good night, kid.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: At the end of one Season 6 episode, a young Marine mentions that his mother took care of Gibbs when he was wounded on a mission in her country. Gibbs tells the Marine that his mother was already pregnant when they met. Seconds later, in Vance's office, Vance asks Gibbs if Gibbs told the young man that his mission had been to kill his father.
• Fanservice:
  • Abby, mostly.
  • At times, Director Shepard, especially after wardrobe started putting her in tight skirts and sweaters.
  • There's also the pic of Kate in the Wet T-Shirt Contest (though it is Nipple and Dimed), plus numerous butt shots from Tony's POV.
  • One of the most blatant instances of potential fanservice (Ziva in a fairly skimpy bikini) actually ended up being a half-subversion, as she's lying on her side reading a book and the audience never gets a good look...unless you count the screensaver McGee made from Tony's pictures of her.
  • Then there's the cocktail dress Ziva wore while undercover as a lounge singer. The back is scooped down so low you can see Coté de Pablo's tanline.
  • Kate as an adult version of a 'Catholic Schoolgirl' and as a Dominatrix. This was the lighter side of a very serious episode.
• Fatal Attractor: The entire cast. With relatively few exceptions, every date any of the characters go on will be with someone evil.
• Fatal Family Photo: The ending of the episode "Rekindled" features a Marine out at sea on an amphibious carrier accidentially dropping his cell phone through the grates, reassembling it to see his family photo, only to find flickering lights underneath the door to the electric room (strongly implied to be the arson electrical bomb trap from earlier) before he is knocked back in an explosion.
• Faux Affably Evil: Ari Haswari, Mossad double agent extraordinaire. He's always calm and polite, even when pointing a gun; he's charming and persuasive enough to convince several groups of his loyalty, which is truly only to his own agenda.
• Feuding Families:
  • Season 2 featured a rural area with a Hatfields-McCoys situation.
  • The Reynosas vs Gibbs and his father and teammates.
• Film at 11: In one episode, Gibbs doesn't show up and the rest of the team suspects something happened to him (he lives alone and no one would know, after all). Tony, in his usual style, parodies the concept, complete with desk lamp shade and a coincidental ZNN news report in the background.
  Tony:In a tragic story of obsessive hobbying turned deadly, an NCIS agent was discovered in his basement, crushed between a large homemade boat and an even larger bottle of bourbon. (dramatic pause) Film at eleven.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Gibbs and McGee, as of their ordeal in Paraguay.
• First-Name Basis:
  • Gibbs's father, Jackson, is the only one who consistently addresses him by his first name of Leroy. Ducky goes the middle route via Gibbs' middle name Jethro.
  • Most of the female main characters (Kate, Abby, Jenny, Ziva, Kasie) are usually addressed by their first name. Jenny is a minor exception whenever someone used her title "Director Sheppard," but played straight otherwise.
    • The only exceptions are Ellie, who is usually referred to by her last name (Bishop) by everyone, and Alexandra, who is always referred to as Quinn.
• False Flag Operation: The whole point in the end of "Devil's Triangle".
• Fan Disservice: Used to excellent effect in "Kill Ari", contrasting the Kate-visions of McGee, Tony, and Abby (!) with Ducky and Gibbs' decidedly more morbid versions.
• Flexibility Equals Sex Ability: During combat training in "The Bone Yard", McGee gets Distracted by the Sexy when he sees Kate doing warm-up exercises and comments on how flexible she is to Tony. Unfortunately to him, she overhears, which earns him a Groin Attack during training.
• Foil: An industrial chemist for Abby. Abby is tall (though most of that is her boots^note "most" is subjective, given that Pauley Perrette is 5'10"), brunette, goth, perky, and American while the other scientist is short, stout, blonde, neither goth nor perky, and British. About the only thing they have in common is their love of science and commitment to environmentalism which is why Abby feels sorry about turning her in for corporate espionage and letting a bunch of violent thugs into her workplace (she didn't know her "fellow environmentalists" would be so trigger-happy and when she immediately owned up to everything Abby wrote her a recommendation for a reasonable sentence).
• Foreshadowing: This is actually a standard feature of the show. The two-second black & white sequence at the beginning of each segment is the last image you will see before the next commercial break. So if you see a dead body, or Abby looking frightened, or a car crashing, then you know that you will see events leading up to that situation.
  • Some specific instances: The fourth season's slow leadup to the finale/premiere. Also, as early as season one, Gibbs had a vision of Kate being shot by Ari. Cue the season two finale...
  • The season two finale is crammed full of these. These moments are even lampshaded on the cast commentary.
  • As of "Family First," episodes like "Under Covers", "Engaged Part 2," and "Shabbat Shalom" are this for Tony and Ziva's daughter Tali.
  • In the Season 3 episode “Family Secret”, Gibbs and Jenny eat steak au poivre together. Their relationship never got off the ground due to her death in Season 5. In the Season 14 episode “A Many Splendored Thing”, Vance and Congresswoman Flemming, who were then dating, were about to eat steak au poivre together. Their relationship ultimately failed, too, mirroring the events that happened (in that very same office, no less) 11 years earlier.
• For the Evulz: When Gibbs asks Ari why he murdered Kate Ari just says "to cause you pain."
• Frame-Up:
  • "Lt. Jane Doe" had the killer trying to pin the murder of her ex-girlfriend on a serial rapist and murderer, going so far as to acquire a sample of the rapist's sperm from an evidence freezer. However, unknown to her, the rapist had died five weeks prior, causing her to have a Villainous Breakdown when presented with the rapist's death certificate by Gibbs.
  • The season 3 episode "Frame Up" where Tony was pointed out as the killer through the evidence collected, no matter what Abby did. She did clear Tony in the end, it turned out to be her lab partner Chip, who wanted revenge on Tony for costing him his job.
  • In the season 9 premiere "Nature of the Beast," Tony ended up framed for killing a fellow NCIS agent, Cade, whom he was also intending to bring into custody for stealing equipment from the watchers. Cade also implies in what ultimately turned out to be his last moments that he was actually framed for stealing the microchips and selling them onto the black market. It was later revealed that a fake FBI agent as well as the Director of Special Operations, both of whom were in Watcher 8, were the ones who were actually doing this action.
• Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind: Abby.
• Freeze-Frame Ending: This happens not just at the end of each episode, but the end of every segment, as well. The freeze frame is always black and white.
  • Lampshaded in "Jet Lag", when Ziva remarks that Tony's photo of her would look better in black and white. Cue this trope.
• Freudian Excuse: Gibbs, Tony, McGee, and Ziva all have astounding Daddy Issues that can be seen as the cause of all their idiosyncrasies. Gibbs and Tony are able to reconcile with their fathers after years-long estrangements, but other agents haven't been as fortunate.
  • McGee's father was a career naval officer and a strict disciplinarian leading to the two not speaking for years, only hearing about the other through news delivered by McGee's grandmother. They started speaking again when a case NCIS was investigating brought McGee's father, now an admiral, under scrutiny, but the relationship remained strained and never had the chance to fully heal before the admiral passed away due to cancer in Season 12. McGee is able to find closure, however, through a letter he writes, explaining his issues and feelings, and places in his father's coffin.
  • Ziva eventually had to retreat into seclusion because all (or most of) the trauma she went through from her father's machinations became too much to bear.
  • It isn't until Season 11(!), with the introduction of Ellie Bishop, that an agent of the Major Case Response Team comes from a happy family and is Happily Married. The marriage falls apart in season 13.
  • Sharif. His family was killed by a bomb in a tragic accident, which made him become a terrorist.
• "Friends" Rent Control:
  • Tony lives in a very nice apartment for a cop's salary - having bought it at a significant discount - because it was once the scene of a triple homicide, after which he was the only person who was interested in taking the place. The piano is actually hiding a large bloodstain. A subplot of one episode in season 14 is the team quarreling over who gets to lease that apartment from Tony's dad after Tony leaves the team and the country. Tim ends up with it.
  • In season 14, new agent Nick Torres laments that back when he did undercover work in South America, he could get a gorgeous apartment for $400 US a month. The cost of living in the DC Metro area is much higher.
• Fridge Horror: invoked Of the in-universe type. The season 4 episode "Smoked" has the team find the corpse of a cannibal serial killer (identified due to the fact that he still had a victim's toe in his stomach) where he fell into an abandoned chimney. Fornell had been chasing this guy for years, but eventually they realize his wife was the killer, and hadn't stopped at her husband's death.
  Fornell: You know what's really got me freaked out? If her husband's body hadn't gotten hung up going down that chimney five years ago, she'd still be out there. We'd never have caught her.
  Gibbs: I can do you one better than that.
  Fornell: No, can't top that, Jethro.
  Gibbs: What was a toe doing in her husband's stomach?
• A Friend in Need: In Season 13 episode "Spinning Wheel" flashes back to the 1960s with Ducky and his lawyer friend Angus Clarke. After the events previously shown when Ducky tells Angus' fiance he loves her and the fight in which Ducky knocks two of Angus' teeth out but the woman still marries Angus, Ducky goes to Angus for help in securing custody of Ducky's half-brother from his biological mother. When the legal case is against them, Angus tells Ducky he will give Ducky the 10,000 pounds the mother is asking for in exchange to give up custody of her child. Ducky is shocked at this benevolence from the man, who will simply take Ducky floundering for the words to thank him as payment.
• Funny Background Event: In "Life Before His Eyes", if you look at the foreground carefully, you can see Ari and Leon Vance are playing chess.
• Girls with Guns: In the first episode of season 9, Dr. Rachel Cranston pegs Tony's type as this, along with being attracted to dysfunctional women because he wants to help them.
  Dr. Cranston: Tony, admit it. You like hot girls who carry guns.
  Tony: Who doesn't like hot girls who carry guns?!
• Girlish Pigtails:
  • Abby, occasionally.
  • Child genius Angela in S7 Ep 09, "Child's Play."
• Give Away the Bride: When Ziva is considering marrying Ray, everyone assumes Gibbs would walk her down the aisle. It does not happen, and never will. Marrying Ray, that is, not Gibbs walking her down the aisle. And with Ziva being murdered by Kort (it turns out she's actually alive and went to hiding after the explosion), the second won't happen either, sadly.
• Give Me a Sign: Ziva asks for one after the death of her father. Her sign arrives in the form of Tony, offering her support for whatever she needs.
• The Glomp: Abby, usually to Tony and McGee (especially if they're injured, which seems to be a minor Running Gag).
• Glove Snap: Tony does this comically quite often.
• Golf Clubbing: In S11 Ep 19, "Crescent City" McGee collects the wrong end of this from a perpetrator's father.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Abby is a wonderfully chipper woman but she does seem at times to not understand how terrible some human beings can be and stunned at a truly grisly murder case.
  • Her brother, Luca, is actually worse as Abby notes he assumes anyone he tries to help is a wonderful person who deserves it. This attitude has caused him to unknowingly invest in Ponzi schemes and help a woman fleeing her ex who turns out to be a Russian spy wanted for murder. Despite hearing the truth, Luca still insists on helping her and is stunned the woman turns out to be so dangerous.
• Goomba Stomp: Take Gibbs' utter intolerance for anything that tampers with a crime scene, add his general hatred of technology, mix in the fact that a scheduled and automated roomba was eerily sucking up shell casings at the site of a shooting, and the result is that Gibbs invents the Roomba Stomp.
• The Government: Interagency cooperation (and competition) comes up a lot. And Benoît? He was working with, or for, the CIA.
• Grade-School C.E.O.: A bit character from one early episode runs a nightclub while still in high school.
• Grave Robbing: The criminals in "Silver War" are engaged in this - they are after a stash of 50 Civil War Era rifles, which they plan to sell to collectors for 30 grand each. The victim was Buried Alive because he tried to invoke It Belongs in a Museum.
• Green-Eyed Monster:
  • Some scenes in Season 4 with Ziva show her a little too interested in who Tony speaks with when using his second mobile phone. Sure you are only worried because he is your partner...
  • Almost every episode in later seasons has a witness/local detective/suspect make a pass at Ziva. Cut to a reaction shot from Tony, looking quite displeased. This is often followed by a snarky remark to said witness/suspect/local detective.
  • Abby's generally not wild about seeing McGee interested in other women, or vice versa. However, Abby has recently befriended McGee's current girlfriend Delilah.
    • Then again, Gibbs's flames tend to put her hackles up as well. Mann, anyone?
• Grief-Induced Split: Season 9 Big Bad Harper Dearing used to be a CEO with a happy family. Following his Navy sailor son's death in a shipyard explosion, he began turning to crime, a change that led his wife to divorce him. This, in turn, caused his transformation into the ship-firebombing vengeful terrorist that the NCIS team encounters.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: In episode "Singled Out" Ziva threatened a guy who grabbed her ass that she'll rip his arm off and beat him to death with it.
• The Grim Reaper: In the fourth season finale "Angel of Death", Dr. Jeanne Benoît encounters a little girl outside the hospital who may or may not be the Angel of Death. An odd example from a show usually so completely grounded in reality, especially since it's heavily implied to the viewer that she really is the Angel of Death.
• Gun Stripping:
  • Ziva mentioned once that she cleans her gun every day, even when she hasn't fired it. Of course, unless someone with a gun is wallowing around in extremely dusty or gritty places, cleaning the weapon every day is unnecessary, but given that Ziva's Mossad background means she spent most of her time with her life in danger, her behavior is understandable. She was also shown cleaning her gun while hiding out in Gibbs' basement during season 4's "Shalom", and Gibbs has also been shown cleaning his gun a few times.
  • In "Judgement Day Part 1" Shepard strips and cleans the gun Mike Franks loans her for her final firefight.
• Halloween Episode: "Witch Hunt", "Murder 2.0", and "Code of Conduct"
• Hand Cannon: Ex-Watcher operator Casey Stratton uses a Desert Eagle chambered in .50 Action Express against the NCIS team in "Housekeeping". Lampshaded by McGee: "What's he got, a cannon?"
• Hannibal Lecture: Jerry, a witness in a murder investigation, points out several characters' psychological problems (Abby doesn't admit she likes Tim because she's Married to the Job and doesn't want to risk him being The One and missing out; Gibbs shows that he misses his late wife by keeping his house better than a single man who's never home or locks his door should; Ziva most definitely has feelings for Tony), however it appears he's just really good at reading people and really bad at reading the atmosphere. He later atones by helping Tony rig a surprise Christmas confetti bombardment.
• Happily Married: McGee and Delilah, as of Season 14
  • Vance.
  • Gibbs' first marriage was, from all evidence, happy...not so much since then.
  • Bishop's was this, initially, but became less so after she joined NCIS, finally being capped off with the revelation that her husband is having an affair.
• Harmful to Minors: In Season 4, Episode 2, Fornell is at a party with his daughter when she is approached by a criminal Fornell put away. It's a very tense scene as they talk, enhanced by the fact that everybody in the room besides the two are oblivious. But then comes the man's threat to keep Fornell from following him from the party. Sure, he turned out to be innocent, but that scene gives us a reason for doubt throughout the episode.
  Paulson: Now I'm going to walk out of here. You'll want to follow. But you realize something, and end up just reaching for that cell instead.
  Fornell: Really.
  Paulson: Yeah.
  Fornell: What's that?
  Paulson: I might not be alone. (touches Emily's shoulder) Bye, sweetie.
  Emily: Bye.
  (Paulsen walks out while Fornell moves closer to his daughter)
• Has a Type: Gibbs has a history of marrying red-heads, or having liaisons with them on undercover missions in Paris, or getting picked up by them on his way home from work...you get the idea.
  • Whenever a character hears about a witness or suspect flirting with Gibbs, someone inevitably asks "Is she a redhead?"
  • In "Life Before His Eyes" we see that Gibbs got this from his father, given that his mother is revealed to have been a redhead herself.
  • Colonel Mann is the only exception to this rule so far for Gibbs. They did have a relationship, but then she realized that he'd never be able to forget his wife and daughter. She moved to Hawaii after breaking it off with him. (And even she's a suspiciously reddish shade of blonde!)
• I Have Your Wife: In "Devil's Triad", Emily, Fornell and Diane's thirteen-year-old daughter, gets kidnapped by the head of the money laundering scheme as ransom for the money the team confiscated. While she does get saved at the end of the episode, her parents are completely out of their minds with worry for the remaining quarter of the episode (the former is rallying every asset from the FBI, the latter is freaking out because the kidnapper broke into her house to get to Emily).
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Page 57 from S3 Ep 04, "Silver War". Tony shows Ziva an FHM/Maxim-esque magazine called "GSM".
  Tony: You want something to read?
  Ziva: What do you have?
  Tony: (pulls out magazine) GSM. It's a men's magazine. Most women find it objectifies them.
  Ziva: (pulls out same magazine in Hebrew) I read it on the plane. I especially liked the article on page fifty-seven. In my experience, it works every time.
  Tony: (checks his copy with the inside facing away from the camera) I always thought that was an urban legend.
  • There's a similar scene in Season Twelve's "Choke Hold" when Tony and Tim are scoffing at the sex tips listed in the same magazine, only to have Ellie rather blithely admit that she's pulled off several of them, prompting Tony to ask, "Are you double-jointed?"
• Hearing Voices: Subverted in one episode. A woman was diagnosed with schizophrenia after she said was hearing voices. The reveal? She was being assaulted via a remote audio transmitter so that she would be declared insane and sent back into the asylum.
• Held Gaze:
  • Tony and Ziva, accentuating their UST.
  • Gibbs and Sloane, ditto.
• Help Mistaken for Attack: Minor recurring character Nikki Jardine had this as part of her Backstory. When her brother, Eric, was in Iraq he was injured in an IED attack and when a friendly Iraqi man tried to save Eric's life, the man was shot by US Forces who mistook him for a terrorist. Nikki has tried to help the Iraqi's widow and children ever since in gratitude for his sacrifice.
• Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": Averted in-universe. McGee doesn't make himself the big hero of his books...he does that for his Gibbs Captain Ersatz.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Amnesiac Gibbs' reaction to his Mentor telling him about 9/11.
  • Tony goes into one in the season 7 premiere when he thinks Ziva is dead.
  • Everyone when Mike Franks is killed in "Swan Song". Everyone also had one when Caitlin Todd is killed as well.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Agent Cassidy, who saves the team from a suicide bomber.
  • Agent Lee when she decides that Redemption Equals Death.
  • Subverted by Agent Todd. She takes a bullet to save Gibbs' life, but is saved by her Kevlar vest...and then gets head-sniped by Ari.
  • Jonathan Cole ends up doing this to disarm the bomb in the Season 9 Finale. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to start disarming the bomb before Dearing activated it. Also qualifies as a Redemption Equals Death.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners:
  • For just being former NCIS partners, Franks and Gibbs seem awfully close together. When Gibbs was retired, he actually went to live with Franks in Mexico, and they bickered like a married couple.
    • The place that Franks has is one they used to stay at when they would go fishing in Mexico — so they even went on vacation together at one point, apparently.
  • Gibbs and Ducky
  • Gibbs and Fornell. They also share a common ex-wife.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Eli David. He has crossed the Moral Event Horizon a number of times,and it is obvious that he does so because of his determination to protect his people against vicious enemies.
• Hidden Depths: McGee's writing career and, far more importantly, Tony's growing maturity. Unfortunately, Tony seems to have been getting more and more Flanderized and less mature in the most recent seasons, although this may just be Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • This is especially prominent when you compare Tony's maturity and his solidarity with McGee before and after the season two finale.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • In the most literal meaning of the words in Season Seven's "Flesh And Blood": the Victim of the Week is hurled backwards and smashes into the ground when a bomb that he is later revealed to have planted himself explodes prematurely.
    Tony: I've heard the saying, 'he got blown out of his shoes', but never thought I'd see it.
    Ducky: Now if the explosion had knocked his socks off, that would be impressive, wouldn't it?
  • In Season Eleven's "Bulletproof", the team is tracking down defective body armor that was sent to soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan. When confronted, the person responsible dons a suit of armor and opens fire on the team. Bishop takes a bullet, but survives without serious injury because she's wearing a vest. The perp is also shot, but she was wearing one of the defective vests - which were worse than useless - and dies.
• Hollywood Atlas: In series premiere "Yankee White" The Wichita County Coroner shows up to fight for the body. Wichita County, KS is in the far western part of the state. The city of Wichita is in Sedgwick County. This was most likely done so as not to confuse those who don't live in "Flyover Land"
• Hollywood Hacking: McGee and Abby.
• Hollywood Healing: Consistently averted; characters who suffer injuries at the end of one episode are typically still sporting the signs of them in the next one...except glaringly in season one when Gibbs recovered from grenade fragments in the shoulder between episodes.
  • Played painfully straight in the 200th episode, where Gibbs is shot in the shoulder at the beginning. At the episode's end, set the very next day, he's perfectly fine.
• Honorary Uncle: Gibbs is this to Fornell and Diane's daughter
• Hooking the Keys: A variation shows up in "Missing". Tony DiNozzo ends up getting drugged, captured, and trapped in the same room by the same Serial Killer who kidnapped the missing marine NCIS is searching for. Tony uses a knife he had hidden in his belt and a piece of string to get the piece of wood locking both of them in so they can escape.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: In the episode "Guilty Pleasure" we are introduced to Det. Philip McCadden of Baltimore PD. He was a Flanderized Expy of Tony and the two movie buffs became fast friends. But when Tony saw McCadden disrespecting McGee during an NCIS case (and not caring if he got some movie trivia wrong), Tony effectively ended their friendship, without even telling McCadden why.
• Huggy, Huggy Hippos: A variation of this with a hippo plushy that belongs to Abby. Bonus points for the fact that hugging is involved: when hugged, he makes a fart noise.
• Humble Hero: Gibbs confides to his namesake, Leroy Jethro Moore, that "you were my hero long before you got the Medal of Honor". Moore - who ran through yards of heavy Japanese fire on Iwo Jima to drag wounded members of his platoon to safety, despite being hit twice himself - chuckles and says he only joined the Marine Corps because he thought he'd look "real sharp" in the dress uniform.
• Hypocritical Humor: On one occasion Gibbs sees fit to remind McGee that hacking is illegal.
  • A great case is Ducky checking over the body of a murdered teacher, saying he thought about going into teaching once but "I could never stand giving lectures." He completely fails to notice the looks of the team who put up with his constant stories on bizarre trivia.
• Hypothetical Fight Debate: There is a small running gag about the rest of the team talking about who would win in a fight-resident Memetic Badass Jethro Gibbs and such crazy proposals as The Terminator and Batman... and Memetic Badass that he is, the rest of the team puts the odds on Gibbs.
  • It was eventually decided that the only contest was Gibbs vs. Gibbs, but they thought it would just end in a draw.
• I Am Spartacus: In S 10 Ep 11, a reporter, whose story might have falsely implicated some sailors in a crime, is found dead which results in them being called in. They all confess to killing the reporter. Tony later lampshades the four sailors.
• I Call It "Vera":
  • Abby's "Major Mass Spec", and, apparently, her own teeth, though they appear to be masculine names - one is Frank.
  • In one episode, she gives the bugs she is raising as evidence male names, such as George, Norman and the like. George ends up being Regina.
  • According to Gibbs, a Bravo 51 sniper rifle is called a "Kate".
  • In S11, Ep 19: Crescent City Pt 2, Agent Pride calls his Hand Cannon "Charmaine".
• I Know Mortal Kombat
  • Justified in S 7 Ep 09, "Child's Play", which focuses on child prodigies using video games, one of which is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in which they compare the situations in the game to real life military situations and analyze them.
  • In S 10 Ep 16, "Detour," Jimmy claims that while he has no experience with a real gun, he nevertheless Prestiged in Call of Duty: Black Ops six times. And he shoots an assassin with a full clip not long afterwards.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Frequently. A few standout examples:
  • The killer mentions the man who (supposedly) shot the lieutenant will get away. "How did you know she was shot?"
  • S 7 Ep 07, "Endgame", has Amanda, McGee's love interest for that episode, coming to visit him at work. The next morning McGee reveals that he never told her where he works. It turns out she was hired to kill the North Korean assassin the team is trying to catch.
  • When Gibbs tells a suspect that a victim was found dead, the man asks, "How was he murdered?", thus confirming Gibbs' suspicions, as he hadn't told the man that.
• Idiot Ball:
  • They retrieve Director Vance's car when it was handled by a terrorist and since they found no prints, they don't strip it down for explosives or other traps.
  • From the same episode: when the headquarters building goes into bomb threat alert and begins evacuation procedures, Tony and Ziva help usher everyone out of the upper floors and then decide to take the elevator down together. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
    • The two do lampshade the blatant breaking of protocol in doing such in the following episode, however.
  • In a later episode, when Vance is searching for a nanny to help the family, one of the women he interviews is a young 20-something woman who cannot get off Twitter and Facebook during her interview with him. Vance barely holds in his contempt at this lack of respect and proper interview ethics.
  • Gibbs is at least aware he's holding the ball when a hallucination of Mike Franks and Dornaget's (not hallucinatory) CIA officer mother both tell him that they're being played by one of The Calling's child soldiers, who they realize has seen inside a government security building, met with important agents, and later KO's his social worker agent and shoots Gibbs in the leg and torso.
  • Bishop is normally a competent and intelligent agent, but in "Incognito" at the end of the episode she is told that they have all the evidence necessary to arrest the suspects and that Tony and Gibbs are on the way to the suspects' house that Bishop is currently watching to arrest one of them. Bishop however decides for literally no reason whatsoever to break into the house to look for more evidence, WITHOUT her phone or any other way of contacting her and without her gun. This leads to her being snuck up on and nearly being murdered by the aforementioned suspect returning to the house and only surviving due to a conveniently placed pair of scissors.
• I Know You Know I Know: Played with all over the map.
  • Played with when Gibbs asks for Ziva's weapon. And her backup weapon (revolver in ankle holster). And her backup backup weapon (a knife). He then hands the knife back to her, and points out that he wanted her to know he knew.
  • At the end of S 5 Ep 6 "Chimera", McGee summs up the situation involving a Navy research ship that isn't, pirates who are actually Russian sailors on a state-sponsored covert op and a Soviet nuclear warhead that the US thought that the Russians didn't know about but clearly did. And now we know that they knew.
• Imagined Innuendo: A little one from "Jack Knife," in which a sleep-deprived McGee totally misinterprets Gibb's request regarding Tony and Ziva:
  Gibbs: Get Ziva and DiNozzo out of bed.
  McGee: What?!
  Gibbs: Wake 'em up.
  McGee: Oh. Oh, right. Get them out of bed because it's the middle of the night and they're asleep.
  Gibbs: (incredulously) Yes.
  McGee: Individual beds. Get them out of individual beds. I was confused. I thought we were talking —
  Gibbs: Need some sleep yourself, do you, McGee?
• Impaled Palm: Ducky suffers this when he's attacked with a knife at a crime scene.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Justified in "Yankee White", since the guy in question is trying to fire an MP5 submachine gun on full auto one-handed while raising it from his side. He misses Gibbs by a foot and change.
• Imperiled in Pregnancy:
  • The Christmas Episode "Newborn King" had the team defending a very pregnant Marine from mercenaries trying to get the baby, due to it being, if male, the only surviving heir to an Afghan tribe. (She'd fallen in love with the previous heir, who was later killed by the Taliban.) A Maternity Crisis ensues and Gibbs ends up delivering the baby in a gas station while Ziva fights off the mercs in the next room.
  • The Thanksgiving episode "Ready or Not" had an indirect one: a hostage situation in the hospital where Delilah is giving birth. However, since the hostage situation was in a totally different part of the building than the maternity ward, Delilah was not in direct danger (though her husband was).
• Implausible Synchrony: The Cyber Vid character gives the time of his victims' deaths and then broadcasts the murder over the internet. He lists the time of death as five minutes to midnight. Two clocks are shown when the victim dies, and they both show the precise time, despite the fact that the poison that kills him was administered hours ago. This is justified because both clocks are at the Naval Yard. Military bases take care of keeping their clocks in sync with a standard, especially when the time is very relevant to an ongoing investigation. And, because the killer mostly leaves the clue for Gibbs, he would have operated according to that time. The perfect timing of the poison is a completely different trope, of course.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: While all the agents on the show have been shown to be excellent marksmen, Gibbs and Tony show almost a supernatural ability to hit whatever they're aiming at.
  • Gibbs is a trained sniper and has been shown making accurate shots over long distances. Impressive once you remember that his eyesight was damaged when he was injured in Desert Storm and should be wearing corrective lenses but rarely ever does.
  • Tony once took down two armed men while shooting single handed and running at full tilt. He also took out the tires of a pickup truck that was speeding away immediately after having tackled his partner out of danger. Note that not one of his shots missed in either of these incidents.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • In "Jetlag":
    Ziva: I once killed a man with a credit card.
    • Possibly a a shout out to Trevanian's "Naked/Kill" techniques where an Israeli operative uses a credit card on a plane to kill someone. Everything matched perfectly.
    • Later in that episode aboard the plane, the air marshall is found dead in the lavatory, stabbed in the neck with a knitting needle taken from one of the sleeping passengers. And then the assassin (who is actually the stewardess) tries to kill her target by giving her a pillow covered with peanut dust, trying to trigger fatal anaphylaxis from her peanut allergy.
  • Ziva has also threatened that she can kill Tony eighteen different ways with a paper clip. Safety recommends that she be believed - after all, the bullpen's probably got plenty of paper clips lying around.
• Improbable Age:
  • Ziva David is less Improbable Age and more Impossible Age. She joins the show in her early twenties, supposedly after she's graduated high school, served her two years in the IDF, attended college, applied for Mossad, become immediately tapped for inclusion into an elite and highly competitive special operations unit with a training period of several years, and still have enough time to become "an experienced agent" with multiple missions under her belt. And this is at an age the youngest CIA intelligence officers would be beginning training. (It's worth pointing out, however, that she is the daughter of the Director of Mossad, and it is heavily implied that she was all but raised from the cradle to be a Mossad operative.)
  • Abby, meanwhile, was stated as being in her late twenties during season 7. And it's also been heavily implied she has a PhD in chemistry.
• Improvised Weapon: In "Old Wounds", Knight uses an old fashioned landline touch tone telephone as a weapon against one of Benny's goons.
• Initialism Title: NCIS
• Innocent Innuendo: Numerous instances...along with the not-so-innocent kind.
• Insurance Fraud: In the episode "Reasonable Doubt", the team is faced with a dead officer, with his wife and mistress accusing each other of the murder. They can't arrest either of them, because the physical evidence is so ambiguous that no matter which one they charge, any decent lawyer could establish reasonable doubt that it might have been the other one. It turned out to not be a murder at all, and the two women faked the crime scene because the man's life insurance wouldn't pay out on a suicide.
• Intergenerational Friendship: The rest of the team with Ducky (in his 70s) and Gibbs (in his 50s). In early seasons Ducky and Abby even indulged in occasional intergenerational flirtation, while Gibbs and Abby still do.
• Internal Affairs: Perspective Flipped, as NCIS often takes the role of internal affairs towards the suspects-of-the-week. They are fully aware of how this makes them look to those being investigated.
• Intimate Healing: Played with. Abby is very fond of hugs. Also, in the first "Hiatus" episode, after Abby blows up at Ziva and each slaps the other a coupla times, Tony disciplines them in the office area:
  Tony: Abby! Front and center. You too Ziva. Let's go! I know what happened.
  [Abby and Ziva start talking at the same time]
  Tony: Hey! If there's going to be any bitch slapping on this team, I'll do it. Clear? Good. Now shake hands. Shake.
  [Abby and Ziva reluctantly shake hands]
  Tony: There we go. That wasn't so tough, was it? Now how about a little hug? Big buddy hug. Come on.
  [Abby immediately hugs Ziva, Ziva slowly reciprocates]
  Tony: Now a deep tongue kiss.
  [Abby and Ziva punch him in the chest at the same time]
  Tony: OOF! Now we feel better.
• Intimate Lotion Application: Played for Laughs In "Moonlighting". One of the witnesses is a perpetual stoner who has welts on his back due to a henna tattoo, and he begs either Tony or Ziva to rub lotion on his back, with them desperately trying to dodge having to do the task, clearly disgusted by the prospect.
• Inverse Dialogue/Death Rule: Subverted in "Twilight". Kate Todd, one of the lead special agents, gets sniped straight in the center of her forehead and dies abruptly.
• I Remember Because...: In Season Ten's "You Better Watch Out", Stewie, McGee's old buddy from M.I.T., now works as a foreman at a landfill; when they ask him about a certain date, he remembers there was a break-in on the same night. When Tony asks him how he could remember the exact date, Stewie is surprised: "Everybody remembers where they were that day, don't you? It was the night the Navy SEAL team took out bin Laden."
• Iron Lady: Several women during the course of the series.
  • Director Shepherd.
  • Gibbs' ex- and Fornell's soon-to-be re-wife used this in the fake recording that lured Gibbs to the roof.
• Irony / Dramatic Irony:
  • Jackson Gibbs refused to let his son fire his rifle. He notes the irony in his son becoming a sniper.
  • Both Mrs. Vance and (the first) Mrs. Gibbs were preparing for life after their husbands' deaths but didn't plan on their own.
  • Jake narrowly escaping a hotel bombing in Dubai made Ellie decide she wanted to salvage their faltering marriage—and made him embark on an affair. Conversely, her discovering the affair made him realize that he wanted to save their marriage, while she realized that it was over.
• It Will Never Catch On: Joked about in S 7 Ep 11, "Ignition."
  Ziva: There's nothing good on the internet anymore.
  McGee: Yeah, I think that internet thing has just about run its course.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: One of the main reasons why Amanda Kendall, the titular character in the episode "The Admiral's Daughter", does not want to reveal what's under her party girl persona...She's an undercover CIA agent who uses her party girl persona as cover. Not even her father the Admiral knows this; he would likely have been in danger if he or anyone else did.
• It's Personal:
  • Even if a case doesn't involve anyone the main cast knows personally, Gibbs takes his ties to the military very seriously. His hunting down the man who murdered his family goes without saying.
  • Amusingly, Gibbs' Rule Number 10 is: Never get personally involved in a case. He admits he has trouble with that one.
  • Jenny Shepard's possibly unwarranted hunt for René Benoît is this, since she believes Benoît killed her father.
  • "Check": Gibbs was already gunning for Sergei Mishnev personally after he escaped in Russia when Sergei hacked Gibbs' record and recreated the murders of Jenny Shepard (plus the four guys who killed/were killed by her) and Mike Franks using innocent people and then sniped Diane in front of Gibbs, which now makes this personal for Fornell too. Ducky is certain that Sergei's hatred is fueled by something beyond Gibbs' attempts to kill him; it's later revealed Sergei is Ari's half-brother.
  • Gibbs helps out a DEA agent capture a very elusive drug dealer who gave the order that killed Gibbs' family and their guard, the agent's father. The agent doesn't know what Gibbs did to the assassin but Gibbs does tell the agent that killing the drug dealer won't help his feelings; fortunately Tony (who figured out the truth after learning the agent's full name and was understandably alarmed) was able to sneak a recording device into the drug dealer's house and got a confession without anyone getting killed.
• I Work Alone: Abby, and with good reason. She tends to get neurotic when another person she doesn't approve of is helping her in the lab. She makes one intern wear bells so she knows where he is, though considering the last person who was assigned to her tried to kill her and frame Tony for murder it's not without justification.
• Jedi Mind Trick: These pop up now and then. With Tony being a pop culture fan and somewhat Genre Savvy, he can be a big source.
  • When Team Gibbs is questioning a random hotel desk clerk, said clerk claims the person they are looking for pulled one of these on him. Including dropping the trope name.
  • In S 12, Ep 8, Gibbs is talking to a "suspect" who didn't do anything wrong. Tony comes in, ready to take their detainee back to Fairfax but Gibbs says no. So Tony makes a Shout-Out.
  Tony: Right. These are not the droids we're looking for.
• Jenny's Number: In "Judgement Day", Gibbs is given an FBI file with the number 8675309.
• Jerk Jock: Though not in high school, Tony, especially in early McGee episodes. Incidentally, his major was Phys. Ed.
  • Tony's high school basketball teammates were even worse because they were, basically, an Absurdly Powerful Student Council (complete with red arm bands of enforcement) who terrorize underclassmen with impunity. Tony thought they were disbanded after they were caught attacking him but he was simply left alone on orders of his beloved coach who allowed the abuse to continue into the present day because "it's school tradition".
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Tony, he skirts into Jerkass territory.
  • Gibbs as well. While he's often quite rude to his allies he has a lot of Pet the Dog moments.
• Jurisdiction Friction/Right Hand Versus Left Hand: The team frequently run into jurisdiction issues with the FBI and other government organizations.

K-M

• Karma Houdini:
  • Ari for a while.
  • Subverted at the (apparent) end of the Benoît arc, when Gibbs, Tony and Ziva are on his boat, and figure he must've disappeared. Then the camera pans out over the water to reveal Benoît's corpse in the water with a hole in his head. End credits.
  • Tony would've been fired for sexual harassment of Kate before the end of the first season in a normal workplace. The show eventually hangs a lampshade on this when the team goes to a sensitivity training seminar, where Tony doesn't pay attention. To fix this, Ziva licks him.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: In S8 E7 ("Broken Arrow") Ziva David speedily defeats an attacker while wearing a full length gown.
• Know Your Vines: While investigating a murder in a national park McGee has to search a patch of poison ivy for a murder weapon. Tony recognises what the plant is, but when Tim says he can handle things, Tony doesn't correct him.
• The Lab Rat: Abby, sometimes McGee.
• The Lad-ette: Ziva fits this when not in combat.
• Lady of War: Ziva fits this when in combat.
• Lampshade Hanging: The show has now started lampshading itself.
  Ziva: "No, Tony, I am not going to rate your butt, you know Gibbs is going to be around that corner!
  • On another occasion, Tony baits Ziva into saying something bad about Gibbs. She almost falls for it, then turns around because she knows Gibbs will doubtless be coming up behind her. He's actually in MTAC.
• Large Ham: Tony.
  • Abby, at times. "...and AH WIYLL CRUUUUCIFAH HIYM,", anyone?
• Laser-Guided Karma: The CyberVid killer in "Murder 2.0" is a narcissist who committed and filmed the crimes in a bid for everlasting fame; when Gibbs arrests him, he cackles that even if he goes down for multiple homicides, his name will live on alongside those of Charles Manson and other notorious serial killers, whereas Gibbs will be as forgotten as the men who arrested the serial killers. Cut to a newsreader announcing that, because of suspected terrorist connections, the CyberVid killer's identity is being withheld from the public and will likely never be known.
• Last-Name Basis:
  • Most of the male agents (Gibbs, DiNozzo, Fornell, McGee, Palmer, Vance, Torres) are almost exclusively addressed by their last names, unless the conversation is personal.
  • Eleanor is almost always addressed by her last name (Bishop), even among her teammates. Torres is the only one who calls her "Ellie" with any regularity.
  • Quinn was only on the show for a little over a season, but very few people called her "Alex" or "Alexandra."
  • Donald Mallard is the only male execption, as most people address him by his nickname "Ducky."
• Layman's Terms: Gibbs does this at least Once an Episode, usually when dealing with McGee or Abby/Kasie.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The episode "Jet Lag" ends with a Ziva looking at a picture Tony took, with her commenting, "I think it would look better in black and white." Cue the ending black and white shot of said picture.
• Left the Background Music On: It's established several times that the music playing in Abby's lab is her own library. In "Power Down," a scene in Abby's lab starts out with her music, but ends with the music slowing to a stop as the CD player runs out of battery.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • In Season Six's "Hide and Seek", Ziva says she "hit a stone wall." Everyone assumes she made another one of her idiomatic errors and meant to say "brick wall", but she explains that she backed up her car too quickly.
  • In Season Seven's "Flesh And Blood", Tony observes one of these at a crime scene where the Victim of the Week was hurled backward when a bomb detonated in front of him:
    Tony: I've heard the saying, "he got blown out of his shoes", but never thought I'd see it.
    Ducky: Now if the explosion had "knocked his socks off", that would be impressive, wouldn't it?
    • For bonus points, Abby later confirms that the victim planted the bomb himself but it exploded prematurely, meaning he was, in the most literal sense of the words, Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • Played With in Season Twelve's "The Searchers": When Abby and McGee tell Palmer they need "a fresh set of ears", he winces and says he'll look down in Autopsy, before they hastily correct him.
• Locked in a Freezer: The shipping crate variation for Tony and Ziva in "Boxed In", to capitalize on the UST.
• Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard: In one episode, a panicking suspect tries to run, leaving behind his high-powered hunting rifle, right next to Gibbs, the Marine Corps sniper. Not that that would have been bright to do that under any circumstances, but still. It should be noted that it was very highly insinuated that Gibbs let the suspect go so that he would have an excuse to shoot him in the ass. Cue Tony and McGee wondering, "You don't think he did that on purpose...?" "No...no, of course not," and Gibbs just doing a badass walk with a huge smile on his face.
• Long List: Ducky's list of interests when he joined Facebook.
• Long Runner: NCIS is currently in its 20th season and now have over 450 episodes. It got renewed for season 21 on February 2023.
• Long-Runner Cast Turnover: The only members of the cast from the opening credits of Season 1 who are still in the cast after the end of Season 15 are Gibbs/Mark Harmon and Ducky/David McCallum (McGee/Sean Murray and Palmer/Brian Dietzen were recurring guest stars in Season 1 who didn't get Promoted to Opening Credits until later seasons). Over the course of those fourteen seasons, four people left, six people joined, and three others joined and then left. And that's not counting the turnover in recurring guest characters.
  • With Mark Harmon/Gibbs no longer in the show after Season 19, Sean Murray/McGee now appears in most episodes (442 episodes to be exact so far, even surpassing Harmon’s and McCallum's total number of episodes), and Ducky/David McCallum is the only member of the cast from season 1 to still be in the opening credits.
• Loony Fan: In "Cover Story", one of these is this of McGee's book "Deep Six" who gets so attached to the cast that he goes nuts after looting one of McGee's scrapped free-writing notes and thinks that he as his counterpart "McGregor" is going to be killed by two real-life people also having counterparts in the book and bases their deaths directly from the story, which culminates in him completely misinterpreting a scrapped line that looks like Abby as "Amy Sutton" is going to kill "McGregor" next.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • In "SWAK", Gibbs and McGee are confined to Autopsy until it can be confirmed they weren't infected by the powder even though they don't have to stay in a hospital's Isolation Ward like DiNozzo and Kate had to so they don't infect anybody else. Unfortunately, there's a time limit to the case and they can't work on it if they stay in Autopsy. So they put on Haz-Mat suits so they can work on the case without potentially infecting anybody else until their blood samples are confirmed clean.
  • In "Alibi", a Marine is killed in a hit and run, and the vehicle owner is the main suspect. When he asks for a lawyer, he reveals to her that he was in a different town committing an unrelated murder at the time of the accident, and the attorney is unable to inform Gibbs of this because of client-attorney confidentiality. As a result, she uses a payphone across the street from the second crime scene to call Gibbs and tells him that she was able to confirm the alibi. She used the payphone because she knew that it would show up as an unknown number on Gibbs' caller ID, which would prompt him to have the call traced and have the surrounding area investigated by his team, leading them to the second crime scene.
• Love Confessor: Just before Tony's departure in Family First Abby tells him "I know how much Ziva really loved you. And I need to know that you know that too." He responds, "I do, I think." Abby then tells him, "Don't think. Know. I know. She told me." In Family First, Tony also confesses to McGee "I loved her, Tim."
• Luke, You Are My Father: Tony is told that there was one survivor pulled from the rubble. An agent is told to bring in Tali. Tony asks "wasn't that Ziva's sister?" to which Orli responds, "her namesake, yes." Confused, Tony asks whose namesake and is told that Tali is he and Ziva's daughter, a result of their 'fond farewell' in Israel three years prior. Orli also tells him that Ziva had wanted to tell Tony as Tali grew, but assumed that he would not be happy with the news.
• Lzherusskie: Gratuitous fake Russians, everywhere, speaking second-year level (jumbled, albeit real) Russian, complete with the expected grammatical errors and horrid pronunciation. Strangely enough, they are interspaced with people fluent in Russian, and in at least one case, an actor highly proficient or fluent in Russian speaking lines written by someone who was not, true to script, complete with every single error. Also, a surprising number of cast members and recurring characters, including ones too young to have picked it up in the course of their military duties during the Cold War, speak Russian. A lot.
• Magnetic Hero: Gibbs. But "he only uses his powers for good."
• Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Comes up a few times.
  • Ari Haswari, the terrorist mastermind for Hamas and later al-Qaeda, was educated as a doctor at the Royal Medical College in Edinburgh, Scotland (Ducky's own alma mater).
  • Saleem Ullman, the leader of the terrorist cell in Season Seven's "Truth and Consequences", received his B.A. from Yale University, and is indignant when Tony insults their football team's record.
• Malaproper: Ziva (the ESL variety) which is a Running Gag on the show; she speaks English perfectly, except for idioms, which she constantly gets wrong and is usually corrected by Tony. What's strange is that she actually has a remarkably good grasp of American pop culture. That and her level of English proficiency mean she shouldn't get nearly every single idiom she uses wrong. It's eventually revealed that Ziva was using a For Dummies book to memorize pop culture cliches from by rote, especially movie lines. And it's hinted in a later episode that she was, at times, playing dumb to get people off-guard (and yank Tony's chain). Possibly a Retcon, though.
  Ziva: It'll be like shooting fish in a pond.
  Tony: Fish in a barrel.
  Ziva: Why would fish be in a barrel?
  Gibbs: How'd you get on?
  
  
  Ziva: I hit a stone wall.
  Tony: Brick wall.
  Ziva: No, it was definitely a stone wall. I backed the car into it.
  • In "Shabbat Shalom", it's Ziva who corrects her father's malapropism.
• Male Gaze: From Tony's point of view, natch.
• Mama Bear:
  • S4 Ep 06, "Witch Hunt", a Halloween episode. A mother lays the smackdown on a kidnapper after learning that her daughter is safe. Ducky even lampshades the trope.
  • S7 E6. "Outlaws and In-laws" had Mike Franks' daughter-in-law shooting down a pair of mercenaries trying to kidnap her daughter. Franks even names the trope directly.
    Franks: Never underestimate a mama bear when her cub's in danger.
  • In season 6's "Cloak" and "Dagger," this is Agent Michelle Lee's motive for becoming The Mole: to protect her little sister Amanda, whom she has raised as her own since their parents' deaths. The moment she finds out Amanda is safe, Lee lets Gibbs SHOOT her to take the bad guy down!
  • In Season 11's "Bulletproof": during the investigation into the faulty bulletproof vests that was sold as surplus on the gray market, a whole group of mothers show up at the Navy Yard demanding answers, since they sent their Marine sons and daughters extra body armor and they're worried that their children are in danger because of the vests.
  • Season 12's finale, "Neverland", features Mimi Rogers as Ned Dorneget's mother, CIA Officer Joanna Teague, who is more than ready to torture a terrorist suspect to find the men who killed her son.:
    Suspect: Who are you?
    Joanna: A very angry mother with a short fuse.
• Manly Tears: Tony after Agent Cassidy's death. Eventually, after Ziva's too.
  • S13 Ep 11, "Spinning Wheel:" Ducky sheds some as well when he reunites with his younger brother Nicholas.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Speculated on by Abby in regards to Gibbs, who has the seemingly-supernatural ability to appear out of thin air and walk into a room just as an important development is discovered. Abby's even gone as far as to sweep her labs for bugs under the suspicion that Gibbs monitors her progress remotely. Tony demonstrates the same ability whenever he's in charge of the team.
  • Given a very mundane explanation in a Season 13 episode, when McGee and DiNozzo are standing in a corner, discussing Bishop's marriage, assuming she can't hear them because they're too far away, only for her to reveal that she can, because their voices are reverberating off of the skylight.
  DiNozzo: "Wait a second. Is that how Gibbs is always able to—-"
  (right on cue, Gibbs appears out of nowhere)
  Gibbs: "—walk up behind you and finish your sentences?"
• May–December Romance: Gibbs regularly gets hit on by women at least twenty years his junior.
  • Not often brought up, but the age difference between Tony and Ziva is roughly 14 years.
  • Most of Ducky's love interests have been considerably younger than him too.
• Mean Boss: Gibbs leans toward this when he's really angry or upset, as his already-considerable impatience skyrockets, his tolerance for the team's personality quirks goes right out the window, and he gets a lot snippier and Drill Sergeant Nasty-ish.
  • In "SWAK", he even got mad at Abby... count how many times that's happened over the course of the series.
  • He explodes at DiNozzo in the episode where Ari briefly kidnapped Kate, at a point when the team's having no luck identifying Ari and doesn't know what's happened to Kate.
• Meaningful Funeral: New Orleans style.
• Medication Tampering: A victim-of-the-week runs afoul of this. His wife replaced his contact lens solution with a drug that reacted with his anti-depression meds, making him suicidal. But when that wasn't quite enough, she simply shot him.
• Memetic Badass: Gibbs is an in-universe example. When asked what the most awesome cage fight opponent for Gibbs would be, McGee and Abby casually discard such foes as Godzilla and Mothra, and decide (however unintentionally) that Gibbs vs. Gibbs would be pretty much impossible to top. At least once, Abby has put forth the theory that Gibbs has magical powers. Tony once compared Gibbs arresting God to The Thing arresting The Hulk. Even diseases know better than to mess with Gibbs, as proven in "S.W.A.K."
  Gibbs: Never had a cold. Never had the flu, either.
  Kate: ...Why do I believe that?
  Tony: If you were a bug, would you attack Gibbs?
• Mercy Kill: In "Broken Bird", it's revealed that Ducky was forced to do this to an innocent Afghani civilian who was being brutally tortured for information. Thirty years later, and Ducky still feels guilty about it. The man actually knew nothing, and his torture was really a way to torture Ducky, who had to patch him up.
• Military School: In S12, Ep 14 "Cadence" we learn that DiNozzo attended one his senior year. We get to visit it because the Victim of the Week was also an alumnus.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: “Kill Screen” starts out with a pickpocket lifting a purse from a customer at a hotdog stand. A few seconds later, he’s intercepted by a police officer who witnessed the act. The officer confiscates the bag and discovers the fingertips and teeth of a corporal inside, getting the NCIS team called into the scene. Over the course of the episode the case spirals from a pickpocket accidentally stealing the I.D. evidence of a gruesome murder to a game developer’s plot to wipe out every military computer on the Pentagon’s grid using his new video game and a computer mainframe to generate enough power to break through the firewalls.
• Mission Control: Whomever issues orders from MTAC while the other agents are out in the field. Usually either Gibbs or the Director.
• The Missus and the Ex: Played With. When Tony's ex-fiance comes to the team for a story, Tony tries his hardest to keep Wendy and Ziva from being alone. He isn't worried about them fighting but the possible personal information Wendy has on him.
  • Gibbs was once confronted by Hollis Mann (his then-paramour), his third ex-wife, and Jenny Shepard (his former lover and current boss). Gibbs can only stand in silence while the women take pot shots at him as Tony and Ziva look on.
  • In a gender-flipped example, Diane (Gibbs and Fornell's shared ex) had to deal with two of her husbands (while in the midst of divorcing her third) and her most recent boyfriend. All four happened to be working on the same case and she'd recently rekindled her romance with Fornell. Emily (Diane and Fornell's daughter) was not pleased to find out that her parents were getting back together.
• Mistaken for Flatulence: Abby has a plush hippo that makes a fart noise when squeezed. It surprises people the first time they hear it.
• Mistaken for Gay: Both Tony and Gibbs and Tony and McGee on different occasions.
• Mistaken for Misogynist/Racist: In Season Four's "Dead Man Walking", Tony asks for Ziva's help in identifying the designer of McGee's suspiciously expensive-looking designer jacket:
  Ziva: Why do you assume I know?
  Tony: Because...
  Ziva: "Because..."? Because I'm a woman? Because I'm Jewish?
  Tony: Because you're a great detective.
  Ziva: ...True.
• Mock Millionaire: Anthony DiNozzo Sr. is a formerly wealthy businessman, who is trying to keep up the appearance that he is still wealthy.
• The Mole: Michelle Lee.
• Mood Whiplash: Sometimes. A particularly prominent example is in the tenth season premiere, when Ziva and Tony are trapped in an elevator following the bombing of NCIS. They (of course) bicker, then chuckle with the thought that at least they aren't trapped with a few other colleagues who sweat a lot or undress Ziva with their eyes. Then a thought occurs to Ziva and she asks "Hey, what if those men are dead?"
• Morality Pet: Abby. She serves as a much-needed outlet for Gibbs' paternal instincts, which arguably keeps him from becoming utterly cold and ruthless.
• Motor Mouth: Abby, especially when she's really stressed.
• Mouthy Kid: A few, as either victims, witnesses, or suspects, but probably none funnier than Nick—the young son of McGee's landlord who steals his identity in season 8's "Freedom" and spends over $10,000 on ridiculous things. He tells McGee that he did it because McGee's life is too predictable, and he's "too young to act so old." He even manages to make a pass at Ziva as Tony leads him out of the office.
• The Movie Buff: Tony
• Ms. Fanservice: Abby and Ziva tend to rotate between this role.
  • In one episode, Abby is dressed up in a vaguely Catholic schoolgirl-esque outfit, but can't figure out why everyone keeps staring at her.
  • During a Halloween episode, she dresses as Marilyn Monroe...complete with poses. That time, she knows exactly what she's doing to McGee.
  • Another episode has Abby changing clothes in her office and showing a pretty, bra-strap-less, tattooed back to McGee (and the audience).
  Abby: See anything you liked?
  McGee: (embarrassed) No.
  Abby: (skeptical look)
  McGee: ...Yes.
  Abby: (satisfied look) Better.
  • Subverted in another episode when we get to see what she sleeps in; the camera does the usual panning establishing shots, then pans over to Abby...and we see she's wearing a full-length Victorian-style nightgown, complete with cap. And since it's Abby, she looks adorable.
  • In the stalker boyfriend episode when Abby was staying with McGee, she was wearing a man's shirt and panties.
• Multi-Take Cut: Used extensively in the early seasons in pretty much every establishing shot, with a few seconds clearly passing between each cut. Presumably done to give a sense of hurry. They eventually became less elaborate and camera movements were minimized to save on time during production.
• The Münchausen: Ducky.
• Murder by Remote Control Vehicle: One episode has someone sabotaging an experimental self-driving car so anybody who gets in it and triggers a certain type of actions related to maintenance will be trapped and suffocated with the car's redirected fumes. This is what happens to the Victim of the Week and almost happens to Abby.
• murder.com: "Murder 2.0".
• Must Have Caffeine: Gibbs needs coffee to get through the day to the point where McGee has an Oh, Crap! moment when he accidentally knocks over and spills Gibbs coffee. Abby prefers the Big Gulp-esque drink, Caf-POW.
  • Also, the terrorist who captures Ziva at the end of Season 6. His addiction to Caf-POW! is so great he has it imported, which winds up being how the team finds him.
• My Beloved Smother: Ducky's mom, although she's suffering from Alzheimer's and can't really help herself.
  • Alex's mom is revealed to be one in S14 E20
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: One episode featured a paranoid submariner who killed himself by suffocation when he realized NCIS was closing in. They stow his body in the freezer...then they realize he has a cold-activated nerve-gas bomb in him. Solution to the problem? FIRE HIS CORPSE OUT A TORPEDO TUBE. And all topped off with this:
  Gibbs: You know what our top priority is now, Chief?
  Chief Of the Boat: Getting all the ice cream back in the freezer.
  Gibbs: Exactly. *chuckles*
• My Secret Pregnancy: The Season 13 episode Family First reveals Ziva and Tony had a 'fond farewell', resulting in their daughter Tali. Tony doesn't find out until after Ziva dies in a mortar attack two years later.
• Myth Arc: All main characters (except McGee for some reason) have had important involvement in one. However, the dual episode "Enemies Foreign / Enemies Domestic" brought this to a level bordering on Continuity Lock-Out: To wit, the earliest referenced event in the series is (former) NCIS Director Morrow's retirement, linked to Vance's promotion; the earliest chronologically referenced event in the series continuity is probably Vance's recruitment, which is essentially linked to Eli David's rise into the top seat of Mossad.
  • The cherry on top is definitively the link the entire affair has with the Season 5 finale and Gibbs's mission in Paris... also opening to question the relation between these episodes and Decker's "insurance policy" that Mike Franks took away (with the explicitly stated declaration that it was for Vance to read "in my will").
  Gibbs (realizing the connection): Zukov? Anatoly Zukov?
  Agent Sharp: Yeah, that's him... Wait a minute, that's him. What... you think he came back to clean after himself [for failing to kill Vance]?
  Gibbs (head leaning down): No, he's long gone.
  Agent Sharp: You sure?
  Gibbs: Yes, I'm positive.
  (Gibbs flash backs to the well-known Paris mission with Jenny, where Gibbs terminates Zukov)
• Mythology Gag: In the Season 7 episode "Moonlighting", while Gibbs and Fornell are watching McGee questioning a witness inside the conference room via camera, Fornell is suprised that they have a security camera inside the conference room. He then asks nervously if they also have cameras inside the elevator now.

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