Series / NCIS: New Orleans

From L to R: Brody, Pride, Wade, LaSalle

"Let the good times roll."

— Show's tagline

NCIS: New Orleans is an American TV show created by Gary Glasberg and executive produced by Mark Harmon. It premiered on CBS in 2014 and ran seven seasons.

The second spin-off of NCIS, it is set in New Orleans and is about the NCIS field office based in the city and the small team of agents that maintains it. Unlike its sister series NCIS: Los Angeles, which deals with espionage and undercover investigations, it is closer in style with the early seasons of its parent series NCIS, as a crime procedural centered around a group of odd but professional investigators.

The show stars Scott Bakula and Lucas Black as NCIS agents Dwayne "King" Pride and Christopher LaSalle, respectively, who run the office. The cast also includes C.C.H. Pounder as medical examiner Loretta Wade, Rob Kerkovich as forensics scientist Sebastian Lund, Zoe McLellan as agent Meredith Brody, Shalita Grant as former ATF agent Sonja Percy, and Daryl Mitchell as computer scientist Patton Plame. The third season introduces Vanessa Ferlito as FBI agent Tammy Gregorio and Chelsea Field as lawyer Rita Deveraux, the fifth adds Necar Zadegan as supervisory agent Hannah Khoury, and the following season adds Charles Michael Davis as Quentin Carter, who replaces LaSalle's position in the team.

Sadly, the seventh season turned out to be the final season as CBS officially announced in February 2021 that NCIS NOLA would end, with the series finale airing in May 2021.

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This show contains examples of:

• African Terrorists: The reveal of the Niger Delta Renegades in "My City".
• Afterlife Welcome: Implied in the episode in which Christopher LaSalle was shot. He awakens and reaches for Dr. Wade's hand, saying, "I've missed you". However, his next line reveals that he was actually talking to his deceased brother when he then says, "Let's go fishing, Cade"... and promptly flatlines.
• Always Murder: Someone is convinced that Brody's twin sister Emily didn't die in a car accident but was actually murdered. They inform her by sending creepy photoshopped pictures that hide Roman numerals that lead to a conspiracy website. They also somehow learned that Sebastian was analyzing the photos and sent him a message at morgue. It turns out the informant was the man who ran into her, a computer expert who could not have been drunk because he just got his sobriety chip from Alcoholics Anonymous the same day and only plead guilty because he thought no would ever believe that he was actually drugged (he started sending the messages after he was released from prison) and the real killer was Emily's future father-in-law, who she discovered was illegally hacking into computers to get info that would help his newspaper's Spot Light-esque investigation section — just like the victim-of-the-week and the red-herring bad guy he was investigating (though by that point the victim was done with him and looking for the illegal bugs).
• Amoral Afrikaner: In "Sleeping with the Enemy", the Big Bad employs a team of ruthless South African mercenaries to carry out his plan of terror and murder, which includes bombing public areas.
• And Starring: C.C.H. Pounder.
• And the Adventure Continues: The end of the final season (Season 7) has Pride getting married to Rita officially with Sasha deciding to stay low on the radar from the US Marshals in order to ensure that no one tries to target Connor. On the other hand, Pride and the others are summoned to investigate a Navy case involving a breach on the Stennis.
• Anger Born of Worry: Percy is furious when LaSalle reveals he was almost shot (the suspect had him dead to rights and was only saved because the gun jammed) and didn't tell her, his partner. She was especially annoyed because it was LaSalle who convinced her to be more open with people. He later hints he didn't want to reveal he was scared, as his "thing" that episode was his discomfort with death.
• Angst: Loretta's foster son gets extremely defensive and cannot understand why she sticks up for an ex thug like him when he's nearly accused of murder. She shuts him down quick ("When you're done wallowing in self-pity we'll talk.")
• Artistic License – Biology: Quid Pro Quo (season 3 episode 19) when a virus is used to attack a navy base and Loretta is infected and collapses due to it ... they try to treat it with antibiotics. Which do not work against viruses.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • The confession Pride managed to obtain from Mayor Hamilton wouldn't last 5 minutes in court. Since Pride got that confession after kidnapping and threatening Hamilton any remotely competent lawyer would have been able to get it thrown out on grounds of coercion. On top of that, Pride would lose his job and be in jail for kidnapping and assault of Hamilton and the murder of Stone.
  • During the events of "Overlooked", FBI Agent Isler is on a leave of absence when Pride asks him to re-open a case. Isler is merely a field agent, and on leave to boot. Such power is in the hands of an FBI supervisor. On the search for Cade, LaSalle and Sebastian would have received a reprimand for their investigation, as it is a misuse of NCIS resources.
• Authentication by Newspaper: In "It Happened Last Night", a ransom message is sent showing a kidnap victim holding a copy of that day's newspaper.
• Awesome by Analysis: A tattoo artist that the team is investigating guesses what kind of tattoos each team member would get just by looking at them. He is on the nose with Sebastian and, judging from his reaction, the artist wasn't wrong about LaSalle either. Brody laughs it off.
  Tattoo Guy: I'm thinkin'...(points at Brody) Broken heart...(points at LaSalle) Sexy girl on a mud flap...(points at Sebastian) And something to do with Lord of the Rings.
• Badass Bystander: In the series finale "Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler", a horse-carriage tour guide whips a fleeing armed suspect in the face, to the applause of others.
  Pride: God, I love this city.
• Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: At the climax of "Means to an End", Pride arrives just as his daughter is about to be shot. He wraps himself around her in a desperate attempt to protect her. There is then a close-up of an automatic being fired. The shot then pulls back to reveal that the automatic is in the hands of Percy, who had been knocked unconscious earlier. She has recovered and entered just in time to shoot the would-be killer.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Subverted. The imprisoned Percy doesn't look terrible, but she does look like someone without access to her hair and makeup products.
• Beware the Nice Ones: After Loretta (and other victims!) is infected with an engineered virus, Sebastian threatens to inject a Chinese agent with the same virus (the real thing, not a needle full of saline) if he doesn't reveal where the antivirus is.
• Big Blackout: In "Darkest Hour", Pride and the team investigate a murder that takes place during a city-wide blackout. The murder ultimately turns out to be intimately connected to the blackout.
• Big Damn Kiss: LaSalle and Percy have a Big Damn Hug and an Almost Kiss in the season 2 finale, but in season 3 Percy is determined to forget it ever happened, even exclaiming "Ew!" when Gregorio reveals she thought they had slept together ("You two have a vibe!").
• The Big Easy: Right there in the title.
• Big Eater: All three agents, apparently. Brody and LaSalle even interrupt a "Eureka!" Moment to peruse a menu to order takeout desserts.
  • LaSalle is seen snacking and leaving crumbs all over the office.
  • Brody eats an enormous amount of food for breakfast while Pride can only look on with an expression that is a mix of shock and awe.
  • Pride says with all seriousness that he'll eat the better part of a chicken for dinner. He is also a great chef whose food gets other characters immediately drooling.
  • Pride's daughter, Laurel, seems to be one too.
• Big "NO!": In "Father's Day", Pride belts one out when one of the rescue personnel mistake his kidnapper holding a camera for a gun.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: LaSalle's "last unsolved case before Katrina" featured a murdered man and his pregnant wife who gives birth in the last part of the flashback.
• Bittersweet Ending: In "Checkmate", Barrow's terrorist plot is foiled and reputation destroyed, driving him to suicide and Pride's reputation and badge are restored. However, LaSalle learns that his family business has been engaging in tax fraud and Pride is shot three times by Amelia, Barlow's assistant and hitman.
• Bland-Name Product: For some reason, despite using obvious stock footage and the franchise being Backed by the Pentagon, the show decided to call the US Navy's Blue Angels the Golden Aces. Probably has something to do with the pilot/Victim of the Week being suspected of drug use actually trying to harvest her eggs so she can have children on her own schedule, cheating, and nepotism (she's the first female pilot and her father is a high-ranking officer), her fellow pilots being suspected of assaulting her, and ultimately the contractors who built the planes cut corners by using shoddy parts that were slowly poisoning the pilots, hence the victim and her teammates' sickly appearance, which probably wouldn't happen in real life.
• Blood from the Mouth: In "Collateral Damage", the Victim of the Week coughs up a large amount of blood as she keels over from an overdose of arsenic.
• Bookends:
  • "Escape Plan" starts with Sebastian and his mother at breakfast with her ordering for him and lecturing him on not talking to the pretty waitress, who she thinks is trampy. It ends with them at the same restaurant, with him dismissing these same efforts to coddle him, ordering what he wants and asking for the waitress' number.
  • 1/3 into "Means To An End", Percy assures Pride, "I got this", regarding protecting Laurel. At the end, having shot dead Laurel's would-be killer, she repeats the sentiment, having proven her point.
• Boom, Headshot!: The Chinese agent Sebastian threatened is promptly sniped through a brick wall. Gregorio is horrified to learn that whatever advanced tech the sniper used was American and Sebastian reveals that whoever sniped the agent also killed the cartel guy.
• Briar Patching: Set up on false charges, Percy is put into general population at a prison. Knowing a federal agent won't last long against these convicts, Percy attacks a guard so she can be thrown into solitary confinement and thus safe from anyone going after her.
• Brick Joke: In his first appearance, Carter asks for a standing desk. By the next episode, he has one.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The agents of the New Orleans office are odd even by NCIS standards.
  • Pride has an ego to match his name and is as passionate about living up the New Orleans lifestyle as he is about catching crooks. Instead of being based in a federal building, Pride maintains a base of operations in a nondescript building (which is also his living space while his marriage is on the rocks) and didn't particularly care about keeping his office space clean until Brody came in and organized everything.
  • LaSalle enjoys making elaborate Lego models of New Orleans landmarks. His bricks and various models are strewn around the office.
  • Brody likes to do crossword puzzles in her head and has an extremely eclectic collection of knowledge.
    LaSalle: "You present yourself all buttoned up, but you are an odd bird, Brody."
• The Butcher: Nickname of a Serbian war criminal in a local prison who Sebastian is kidnapped to help bust out. He's none too appreciative that his jailbreak took so long and involved crawling through a storm drain.
• Call-Back: Tony DiNozzo is called in to assist in a bubonic plague outbreak in the episode "Carrier", as he had actually had the plague many years before in the NCIS episode "SWAK".
• The Cameo:
  • There have been a lot of appearances of NCIS characters on this show. Most of them are so brief and have the guest character do so little that they appear to have been done purely so that they could advertise the appearance of the guest star.
    DiNozzo: Can I go home now?
  • Sheryl Crow appears in "Krewe", singing during a musical act.
• Car Fu:
  • In "If It Bleeds, It Leads", LaSalle stops a fleeing trail bike by backing his pickup in front of it; sending the rider flying.
  • NCIS uses their Ford Explorer to ram armed suspects down when they need to.
• Celebrity Paradox: While rambling on a tangent, Sebastian mentions "that Jamie Lee Curtis stuff [yogurt]." Jamie Lee Curtis happened to play a major recurring character during one season of NCIS.
• Character Name Alias: LaSalle's brother used Caulfield and Kimble as aliases while he was on the road.
• Chekhov's Gun: A blink-and-you'll-miss-it comment by LaSalle about the USS Maultrie in the show's Poorly Disguised Pilot turns into a major plot point and source of major character development for Brody 14 episodes later.
• City of Adventure: New Orleans. And unlike some crime and punishment shows, the series personalizes New Orleans until it is practically a character, with hints at it's history and culture.
• *Click* Hello: Happens to LaSalle in "Second Line" when he enters a darkened room and the criminal hiding there gets the drop on him.
• Cliffhanger: The season 4 finale "Checkmate" - Pride is shot twice in the chest in the room above his bar and is bleeding out.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Very delayed version, but not only does P3 volunteer to help steal Javier's money at an off-site betting place the very same day he's getting a cake from his pals at Gamblers Anonymous, he's going to use the same scam he was attempting to do when he was caught cheating and forced to quit gambling and use his hacking skills for the government (delay the broadcast at the off-site betting parlor and bet on the "winner").
• Consummate Liar: Brody, especially to suspects and occasionally to LaSalle, most notably when she told him a ton of embarrassing information after he had met a friend of hers ("He didn't tell you about _____, did he?") only to reveal she had been lying after LaSalle revealed his own embarrassing info to get her to talk.
• Convenient Misfire: In "Second Line", LaSalle is saved from getting shot when a crook accidentally squeezes the trigger and the gun dry fires. It seems the crook had neglected to chamber a round.
• Correlation/Causation Gag: Ducky from the main NCIS series has a cameo in the pilot, talking with Wade via Skype. During the conversation, Ducky mentions that the last time he was in New Orleans, it snowed for the first time in more than twenty years. Pride tells Ducky that if that's what happens when he visits, he's no longer welcome in the city.
• Cowboy Cop: Pride, whose ways consistently get him in trouble, ranging from being disciplined, suspended, and as of the second-to-last episode of the fourth season, under indictment.
• The Cracker: Elvis's protege who was involved in the deaths of four people at a nigh-Omniscient Database, which led to Dueling Hackers until he was murdered by his partner, the actual killer.
• Cutting the Knot: When Sebastian's playing his VR game he realizes he and his team can't decode the lock so he decides to find items to blow it up instead.
• Cyanide Pill:
  • In "The Third Man", The Mole delivers a cyanide pill to Judy Brown while she is in NCIS custody to allow her to kill herself before she can be handed over to the Department of Homeland Security.
  • A group of Chinese agents take these after they're caught stealing a new base's top secret warship computer. This was after infecting the whole base with a virus-loaded cake and killing the two Marines they were impersonating.
• Dead All Along: The Father, an anti-government terrorist who was uniting disparate militia groups from around the country, was killed a year ago by his ex-wife because he stole her money and more importantly wasn't really dedicated to the cause ("Movements have Mothers too").
• Death by Falling Over: The Victim of the Week in "Second Chances" is killed when he is tossed into a pit on a construction site, where he is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on the rebar at the bottom of the pit.
• Death Glare:
  • Brody is the most regular user, being the team's primary interrogator. She takes it up to eleven while trying to break a white supremacist.
  • Laurel, Pride's daughter, has a fairly impressive one that she aims squarely at her father after he gets too chummy with her boyfriend.
• Defector from Decadence:
  • The Australian Navy lawyer used to be a lawyer for wealthy families but was driven to drink after years of greedy relatives fighting over wills. After she almost killed a child while driving drunk she quit her job and joined the navy.
  • LaSalle's family — or at least his father — are implied to be rich from the oil business. How rich? LaSalle got a letter and a plane ticket home hand-delivered to him during Hurricane Katrina.
• Detective Mole: A major ongoing plot in second season involves a search for The Mole inside the Department of Homeland Security. The Mole turns out to be Agent Russo, the agent placed in charge of the investigation.
• Didn't Think This Through: A recent case had the team dealing with the kidnapping of a teenager who was going to spend six months with her extreme survivalist father while her mother went overseas on a mission. It turned out that her older sister engineered the whole thing with her boyfriend because she was still angry over how she was raised during her teen years, and didn't want her sister going through the same thing. However, she didn't take into account the fact that no one reacts well to being kidnapped, and it resulted in her sister killing the head kidnapper, leaving his pissed-off men to take over and demand a ransom from her. At the end, the father helped save the girl and the sister is now facing charges.
• Dirty Cop: NOPD Captain Messier was The Mole for the Broussard Syndicate.
• Disposable Woman:
  • BOTH LaSalle brothers lose their girlfriends in the same episode (Savannah's death confirmed in the next one): Cade's girlfriend Wendi is murdered by a serial killer and Chris' girlfriend Savannah (who he's been wanting to marry since high school) is killed by Baitfish just to set the team up for an ambush.
  • A woman who Pride rescued as a child is revealed to be Javier the cartel money-launderer's fiancee. She survives infiltrating his computer but gets gunned down at the end of the episode.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind:
  • One of the college students in "The Recruits" is the mastermind of the Navy SEALs' murder and the leader of the covert prostitution ring. Luckily enough, Price was able to get a confession by using a wire on one of her classmates.
  • The victim-of-the-week of the 2015 Christmas episode was murdered by her own stepdaughter who posed as a traumatized victim and when her robbery ring was found out tried to kill the most suspicious member (who happened to be Loretta's foster son's childhood friend from the 'hood) and got her terrified, "mesmerized" friends to go along with her.
  • The mastermind who stalked Pride's daughter and was spying on the team wasn't the imprisoned Family Militia leader but their lawyer — the same young woman who tearfully told Pride she was being blackmailed and threatened with death.
• The Door Slams You: In "Collateral Damage", a fleeing suspect swings open the door of a cargo container to flatten one his pursuers, who runs into it at full speed.
• Downer Ending:
  • By the end of "Follow the Money", Pride's old friend is killed by her fiancee, a major cartel figure, with the evidence she obtained not having any defining links between him and the cartel, and the lack of any leads basically costs Gregorio her job.
  • The appropriately titled "Broken Hearted" ends with the team getting the heart back, but the heart has deteriorated and Max dies in surgery. Patton then laments how hard it is to beat the odds.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: LaSalle claims to have a tattoo of Big Al, the University of Alabama mascot, on his rear, acquired after a night of heavy drinking. Brody hints that she might have one, intriguing LaSalle and Sebastian.
  Sebastian: You gotta wonder what future civilizations are going to think about our dabbling in the ancient arts of ink.
  LaSalle: They'll say drinking and tatting don't mix. That's how I ended up with Big Al on my derriere.
  Brody and Sebastian give LaSalle strange looks
  LaSalle: Roll Tide!
• Emotions vs. Stoicism: Pride, who thinks it's good he sees his agents like family and goes above and beyond to help them (and the victims-of-the-week, of course) VS. FBI Agent Gregorio who's very by-the-book and thinks getting so close harms objectivity (though he's rubbing off on her).
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: A pair of rival biker gangs (with the "local" one being evil due to their penchant for violence and gun-running) have mostly white members but are led by black men.
• Establishing Character Moment: In her first appearance, Hannah Khoury calmly and effectively gives Sebastian an order, tells him he has pastry on his face, then asks for Gregorio's opinion on something.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Apollyon, aka Avery Walker, a major antagonist in Season 5 who routinely gives Pride hell and a half, kills a number of people involved with their work including Pride's father, Cassius to cover up their tracks, does all sorts of crimes and is even high up in the government to be able to access all sorts of top-secret information as a spec-ops contractor, but the entire reason for this mess? Avery was blackmailed over his initial target knowing about his biological son, Pride happened to be the only other person that knew about the leverage despite lacking context on it, and Avery did every single possible thing he could to eliminate all witnesses, learn his son's whereabouts and clean up his tracks so that no one would ever threaten the boy. He ends up shot right in front of his son's foster home after Pride thought one step ahead of him, with the latter assuring him in his last moments that the boy will be safe.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Hamilton, the corrupt politician who harasses Pride is no killer, and even gives Pride his father's DNA when he (the father, a member of KKK-like group) is suspected of killing a civil rights activist (he's innocent, at least in that instance). He also loves New Orleans as much as Pride, which is why Pride doubts he's behind Sasha Broussard's smuggling ring.
  • He might have crossed that line as he's the first person Javier, the cartel's money-launderer, names as a bribe-taker in a bid for witness protection; Javier is killed after Pride implies to Hamilton that Javier is naming names (to be fair to Hamilton Javier's boss wouldn't have been very happy about his failure either).
  • The biggest cartel member in New Orleans, a real estate developer named Javier, is horrified to learn a construction company dumped hazardous materials at a school his son happens to attend. He sends the FBI fine bourbon as thanks in the next episode but Pride tells Gregorio to put it in inventory as a bribe.
  • Gregorio's ex-husband is a con man who stole Katrina relief funds and disappeared into the Witness Protection Program as it turns out since he was working for a local crime family but he swears he wasn't behind the killing of the victim-of-the-week who happens to be the White Sheep baby brother of said crime family and whose bank account contained the missing funds that his brothers were itching to get their hands on.
• Evil Is Petty: Brody calls Dept. of Homeland Security agent/Colombian cartel stooge Russo]]'s motive for attacking the country "petty": the cartel "appreciated him better" (implying they paid him) than any of the legit institutions he had applied to all the way back to college. Said bad guy had been an exceptional person and had lived an especially upstanding life.
• Exact Time to Failure: In "Broken Hearted" the team has six hours to retrieve a donor heart before it expires. LaSalle is seen setting the timer on his phone they get the heart into surgery with five minutes to spare but it was too beat up and the patient died (it had already been transplanted into a criminal and he died).
• Exasperated Perp: Brody and Borin give an uncooperative suspect (who's been whistling "Dixie") a taste of his own medicine by whistling and singing "I Fought the Law and the Law Won".
• Eye Scream: The killer in "End Of The Line" removes his victims' eyes "so they can't look into his soul" according to Gregorio.
• Eyecatch: Like other shows in the franchise, each act of NCIS: NOLA begins with a preview of the act's final shot. Uniquely, NOLA's eyecatches are colored rather than in black and white.
• Failed a Spot Check: A couple is in witness protection because he's a witness against a dangerous arms dealer. After he's murdered his wife is justifiably upset that their very intrusive security failed them, but it turns out she unwittingly led the assassin to them because she didn't want to stop attending her AA meetings ^note people in "witsec" must avoid all their old activities and didn't notice that a new member sought her out specifically.
• Faking the Dead: In "Second Line", a navy reservist fakes his death in car crash to allow him desert with the proceeds of a crime he has committed.
• Fingore: One of Pride's childhood memories that he didn't share with his daughter includes the time his family was sent a cake with a human finger inside as a warning to father Cassius, a gangster/all-around bad dude.
• Fiery Redhead: The investigator from the Australian Navy. She looked into all the agents' pasts and is so determined to get justice for the murdered officer's family that she jumped the gun on a stakeout and had to be disarmed before she hurt any more suspects (Pride took a collapsible baton, a pistol, and a knife off her and he's still not sure he got everything).
• Five-Token Band: And how. Three whites, one of whom is the White Male Lead. Three African-Americans, two of whom are female and one of whom is in a wheelchair, and one Hispanic, who is also female.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling:
  • LaSalle is responsible and his brother is "foolish" (he ran away because he hated the side-effects of his bipolar meds despite knowing how worried his mother and brother were).
  • The Lin brothers from "The Walking Dead" think this way of each other: Lt. Lin couldn't leave his responsibilities "halfway around the world" to care for their dying father while his brother lost so much money in bad investments that his wife tried to kill them both with polonium so she could get out of debt without going to her (allegedly, we never meet him) overbearing father.
  • Dwayne and his half-brother Jimmy have shades of this. Dwayne is an upstanding member of the community and high-ranking federal agent while Jimmy was a criminal for most of his life and is quick to run if he smells trouble coming. Thanks to Dwayne's trust and help, Jimmy came around to the idea of living an honest life.
• Foreshadowing: "Risk Assessment" opens with the victim's two children playing paintball while he gives them combat advice. This seems largely harmless until it's revealed he was a spy who was grooming the children to join the business. Paintball was a training exercise to prepare them for actual missions and the daughter's viciousness during the game foreshadows her willingness to kill.
• Geeky Turn-On: Percy says she likes her men "wordy and nerdy".
• Ghost City: The streets outside Pride's bar are empty at the start of "Something In the Air, Part 1" due to the Covid-19 lockdown.
• Grave Robbing: In "Second Line" the NCIS team uncover a case of tomb robbing, with the robbers stealing valuable artifacts from tombs to sell and on the black market and taking the bones as well to establish the provenance of the artifacts.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: In "Means to an End", Laurel uses a bottle to knock the gun out of the hand of a woman who is threatening her. The bottle smashes when it hits the gunwoman's hand.
• Happy Ending Override: The plot arc involving Mayor Hamilton in Season 4 concludes with Pride saving the Clearwater community from Hamilton's scheme to demolish it and build a massive naval base on the lands, but, while he clears his name and earns the adoration of Clearwater and his team, the next few episodes involves him contending with disgruntled New Orleans residents who found themselves out of a job. True, Hamilton was a Corrupt Politician who had no qualms ordering the deaths of anyone in his way and the destruction of an entire community, but that naval based promised a lot of people jobs, jobs that no longer existed when Hamilton got busted, and put New Orleans' economy into decline. Not everyone knows the full extent of what Hamilton planned to do, and many of the people affected by economic fallout of the naval base plan falling through blame Pride for standing in its way.
• Hillbilly Moonshiner: Brody and LaSalle find themselves held at gunpoint by an unusually erudite hillbilly moonshiner while investigating a body dump in "It Happened Last Night".
  Moonshiner: It's a smooth, clear IPA with faint citrus-honey flavor notes and a dry finish.
  [LaSalle swirls a sip around his mouth and spits it out with an unimpressed look on his face]
  LaSalle: Don't dress it up. It's still moonshine.
  Moonshiner: It's my passion.
  LaSalle: You pay taxes on your passion?
  Moonshiner: Ask my accountant.
• Honor Before Reason: A missing Navy SEAL is willing to die before dishonoring himself after a series of murders because he unknowingly helped the real murderer, a South American revolutionary leader who killed seven villagers and cut their tongues out plus an investigating blogger and the other SEAL who helped him escape, who were on the verge of revealing the truth.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Tall, pale, and geeky Sebastian and Pint-Sized Powerhouse Sassy Black Woman Percy. She loves his sense of humor.
• I Call Her "Vera":
  • King has a nickeled Colt Python called "Charmaine" that he uses for special busts. He refers to the gun as his 'mistress'.
    Pride: Chris!
    LaSalle: Yeah, King?
    Pride: I need you to unlock Charmaine!
    LaSalle: You got it.
    Gibbs: Thought you two broke up.
    Pride: Been my mistress for 25 years...Can't split up now.
    Bishop: Who's Charmaine?
    Gibbs: Sweet, sweet, Charmaine.
    Pride: C'mere, baby! (Pulls a revolver out of a velvet-lined wooden box) Good thing you can't talk...The stories you'd tell...
  • LaSalle calls the facial recognition database they are linked up to "Bruce" and, as it turns out, so does Pride. Brody is bemused by this quirk.
• Idiot Ball: Quite a few times and not just by the bad guys. In "Monster," a CIA operative hires a known arms dealer and his gang to steal weapons in hopes of luring in terrorist buyers. It naturally goes wrong as the guy uses the clout of federal immunity to pull off a huge heist and ends up (literally) stabbing her in the back. He even lampshades the stupidity of her "strategy":
  Kurtz: You hire a bunch of crooks to steal stuff, don't be surprised if it goes badly.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In "Second Chances", the Victim of the Week is tossed into a pit on a construction site, where he is impaled on the rebar at the bottom of the pit.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: "Means to an End" features some spectacularly bad shooting from the bad guys. Despite Pride being an narrow alley that means he cannot dodge sideways, and the villains being militia members who are presumably trained in weapons use, they still manage to miss him while firing at him with automatic weapons.
• Inspired by…: The show's concept came about when Gary Glasberg heard about the Real Life NCIS New Orleans office, how it was run by just a quirky agent and his partner, and how the two handled cases all over the Gulf of Mexico.
• Ironic Echo: The first time Gregorio and Sebastian are confronted by a bad guy, Sebastian fumbles badly and can't bring himself to shoot the man. The second time, he kicks the guy's ass.
• Irony:
  • Loretta's foster son "assistant" is not amused by the fact that he never had a gun pulled on him when he dealt drugs, but on his very first day working with her he gets shot.
  • A rich man's son does everything he can think of to make sure his long-lost illegitimate half-sister won't claim her half of his inheritance — except talk to her. If he had he would have learned that in spite of her poor childhood she wasn't interested in money. she would've gotten half the guy's inheritance but since he committed at least three or four actual crimes including killing a member of the Navy he loses his entire inheritance and she gets the whole lot.
• It's All About Me:
  • LaSalle's attitude prior to meeting Pride (literally, his attitude starts to change after they meet) — he considered cases and victims to be nothing more than stepping stones to higher positions and when he got overwhelmed by a difficult case that happened during hurricane Katrina he was ready to give up and go home to Alabama.
  • Gregorio's ex-husband Ethan. When she rejects any chance of them hooking back up by declaring she's gay he says that he's happy he was part of her "self-discovery" (you know, by stealing millions of Katrina relief funds, disappearing, and causing her so much pain she stayed away from New Orleans for years).
• It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans: Subverted. While it obviously could not be Mardi Gras every week—though at least one episode did air on the actual Mardi Gras, 2/9/16— many episodes have started and/or ended with some kind of celebration. In the second half of the Back Door Pilot, Bishop asks Pride if there's a parade every week and his shrug more or less confirms it.
• It's Personal:
  • Pride loves New Orleans so much that he takes anything that threatens to tarnish the city's reputation as a personal affront.
  • Before joining NCIS, Pride took down a gang called the Broussard Syndicate as a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's deputy. He takes the Broussard family's younger generation trying to rebuild the Syndicate as a personal affront and even takes Charmaine out whenever he has to pursue a case associated with them.
  • An agent interrogating Brody pushes her hard and even reopens the case of the USS Maultrie, even though she was cleared of any wrongdoing, because he was friends with two of the five people who were killed and blames her for the incident.
• Jurisdiction Friction:
  • FBI Agent Gregorio's cartel cases keep mixing in with Pride's NCIS cases; rather than fight over it she joins the team for convenience until they root out the cartel.
  • Much like the parent series, the CIA are treated like constantly foolish spooks that do nothing but interfere with NCIS investigations, do bad deals behind everyone's backs that causes problems, and then proceed to try to flaunt their authority the moment someone gets in their way. This happens multiple times, and usually it either gets people (and the CIA handler) killed, or the handler themselves are corrupt.
• The Lad-ette: Percy is very annoyed she wasn't invited to "Boys Night Out". She didn't actually want to go, but was offended that she wasn't even considered.
• Laser Sight: Not an actual laser, but Pride is able to tell that a sniper is taking aim at the witness he's protecting because the sun is glinting off the sniper's scope and projecting a glare onto the witness's face.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Garcia, a drug lord that singlehandedly controlled much of the drug operations in New Orleans and had numerous people including his own wife murdered for the sake of it then bargained his way out of any consequences besides being placed in witness protection being killed on the way to witness protection instead of being a Karma Houdini is it's own brand of Karmic justice.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In "Father's Day", the team subdues a suspect in the middle of a busy Mardi Gras party, which prompts the crowd to applaud them. LaSalle responds by saying they'll be there "every Tuesday night".
• Love Makes You Evil:
  • A civil rights activist was murdered and everyone suspects a KKK-like group. Turns out the guy's best friend was in love with his wife and accidentally killed him and staged it to look like a lynching.
  • The killer in "End Of The Line" was in love with a woman who wouldn't leave her troubled, mentally ill husband even after he gave her an expensive platinum necklace so he murdered her with her own pickax (her husband wanted her to be able to defend herself if he got violent), plucked out her eyes, strapped her body to a trolley car, and became her husband's defense attorney.
• Luke, You Are My Father: LaSalle may have fathered a child with a woman he hooked up with a couple years ago — actually not, she just wanted to get away from her very angry boyfriend.
• The Man Behind the Man:
  • Pride is obsessed with tracking down an old snitch (whom he disparagingly calls "Baitfish") because he thinks Baitfish is trying to build a new empire out of the remains of the Broussard Syndicate. Pride eventually discovers that Baitfish has a backer in the form of Sasha Broussard, the supposed white sheep of the family. And there's a mysterious man involved as well, but viewers only get a glimpse of his shoulder through fogged up glass; he turns out to be The Mole (see below).
  • It's implied that not only did Agent Gregorio's ex-husband steal Katrina funds he might be linked to pitting two rival biker gangs against each other twice just so his company could take over land the "visiting" bikers wanted to build homes on so his company could build offices.
• Manly Tears: Pride quietly breaks down when preparing for LaSalle's funeral.
• Married to the Job:
  • Pride's devotion to his job cost him his marriage (fortunately he's Amicable Exes with his wife) and at least one previous relationship that he's reconnecting with; Brody's war photographer ex-fiance left town for an assignment in the middle of planning their wedding.
  • Gregorio after fleeing New Orleans and the reason she broke up with Hannah, her girlfriend in the Justice Department. Hilariously she thinks she's a matchmaker, her own romantic history aside.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: For obvious reasons, Pride's mysterious premonitions and hallucinations not to mention everything involving the "Angel" after the season five start can be either his mind and instinct filling in gaps combined with his stress after his brush with death, or genuine hints of supernatural elements. Everyone but Pride himself believes the former, yet the sheer oddities and coincidences make him believe to the contrary.
• Meaningful Name:
  • LaSalle's brother used Caulfield and Kimble as aliases while he was on the road.
  • The winning horse Javier bets on is named NOLA Pride.
• The Mole:
  • The mysterious man conspiring with Sasha Broussard turns out to be Detective Messier, who also killed (or helped kill) Baitfish and the head of security to cover up Sasha's smuggling.
  • The person who leaked info on a high-ranking admiral's scandal and then killed the leaker and everyone else connected to the case was the agent who was third in line for the admiral's post and wanted control over the investigations into his own plots.
• My Beloved Smother: Sebastian's mother is incredibly anxious about her son (and everything in general) and him getting kidnapped during her visit didn't help (it's unknown if she knows about that time he was held hostage in the morgue).
• My Greatest Failure: In "End Of The Line" Loretta believes she sent an innocent man to prison for 20 years because her emotional testimony won over the jury (she just got divorced from her abusive husband and took her frustration out on the suspect when she was only supposed to report the facts of the victim's autopsy). After it's proven the guy was innocent Loretta starts helping him adjust to the outside world.
• New Meat:
  • Percy is subjected to pranks and gruntwork in the season premier and is referred to as the "NFG" (New [something] Girl ^note  It's normally FNG (F'ing New Guy/Girl).
  • After Gregorio joins the team she immediately inspects her desk for pranks; LaSalle and Percy wonder what kind of sadistic workplace she came from, then reveal the previous episodes' shenanigans left them with too much paperwork for pranks. They then surprise her in the kitchen with confetti poppers.
  • Likewise Sebastian's first day is too busy for pranks (unless the evil hacker showing them each other's critical emails counts).
• Not Quite Saved Enough:
  • In the penultimate episode of Season 1, Pride stops LaSalle from killing Baitfish for revenge, only for Baitfish to get sniped.
  • In "Broken-Hearted", the team is able to recover the Teen Genius's donor heart, but he doesn't survive the transplant.
  • BOTH Javier and his fiancee are killed after being placed in FBI custody — his fiancee is killed by one of Javier's assassins as she's being moved to a safehouse; Javier is blown up (either by his boss who didn't get paid or Hamilton who didn't want to reveal he was bribed by Javier) after he's been placed in witness protection.
• Oddly Small Organization: The NCIS New Orleans Office is responsible for investigating Navy-related crimes throughout the Gulf of Mexico, meaning that its agents handle cases coming in from at least five states. Yet, it only employed two full time agents for a number of years before a third transferred in^note The real life NCIS New Orleans Office really did only operate with two agents for a long time. The team will be five agents once Sebastian finishes training. That's still five agents total (the other shows have buildings full of agents). Lampshaded when Pride is trapped on an oil rig with no gun and no cell reception with three killers. The rig's operator, who wanted to leave her post "with a bang" but not like this, is not comforted by his certainty that "only" three agents will come and rescue them.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Pride in "Carrier" after Loretta tells him that the sailor on her autopsy table died from bubonic plague.
  • LaSalle when a lurking criminal not only pulls a *Click* Hello on him, but pulls the trigger, leaving him to gasp in genuine terror as he realizes that the only reason he isn't dead is because the gun jammed. He's considerably shaken up for the remainder of the episode.
• One Head Taller: Gregorio's ex Ethan is several inches taller than LaSalle and much taller than Gregorio and Percy, which makes for a hilarious perp walk (he's also taller than the episode's bad guys the victim's brothers who want the funds Ethan hid in his bank account).
• Origins Episode: "Billy and the Kid" deals with the first case Pride and LaSalle worked on together.
• Out-Gambitted:
  • The team figure they finally have a lead on drug kingpin Garcia as his fiancee (an old friend of Pride's) realizes who the man is and helps them get data files on his finances. However, it turns out that Garcia had made sure to put everything under his fiancee's name, nothing connecting to him so the info is useless. Then he hires a hitman to take her out before she can testify against him.
  • The team turns it on him in the next episode, literally: Garcia HAS to make a big payment to his boss so he risks his remaining fortune by gambling on a horse race that the team has rigged (Garcia knows it's rigged, he just doesn't know by whom).
• Out-of-Character Alert:
  • In "The Insider", Loretta is being held hostage by a gunman. When Pride asks her about the victim on her slab, she says that he died from "Larrabee's syndrome". Pride recognizes this as a Quiet Cry for Help because Captain Larrabee was an officer who was killed working a hostage situation with Pride years before.
  • While being held at gunpoint, Percy calls LaSalle "city mouse", shortly after they'd mutually agreed to retire their pet names for each other. Plus, his nickname is "country mouse". He's perplexed, but quickly realizes something's wrong.
• Pet the Dog: The city councilman who Pride has friction with uses his clout to get Pride and his team a little more time to get Sasha Broussard before Baitfish can sign a deal that gets him into Witness Protection and off the hook for his many murders.
• Phony Veteran: The Victim of the Week in "Stolen Valor" is a former SEAL who hunts military imposters. His killer was someone rejected three times for military service who later joined a militia and then started turning up at veteran events claiming to be a decorated marine.
• Pity the Kidnapper: Sebastian gets on his captors last nerves with his incessant babbling, though not intentionally—he does it when he's nervous, as he repeatedly explains.
• The Place: The second half of the title.
• Playful Hacker: Triple-P (who works for the government) and Elvis (who wants transparency).
• Plot Armor: The season 2 finale and 3 opener has Pride getting fatally shot, but he manages to hang onto the realm of the living through sheer force of will and rejecting passing on personally. In season 6, Lasalle gets fatally shot in a similar manner and hospitalized immediately after, but dies not even halfway through the episode by a medical complication without even any dramatics or theatrics, highlighting just how extraordinary and implausible Pride's prior survival was.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Links all three plots in "One Good Man" (lampshaded by Pride at the end when he tells Loretta's son to "speak his truth"):
  1. The victim-of-the-week can't/doesn't tell his SEAL instructor why he failed the drown-proofing test (being tied up underwater) his high school sexual abuser tied him up and being forced to do it again freaked him out. VOTW tries to tell Mayor Hamilton who may have covered up the abuse as a councilman because he "didn't want to believe" it was happening who dismisses him ^note  to be fair to Hamilton calling his office ten times then running at the mayor as soon as he steps out of city hall isn't the best way to get anyone's attention, and when he does tell someone else the real abuser kills him, his coach, and intimidates another victim/witness/employee.
  2. Loretta's son reveals that he wants to join the Navy instead of going to college (he only went through the motions of applying to make her happy; Loretta thinks joining the military will be an unnecessary "hardship" on top of what he experienced on the streets (plus the fact that she autopsies dead sailors for a living)). Both sides want Pride to talk some sense into the other; Pride refuses and calls Loretta out for her hypocrisy when she encouraged Pride's daughter to drop out of college and be herself.
  3. LaSalle's been getting tons of phone calls from a woman he hooked up with last year and never saw again and Gregorio encourages him to deal with her quickly because constantly hearing his phone is annoying. When he finally sees her it's revealed she got pregnant and believes LaSalle is the father (it's later revealed this was a ruse to get away from the baby's very hot-tempered actual father).
  • In the blackout episode: a rich guy's son kills several people and paralyzes the city because he doesn't want to share his inheritance (which he probably won't get since he was caught) with his illegitimate half-sister. Said sister, who happens to be Pride's daughter's friend, wasn't interested in the money and says so to anyone who asks; unfortunately the half-brother didn't think of that (and probably wouldn't have believe her) and her fiance wanted to surprise her with her inheritance and the half-brother found out.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: The show was introduced in a two-part episode on its parent program, namely: "Crescent City Parts 1 & 2" from the 11th season of NCIS. In the UK the episode aired as a movie-length premiere episode of NCIS: New Orleans (the fact that NCIS and NCIS: New Orleans use entirely different typefaces for their credits gives it away).
• Private Profit Prison: "Overlooked" features a private immigration detention center contracted by ICE. Said center is a human trafficking ring.
• Product Placement: The show is sponsored by Ford, so the main characters drive Ford SUVs and trucks.
• Punny Name: Sebastian is with the "Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus, which is a real thing.
• Quiet Cry for Help:
  • Loretta gives one to Pride in "The Insider" when she tells Pride that the victim on her slab died from "Larrabee's syndrome". Captain Larrabee was an officer who died while working a hostage situation with Pride years before.
  • Percy gives one to LaSalle when she's being held at gunpoint, telling him, "Everything's okay, city mouse." Aside from the fact that they'd decided to stop using their nicknames for each other, that's HIS name for HER.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The show's opening credits sequence uses a snippet from "Boom Boom" by Big Head Todd & The Monsters
• Redheads Are Ravishing:
  • LaSalle and his girlfriend Savannah, who he's been in love with since high school. A sassy ATF agent nicknames her "mermaid" after the Disney movie.
  • Pride's daughter would not be unhappy if her father hooked up with the redhead investigator from Australia.
• Reformed, but Rejected: Sonja Percy's ex-best friend tried to ask for help with her drug habit and was rejected (granted she was high at the time...); Sonja later regretted her decision when she learned her ex-friend's brother's drug dealers left her his debt when he died, forcing her to become a drug dealer herself.
• Remember the New Guy?: Pride is good friends with Gibbs (to the point where Gibbs will give the man a bear hug every time they meet) and Fornell mentions visiting Pride several times. Yet Pride was never mentioned once until his introduction in Season 11 of NCIS.
• Required Spinoff Crossover:
  • Four of the first five episodes include at least one regular from NCIS plus two recurring characters from the parent show make guest appearances as well. To put it in perspective, it took all of two episodes for NCIS New Orleans to have more appearances by NCIS regulars other than Rocky Carroll (Director Vance) than NCIS: Los Angeles, which debuted five seasons earlier.
  • Since its debut, it's also had two crossover episodes ("Sister City" and "Pandora's Box") with its parent show during the February sweeps of Seasons 2 and 3, respectively, indicating that this will be a yearly occurrence.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The NDR's bombing of the USS Allegiance would remind people of the USS Cole's bombing attack.
• Room Full of Crazy: Pride has a "wall full of crazy", to quote LaSalle, during the "Baitfish" episodes.
• Rule of Three: The third NCIS series is the only show with a Real Song Theme Tune, isn't shot in Los Angeles, and has colored eyecatches. They also have the smallest group of agents (three, of course, compared to the other series' four they add Percy as the fourth agent, then Gregorio after Brody leaves; when Sebastian completes his training it'll make five), and the possibly the smallest headquarters since unlike the other shows' teams they're it.
• Sadistic Choice: When Sebastian is undergoing NCIS Agent training he has to choose between getting his badge or ignoring his team's desperate phone calls he chooses his team, of course, which saves the lives of Pride and everyone on a rapidly pressurizing oil rig, which his instructor acknowledges was the right choice NOW GO RUN 50 LAPS!.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: "A House Divided" has the team running into problems when they investigate the death of a Navy officer from a rich family after he fell down a stairway. Within hours, the family have used their pressure to get everyone from city officials to the governor to release the body before Loretta can do an autopsy, have it cremated and force the NCIS chief medical officer to call it an accidental death. They then blatantly bribe the team by upgrading their systems and offices and assume that's the end of it. Naturally, Pride refuses to back down and insist on investigating the case. It turns out that the matriarch drugged her own son to keep him from revealing that the family was involved in smuggling counterfeit cash, making her responsible for his fatal fall.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: When a JAG officer wants to subpoena and entire academy of troubled boys as part of a murder investigation by sending in the SWAT Team (this was before the boys took over the school because their leader, the bad-guy-of-the-week, had trained them to follow orders unconditionally and to protect the school at all costs), Pride, who knows a thing about getting a second chance after a trouble childhood, begs her to try and resolve this peacefully.
• Sex with the Ex:
  • Pride and Linda, although Pride will be quick to point out that they're just separated.
  • Brody hooks up with her former fiancé.
  • Utterly denied with Gregorio and her ex-husband though she still goes to see him at their favorite vacation spot to arrest him after he escapes (for real this time) with the missing Katrina money.
• Sexy Shirt Switch: The opening of the second-season finale confirms that Brody has spent the night with the agent she's been flirting with for the past several episodes when she joins him on his balcony wearing his white dress shirt.
• Shipper on Deck: Gregorio uses her training as The Profiler to help friends find love (her own romantic track record notwithstanding) and surprises everyone by saying she believes LaSalle's perfect match is Percy (who isn't in that episode). Patton finds the idea Sick and Wrong, but Sebastian looks like he's seriously considering whether Gregorio is right.
• Shoot Him, He Has a Wallet!: In the 2016 Mardi Gras episode, "Father's Day", one of the people rescuing Pride and Councilman-now-Mayor Hamilton thought their kidnapper was holding a gun. It was a camera.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Season 2 premier starts with someone deliberately misquoting Apocalypse Now (his partner (paraphrased): "90 years of military movies and the only quote anyone ever uses is 'I love the smell...!'?") and ends with the Psycho-style reveal of the episode's bad guy — actually a long-dead mummy in a swivel chair, killed by those he thought he could manipulate, including someone who refers to herself as Mother.
  • Brody wants to know why Percy is so hung-up on a particularly embarrassing bridesmaid dress (bright yellow with feathers) and Percy tells her about being star-crossed lovers in high school and a ruined prom night. Brody tells Percy "That's the plot of Sixteen Candles." Percy tells Brody she should mind her own business. Percy later tells Brody the truth: in college she was involved with a guy who told her he had broken up with his girlfriend/fiancee. He hadn't.
  • The season finale "Sleeping with the Enemy": Brody suspects that her Homeland Security agent love interest Russo is behind at least a half-dozen murders when she sees him on his phone — his other phone, that is — moments before a bomb "accidentally" explodes. Later the team discovers he was the last person to speak with a terror suspect and could have slipped her (the suspect, not Brody) a delayed-release suicide pill. Brody spends the rest of the episode pretending everything's fine in order to stay close and get info from him.
  • "Escape Plan" has two: A video game covertly being used as a recruitment tool thrusts Sebastian into a deadly situation that involves a prisoner crawling through a rather nasty pipe.
  • "One Good Man": Gregorio teases LaSalle that the woman who's been calling him might be a "bunny boiler".
  • A would-be victim who's Trapped in a Sinking Car uses the air valve from a tire to get oxygen, just like Roger Moore did in A View to a Kill. Sebastian even explicitly mentions the movie upon surveying the crime scene.
  • The ending for that episode could be seen as a shout out to Jim Gordon's faked death from the dark Knight with a twist straight out of eraser or from the original night Rider episode night of the Phoenix (because in the Last two A body was provided to sell that that person was dead when they actually weren't.)
• Shown Their Work: The actions of the Niger Delta Renegades in a reference to how most Niger Delta terrorist groups came to be created in "My City".
• Smug Snake: The corrupt CIA agent in the 2015 fall season premier, who thought he was untouchable after helping a South American revolutionary leader escape after the guy had killed seven villagers (plus two in the US). Turns out the CIA doesn't like their agents taking bribes without permission.
• Splash of Color: A woman dressed in blue flees from a gunman dressed in black while they're surrounded by a crowd of people wearing red dresses (including Pride, LaSalle, Sebastian, and Pride's councilman nemesis). Percy's flashbacks of from the same episode are tinted blue.
• Stalker with a Crush: One of Cade LaSalle's girlfriend Wendi's many horrible ex-boyfriends. He hid a camera in her home, assaulted her, and waited outside her door all night in front of a security camera at the same time she was being killed, so he's not guilty ...this time.
• Stalker without a Crush: In "No. 1 Fan", Pride meets a woman who has been following his career for years to a very uncomfortable degree. She even talks of how much Pride's daughter has grown since "the last time I saw her" and needs his help to hunt a serial killer. Naturally, Pride ignores her...until the woman literally kidnaps Pride to get his help. While he tries to escape at first, as he sees the woman's evidence, Pride realizes she really is onto something about this killer and ends up helping her solve the case and save the latest victim. He then lets her go on the idea she get some medical help for her obvious issues.
• A Storm Is Coming: In the buildup to the Season 1 finale, many storm/hurricane references are made to a horrible something smuggled into New Orleans, which turns out to be a group of African militiamen with a plan to launch a missile at a nearby nuclear plant, and the equipment to pull it off.
• Suicide by Cop:
  • Agent Russo does this at the end of "Sleeping With the Enemy"; drawing his gun on Brody despite the fact that she already has the drop on him.
  • The bad guy at a cadet academy for troubled boys attempts to do this goading his teen underling into shooting him after his plan to remake the school in his own image by discrediting his boss and killing potential whistle-blowers goes haywire when the bodies are discovered and the cadets, wired to protect the school at all costs, stage a coup. Fortunately before the kid can do something he'll regret the team snipes the gun out of his hands and takes everyone alive.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: LaSalle is shot and killed in "Matthew 5:9". Especially surprising in that LaSalle originally survived through surgery and regained consciousness just long to say a few words to Loretta (hallucinating her to be Cade) before losing consciousness and passing on not even a minute later.
• Suspect Is Hatless: "Pandora's Box Part II". Nick Torres (Visiting from the main series) reports that their killer was dressed like a harlequin. Given that this took place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, there was a party with over a hundred people in identical harlequin outfits going on less than a block away.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The handful of pretty CGIS agents who turn up occasionally are clearly this to Abigail Borin. One of them closely resembles Percy (who wasn't in the episode), making her this to her as well.
• Team Title: The first half of the title.
• Technically a Transport: In one episode, the New Orleans police trap a fleeing bad guy in a pickup truck with roadblocks. They think they've got the bad guy caught ... until a second bad guy stands up in the bed of the pickup, unfolds a Minigun on a stand, and starts blasting hell out of the police cars.
• Together in Death: Implied when LaSalle wakes up and takes Loretta's hand. He says, "I've missed you. . ." Loretta responds in kind, but his next—and last—words are, "Let's go fishing, Cade." (his brother, who was himself murdered several episodes prior). He then flatlines.
• Too Dumb to Live: Lasalle believes the words of some random woman who shows up at the hotel room of a suspect without verifying any of it, lets her lead him to a random cabin in the middle of the woods, and with Pride and Co literally only minutes away rushes into the cabin due to a bush rustling instead of waiting for backup. Lasalle gets shot in the cabin and dies of his injuries in the hospital as a result.
• Toyota Trip Wire: A variant in "If It Bleeds, It Leads". LaSalle and Percy stop a suspect fleeing on a motorbike by backing his truck close to another car.
• Trauma Conga Line: Loretta notes that LaSalle got hit with this badly: within two episodes his brother's accused of murdering his girlfriend (it wasn't him, he'd been roofied by the real killers) then his girlfriend is murdered, and just as he's able to overcome his need for revenge and the fact that her killer might go into witness protection the killer is killed.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The eyecatch before the last part of "Broken Hearted" shows P3 alone in the victim's hospital room in front of their empty bed.
• Twerp Sweating: Bizarrely inverted. Pride tends to get along better with his daughter's boyfriends than she does, and it freaks her out.
  Laurel: You cannot befriend my boyfriend!
  [Pride gives his daughter a dumbfounded look]
  Laurel: You brought Barry to Jazz Fest, Andrew and Chris still call you for advice, and, from what I understand, you sent Kenneth a check to cover his rent last month?!
  Pride: At least until his scholarship came through.
  Laurel: Dad! We went on three dates two years ago!
  Pride: He's a good guy!
  • In the same episode, she begs him to play the trope straight when introducing him to her boyfriend Orion. He does try to be more aloof, but the facade quickly falls apart when he learns Orion is a foodie like himself.
• Unorthodox Holstering: Averted. All three agents carry their sidearms in small of the back holsters.
• Vehicular Kidnapping: In "Tick Tock", Pride is out jogging when he's nabbed by masked men in broad daylight, who turns out to be contractors working for Apollyon, a private intelligence unit contracted by anyone who can afford their services.
• Vigilante Execution/Vigilante Man: Kills three Asshole Victims in "The List"; the last "target" is found in time he was innocent but acted suspiciously because he was more afraid of being outed as a gay man than being the prime suspect in a murder (for bonus irony points the motive was two guys fighting over a girl).
• The Villain Knows Where You Live: When Sebastian is abducted, the kidnappers specifically tell him this, then show him a picture of Dr. Wade, telling him that they know where she lives, then show him a picture of his mother, telling him that "she's staying at the Hotel Monteleone, Room 1113", making it quite clear that they'll kill them if he doesn't do what they say.
• I Want Them Alive!: Due to Pride's role in killing a rogue navy officer who leaked sensitive information to the black market, NCIS is forced to investigate for weeks on what the specifics are since he was ordered to bring him in alive.
• Western Terrorists: The Season 2 premiere deals with a collection of unaffiliated Right-Wing Militia Fanatic groups from across the country, united by a man calling himself "The Father" (a banner behind him indicates the group is/will be named "The Family"). At the end of the episode, the movement's actual leader, "The Mother", ominously states that any enemies of the US government are friends of theirs.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Checkmate" appears to be ending on a high note—the bad guys have been defeated, Pride has been reinstated, everyone is celebrating at his bar... then he goes upstairs to his apartment and is shot three times by the one baddie who did get away and who the viewers had forgotten about.
  • "Matthew 5:9". LaSalle is shot trying to apprehend his brother's killer. He gets through surgery, but ultimately succumbs to his wounds.
• Wham Line: Pride stops an attempt by the militia to attack a gathering of soldiers and meets with their imprisoned leader, Zed, to say he's being transferred to Florence Supermax prison and that "[he's] the leader of nothing."
  Zed: Whoever said I was the leader?
• White Male Lead: Despite having a far more diverse cast than its parent show, the show has this in Dwayne Pride (and technically LaSalle, who's his second in command).
• White Sheep: The victim in "Slay The Dragon" joined the Navy to get away from his criminal family and was a genuinely good guy unfortunately for him his bank account was where Gregorio's ex hid the stolen Katrina funds and his brothers were willing to kill for it.
• Whodunnit to Me?: To Lt. Gabriel Lin in "The Walking Dead", who is poisoned by radiation a la Alexander Litvinenko.
• Will They or Won't They?: Percy and LaSalle had this throughout her time on the show. They ultimately did not, deciding that embarking on a relationship would be disruptive to the team. But when she decided to leave the team anyway, they mutually admitted that they regretted not giving it a try.
• Wire Dilemma: Percy faces a variation of this in "Sleeping With the Enemy". In her case, she knows exactly which wire she needs to cut, but - in order to do so - she has to locate the detonator, and she is fast fast running out of time because the Coast Guard has orders to sink the boat she is on if it does not stop.
• A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing:
  • A notorious South American killer nicknamed "El Heche" who killed seven villagers was living in New Orleans pretending he could've been the eighth and cooking in a small restaurant; the CIA agent he paid off was working as a community organizer.
  • A traumatized teenage girl whose stepmother was murdered (years after the death of her bio-mom) turns out to be violent and controlling. You'd think that woman would leave that girl and her daddy alone after having a glass chucked at her head in a restaurant but she just wouldn't listen. She also shot one of her friends/thralls after he threatened to confess.
  • The mastermind behind the stalking of Pride's daughter and was spying on the team wasn't the imprisoned Family Militia leader but their lawyer — the same young woman who tearfully told Pride she was being blackmailed and threatened with death.
• Working the Same Case:
  • In "Means to an End", Pride pulls his team off the seemingly minor case they were working on - a missing petty officer - to investigate an attack on his daughter. It turns out the two cases are connected, and the attack on his daughter was actually arranged to distract NCIS from the missing petty officer.
  • FBI Agent Gregorio joins the team "for convenience" when they keep running into each other on cartel cases.
• Would Hit a Girl: In both senses of the word: DHS agent Russo kills a female terrorist he had hired via suicide pill after she gets caught and attacks Brody when he realizes she knows the truth.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Sebastian is abducted when a woman rushes up to him, claiming to need help for her injured husband. He leans over the guy to check on him and is promptly stun-gunned into unconsciousness.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One/You Are Too Late: In spite of Baitfish's death and Sasha Broussard's capture, her extensive smuggling network already allowed something terrible to get into New Orleans, which turns out to be Nigerian terrorists.
• You Have Failed Me: Zed, accomplice of The Father's ex-wife, fails to kill Pride after arranging an elaborate ambush involving a bomb, fake Texas cops, and a weaselly accountant. While he's in the hospital after being shot by Pride someone comes in and tells him he's going to be punished for his failure, which he willingly accepts.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In "Sleeping With the Enemy", The Mole does this to one of his underlings; detonating the bomb he has just finished constructing in an attempt to make the NCIS team think that the underling was the mastermind and that he has just accidentally blown himself up, taking all of the explosives with him.
• You Have to Believe Me!: In "No. 1 Fan" a woman has been gathering evidence of a serial killer. Rather than simply go to the NCIS office and present the evidence to them so they can take it from there (like several people have done) she walks right up to Pride, acts hysterical, forceful when he doesn't take her seriously, then kidnaps Pride and rants at him like a stereotypical conspiracy theorist when it's clear he doesn't believe her. Naturally nobody believes her until they get a good look at the evidence, which they're unable to do until they free Pride.

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