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  • Adorkable:
    • Jimmy is possibly the single dorkiest character seen on the show. This only makes him cuter.
    • Jack Sloane can also be quite cute when she gets excited about something. Notably, she gets adorably enthusiastic over, of all things, the social dynamics of your average neighborhood cul-de-sac.
      McGee: Suddenly the whole neighborhood's got a story to tell.
      Sloane: A dynamic I just couldn't resist.... Cul-de-sacs are a psychological gold mine. Test labs for tribal behaviors complete with alliances, betrayals, intrigue... [delighted grin]
    • Kasie geeks out over many things.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation:
    • Does Abby solve crimes out of a sense of duty? Or does she regard cases more like fun puzzles to solve? That would explain why she's so happy all the time.
    • In-universe, the team debates if Ziva meant to kill Ari or not. It's revealed that Ziva's father ordered her to shoot Ari, her half-brother, to gain Gibbs's trust and contain a rogue Mossad agent at the same time. While Ziva confirms this is true, she says that she wasn't lying when her plan was to deport Ari instead and get him out of the country, because they were close growing up and Ziva remembered the innocent boy he used to be. The plan changed when Ari held Gibbs at gunpoint in his own basement, and Ziva realized that she couldn't let an innocent man die at the hands of someone she loved. While the team is uncertain about Ziva's motivations, they also acknowledge that she is one of them now, even if she didn't mean to be in the beginning.
    • How much of a bastard is Ziva's father? He turned his children into weapons and fully acknowledges that Ziva was more of a pawn than a daughter to him. Gibbs even says that considering what Ziva went through, she would have every reason to not give her dad a second chance. Yet he does apologize in the episode, saying he remembered that once his children would laugh in his house and regrets that he took away their childhood.
  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • Ziva. Though we do get shown some moments, most of the time she's surprisingly chipper considering everything that's happened to her. Subverted when she comes back in Season 17. She's constantly frazzled and on edge, not bothering to let down her guard completely until the people pursuing her are finally caught.
    • As is Bishop, who mourned her dead boyfriend for all of one episode. This is a man who was the first she dated after her divorce (and she got over that right away too) and whose proposal she was going to accept.
  • Ass Pull: Harper Dearing's arc consists of one man who is supposedly Hopeless with Tech, managing to hack NCIS and government information all over the place as well as somehow finding out about Gibbs murdering Pedro Hernandez. While he does hire outside work to do his initial bombings for him, the rest are entirely his doing and there's never any context or explanation given for how or who he was getting that information from, as even the Watcher Fleet arc of The Mole within the Navy is usurped (and killed) by Dearing. Every single time our heroes seem to have something on him, he eludes them and kills more people, blackmails others while making it clear he could kill the main cast whenever he wants to, and can wrap everyone around his fingers without them realizing it until it's too late; the only reason Gibbs was able to kill him was because Dearing all but let it happen. The story also repeatedly emphasizes that Dearing is a normal citizen, former company CEO or not, raising a lot of questions as to how he managed to pull off all of his elaborate plans, and infamously causing some audiences to feel like he was just too implausible an antagonist the way he was presented.
  • Badass Decay: Every time Kort shows up after season 4, something worse happens to him. It's no surprise that he ends up getting killed no matter what the circumstances.
  • Base-Breaking Character: DiNozzo himself ranges the gamut from being a sex pest in the early series to a bit too much of a Butt-Monkey that never seems to learn his lesson later on. For many fans, he is part of the heart and soul of the series, a bit of the light-hearted brevity that helps keep it from being too dark and serious; once he left, many considered the series to be forever weaker for it. And yet he can be a nigh-unrepentant jackass to even his own friends for an entire episode for incredibly petty reasons, and tends to have one primary gag: running his mouth about arbitrary things and/or women before realizing Gibbs is in the room. To say he can be divisive for newer fans compared to the older audiences that grew up with the series, would be an understatement.
  • Broken Base:
    • One doesn't hear much about it but there's one camp that think that Ziva and Tony's relationship is Like Brother and Sister (making Gibbs' team like siblings with him as Daddy Gibbs) and then there's the ones that think of it as Belligerent Sexual Tension. And then there's they who can't make up their minds. Even the series switched back and forth a lot.
    • The quality of the show once DiNozzo leaves. Some say that the show is just spinning its wheels, lost the magic it used to have, and that Bishop and Torres are poor replacements for Ziva and Tony. Others feel that the new characters bring their own unique traits to the show, McGee stepping up to the leader role is natural character development, and that many of the plots are just as good as the older seasons.
    • Whether Gibbs still has a role on the show. On one hand, he is the face of the franchise, so much so that CBS has outright told him that the show will be canceled once he steps down. However, many argue that Gibbs rarely actually contributes much to the goings on with the show. Many of the last few seasons have had him prioritize his own storyline separate from the rest of the team, and it's shown many times that McGee, Bishop, and Torres can work perfectly fine without him. And even when he does take an active role in the case-of-the-day, he doesn't really do much of the legwork, basically just glaring at the others until they find the evidence they need.
    • How the show treats its female Special Agents Kate, Ziva, Jenny, and Bishop. For many, they are some of the best portrayed female characters on television, or at least in a procedural show, as they have their own wants and needs while allowed to be their own persons. For others, the fact that any happiness is almost immediately taken away, the fact that they are often the victims of sexism from their own teammates (Kate particularly), and that much of their personal lives are spent on romancing the macho man of the team devalues them. But then there's how the characters leave the show. Tony and Ducky got to ride off into the sunset and move onto more peaceful ventures. Kate and Jenny were murdered, Ziva was thought to be dead for years and was hunted down by a terrorist during that time, and Bishop had to intentionally disgrace herself in order to go undercover and follow Ziva's footsteps.
    • Speaking of which, Bishop actually trying to actively emulate Ziva. While some believe it made her into a stronger character, others feel it was a desperate attempt at trying to give her a replacement personality after getting rid of her various quirks from her debut season.
  • Complete Monster: See here.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • People who dislike and/or outright hate every other character on the show will still love Ducky. But hey, it is Ilya Kuryakin...
    • CGIS Agent Abigail Borin, played by Diane Neal, has a popularity with the fanbase all out of proportion to the number of times she has actually been on the show, to the point where she made two consecutive appearances on NCIS: New Orleans and eventually made a third. Many are clamoring for her to be a full time addition to the NCIS universe and some blatant hints have been made on NCIS and NCIS: New Orleans that the powers that be may be seriously considering the idea.
    • Both Torres and Kasie have gained a lot of fans once those characters settled into their roles.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • The "Gibbs Slap", McNicknames, and 'autopsy gremlin' for Palmer.
    • Alison Hart, the character played by Rena Sofer for a few episodes of season seven, was referred to by some fans as "Bitchy McLawyer."
    • Tony used McNickname when referring to something he said NOT being one.
  • Fanon Discontinuity:
    • NCIS is no stranger to killing popular characters, but the pointless deaths of Breena (and especially Emily) in season 18 are viewed as beyond the pale by most fans, and can easily make it tempting to disregard those deaths, or even the entire season, if they don't get retconned (something which wouldn't be unprecedented in this show).
    • Bishop's departure in Season 18 wasn't exactly embraced by the fandom. Many preferred to pretend she just retired to a desk job or something and is still with Torres off-screen.
  • Franchise Original Sin: Both spinoff series of NCIS: Los Angeles and NCIS: New Orleans face arcs where the central heroes are framed for crimes they didn't commit and end up obstructing and obfuscating investigations into themselves to buy time to find the real culprit, with the plots veering into idiotic territory. This parent series has had it multiple times with Gibbs before either of them did it, and his team end up doing questionably legal to straight up illegal obfuscating tactics to try to clear his name — despite him refusing the help, and it making him look worse. NCIS ended up handling such plots a bit more gracefully in most viewer's eyes, albeit also effectively spelling out that Gibbs was just too good to let go. And, after those series had their arcs, ultimately subverts it in Season 18 when Gibbs is severely punished in the lead-up to his permanent departure from the series for nearly murdering a man over the latter's animal abuse, and his team are notably given all kinds of hell for attempting the same law-breaking cover-ups and failing horribly.
  • Gotta Ship 'Em All: Gibbs, Tony, Ziva, McGee, Kate, Abby, and, to a lesser extent, Jenny, are each shipped with all the others by fans. The Ziva/Kate ship is particularly jarring, considering Ziva didn't even come on the show until after Kate had died. This leaves only Ducky, Palmer, and Vance who aren't commonly shipped with anyone (though you do occasionally see Ducky/Gibbs or Palmer/someone), perhaps because Ducky is about thirty-five years older than almost everyone else, Palmer doesn't have a substantial amount of interaction with anyone other than Ducky, and Vance was married for a while.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Ducky’s heart attack (which he thankfully survived) in the Season 9 finale and his final scene with Gibbs in Season 19 is even more sadder with the death of his portrayer David McCallum in September 2023. Rest in peace, David.
    • A marine recruiter in Season One's "One Shot, One Kill" (from the first season, first aired in 2004) tells two teenagers that Iraq will probably be over by the time they finish basic training. Yeah...
    • In Season Two's "The Bone Yard", a mob boss says that if Gibbs hurts his son, he'll kill his entire family, and then him. Gibbs jauntily replies that everyone in his family is dead, though he would be willing to give the boss the names and addresses of his ex-wives. Later on, we learn that his father is still alive, Jackson Gibbs, who appears in several episodes... and eventually dies of a stroke. The ex-wife comment becomes even harsher when one of his ex-wives, Diane, is killed and Gibbs is traumatized by it, even hallucinating her in future episodes.
    • In Season Five's "Stakeout", everyone snickers at Nikki Jardine for wearing a surgical mask around the office, because four people in her division have come down with the flu. Fast forward to Season Eighteen, not only the entire team is wearing masks at crime scenes, but the COVID-19 Pandemic (which required wearing surgical masks as a precaution) was incorporated into the show, and Jimmy's wife Breena died after contracting COVID-19.
    • This exchange in Season 6's "Dead Reckoning", given that seven years later, Kort is responsible for firebombing Eli David's farmhouse, nearly killing Ziva and her infant daughter.
      Ziva: Look, I dislike Kort as much as you do, but-
      Tony: Oh, really? You dislike him as much as me? He tried to kill me! He blew up my car!
      Ziva: I'm sure he had his reasons.
    • Any scene with Jake and Ellie, courtesy of the revelation of his affair and their subsequent divorce. A standout is Season Thirteen's "Incognito", where McGee congratulates Jake on him and Ellie going to St. Johns for a long weekend. He didn't know that it was supposed to be a surprise anniversary gift and Ellie sarcastically thanks McGee for ruining the surprise. Six episodes later, Ellie gets a nasty surprise of her own when Jake's affair comes to light, meaning that was one of the last things that they were ever going to do together.
    • Tony's comments to Jimmy and Breena in "We Build, We Fight" become this after "Family First," when it is revealed that Ziva had their child without telling him. Victoria Palmer was not the first NCIS baby.
    • For similar reasons, Tony and Ziva's goodbye scene in "Past, Present, Future" is this after "Family First," as she's pregnant in that scene, although neither of them know it.
    • In Season Thirteen's "Dead Letter," Kort mentions that he was the best man at a dead agent's wedding. Tony doesn't believe him. Either Kort's lying to gain sympathy and seem less guilty, or he just killed his friend (of which he does have very few).
    • Any episode that explores Abby's troubled background and issues stemming from harassment, especially the episode where she is pursued by a stalker. In real life, Pauley Perrette shares this aspect of her character because she was aggressively stalked to the point of being sickened to even open a laptop and having tearful breakdowns, and now started her own group to protest and cope with this sort of abuse, as seen in a two-part special on 48 Hours. Perrette invoked that plot on purpose as a statement to the problem stalkers present to our society and how unjust it is for authority abusers to just leave them be and blame the women for getting involved with them as though they had control over the situation in the first place.
    • Speaking of Abby, virtually every single scene between her and Gibbs over the show's first 14 seasons after a falling-out between their actors resulted in Perrette deciding to leave the show, made worse by claims that the two supposedly never got along. Consequentially, Gibbs and Abby have very few scenes together in Season 15, not even in her final episode. In particular, the episode "Dog Tags", where Abby befriends a dog that bit McGee and relentlessly chastises McGee for disliking and fearing the animal, to the point of forcing him to take the dog home with him seems like a downright eerie premonition.
    • In "Dead Air", a few extreme members of an isolationist political group based in Alexandria, Virginia, target a high-school softball game which several high-government officials are attending due to their daughters participating in the game. Thankfully, nobody was hurt because the team managed to get everybody out of the baseball field before the bomb went off. Seven years after the episode first aired, a far-left domestic terrorist shot up the practice game of the Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, and unlike the episode, people were hurt in the attack (although the only fatality was the perpetrator after a shootout with the police).
    • In "One Man's Trash", Kasie's debut episode, she moves her workspace from Autopsy to the Forensics Lab because she didn't want to see the dissection of one of the victims; when Gibbs asks if it's her first dead body, she nervously says she has seen one before but she doesn't give him any details. In "What Child is This", we learn that Kasie's "first dead body" was her father, who died from a sudden heart attack on his mail route three months before the events of "One Man's Trash". Kasie had to ID him in the morgue because her mom couldn't bring herself to do it. What makes it even worse? The last time Kasie and her father talked to each other, they got into a huge fight because Kasie was thinking of dropping out of grad school.
    • In Season 17 everything that the new neighbor Sarah did now that we know she was the one who firebombed Ziva's farmhouse (making Team Gibbs think she was dead for three years) and used her own son as a way to spy on Gibbs.
    • In season 18, Jack Sloane left NCIS to work for a non-profit in Afghanistan dedicated to helping those left underprivileged under Sharia law. Given that the Taliban retook the country later that year...
    • Early jokes about "why Gibbs has three ex-wives" seem a lot less funny when the real reason becomes clear. Likewise, the jokes that Gibbs wouldn't mind his ex-wives suffering a bit become harsh when Diane dies and he becomes clearly shaken by it.
    • In "Page Not Found", Tony and McGee remark that a corrupt CIA agent is "worse than Trent Kort". Come "Dead Letter", Kort is revealed to have been a traitor for years.
    • In "Twofer", multiple characters joke about how bad the body smells. This turns out in part to be due to a toxin in the man's stomach, which knocks Jimmy out when carrying out the autopsy.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: In Season 7's "Jack Knife", Ducky talks about how saving someone's life tends to form a bond between the rescuer and the rescued. Season 18's "Everything Starts Somewhere" then reveals that he first met Gibbs by accidentally saving him from a kidnapping, which Gibbs acknowledges as the start of their friendship. Ducky knew exactly what he was talking about.
  • He's Just Hiding: In a show with lots of geopolitical intrigue and a few Death Faked for You scenes it's hard not to hope that Emily Fornell might have had her death faked for some reason.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • The final line of "Twisted Sister," in which McGee's sister thinks she may have killed someone, has Gibbs saying "Sometimes, McGee, a little lie is good for the soul." Sis is played by Troian Bellisario, who four years after the episode first aired would start to build evidence to the contrary. P.S. She didn't do it.
    • "Power Down" slips a "Book 'em, DiNozzo" line in which the latter namedrops as a Hawaii Five-O reference, and "Capitol Offense" has a small subplot joke of McGee having stolen Abby's cupcake. When he finally admits that, yes, he ate it, she promptly belts off a swift "Book 'em, Danno!" Little did anyone probably know that just over two years after the second reference, there would be an actual Hawaii Five-O reboot that takes place in the same Bellisarioverse and even re-contextualizes the legendary Danno quote.
    • In "Good Cop, Bad Cop", Tony is being annoying to McGee, including a reference to "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe and asking him if he has a body buried under his floorboards. (It Makes Sense in Context...sorta.) Seven years later, it's revealed that Tony's apartment has a body buried under the floorboards, and he doesn't even know it. And to make it better, this revelation comes after McGee leases the apartment for himself and Delilah, making Tony's joke prescient by seven years.
      • And speaking of that body, witness this dialogue from "Return to Sender" when McGee and Bishop try to guess how Tony could even afford his apartment. Does Gibbs intentionally hide the answer in plain sight?
        Bishop: Loan from your dad?
        McGee: Generous cougar?
        Gibbs: (entering) Dead body...at the mortuary.
    • In "Voices", McGee and his wife Delilah are disagreeing on whether or not they want to know the gender of the baby they're expecting. Tim wants to find out, and one of the reasons he gives is because it would be easier to narrow down the baby names if they know the gender. At the end of the episode, the couple discover that they're expecting twins, one boy and one girl, so they really do have to come up with names for both genders.
    • In early May 2019, David McCallum was seen leaving Martin's Tavern in Georgetown with none other than Robert Mueller. People were quick to joke that NCIS was on the Mueller Investigation.
    • There was a lot of speculation from the fans that Mark Harmon uses a flip phone in real life, due to his character, Gibbs, notoriously hating modern smartphones and refusing to keep up with technology. According to one Facebook user, Mark Harmon actually uses an iPhone! Here’s proof. And there’s some evidence that Mark Harmon is way more tech-savvy than Gibbs, such as a photo of Harmon being on Zoom. Ironic.
  • He's Just Hiding: Ziva. This is even supported by producer and co-writer of the episode, Gary Glasberg, who stated it's left open to interpretation whether or not Ziva is dead for real. Though, now that Glasberg himself is no longer with us, if she does suddenly come back, he won't be there to see it happen... Season 16's "She" reveals that Ziva is indeed still alive.
  • Ho Yay: Has its own page.
  • Informed Wrongness:
    • Season 5's "Dog Tags" has a dog at a crime scene that had seemingly fatally mauled a suspect and then attacked McGee quite violently, forcing him to take a point-blank shot to wound and disable it. Abby proceeds to uncharacteristically shame, demean and utterly give him hell for the rest of the episode as she goes out of her way and puts her career on the line to prove the dog's innocence, despite McGee being completely justified in self-defense because it nearly tore his throat out. And yes, Abby proclaims it not capable of hurting anyone to McGee's face with his wounds, blood and bandages and all, in plain sight. The episode then takes Abby's side at every possible juncture while threatening and bullying McGee the whole way, including forcing the dog into his care without a choice in the matter and an Implied Death Threat, as well as hindering the current crime investigation massively amidst her moral crusade, making Abby have a massive hand on the Jerkass Ball and expecting viewers to take her side because Heroes Love Dogs despite her poor work behavior over the matter.
    • In early Season 19, a suspect gets loose inside NCIS headquarters and grabs Kasie, holding her hostage at gunpoint. New character Parker tries to negotiate with him to let Kasie go when Gibbs appears from behind and shoots the suspect. When Parker joins NCIS officially, Kasie is pissed at him for not firing immediately and risking her dying, and says that he would pay if he ever "held back" like that again, and the show is supposed to be on Kasie's side. Thing is, trying to negotiate with a criminal is indeed a legit tactic and something that people are trying to coerce actual police officers in real life to do more. If anything, what Parker did at least bought them some time so that someone else (like Gibbs) can get around from behind. It also feels a bit tone deaf, perpetrating the "shoot first, ask questions later" mind set police officers have had that has caused the current climate.
  • Like You Would Really Do It:
    • In one episode, Gibbs is "shot" as part of a sting. In the Season 5 finale, killing Jenny Shepard offscreen. Subverted, as they darn well would. She takes four baddies with her, though. And the serial killer's plan to get himself shot and ruin Gibbs' life...it fails. Badly. "Requiem" opens with Gibbs having apparently drowned.
    • Like you would really replace the entire main NCIS team under Gibbs with a new cast altogether at the end of Season 5. Not only is it all a ploy to lure out The Mole within the agency, but the start of the next season makes it clear Gibbs is getting his crew back with a bit of effort.
    • Like you would really blow up Tony and his old flame with an RPG. Your Target Is In Another Safe House.
    • Like you would really blow up Gibbs, Abby, Tony, Ziva AND McGee, and give Ducky a heart attack at the news. Yep, that's the season nine cliffhanger note ...
    • Like you would really kill Tony and Ziva off in a car crash 3 episodes before the end of Season 10.
    • Like you would really kill off Dex, the brave bomb-sniffing black Labrador who the team and audience has come to respect and adore throughout the episode "Seek". By the episode's conclusion, he's recovered and given to his handler's widow.
    • Like you would even DARE to kill off the beloved and highly idolized Abigail Scuito on her farewell episode. Trailers ALWAYS Lie!
    • Like you would really kill Gibbs by blowing up his boat. Even with his body floating on the water face-down, nobody bought the Season 18 cliffhanger for a second, even with CBS announcing Mark Harmon was coming back before the episode aired.
  • Long Runner: Still on the air since 2003 and it recently got renewed for season 21 with no signs of slowing down.
  • Memetic Badass: Leroy Jethro Gibbs is the most badass NCIS agent ever if you were to ask both the series and the fans, and Always Gets His Man. If he shows up in a crossover episode with one of the other series, he steals the show, and in-universe his own team (particularly Tony) have effectively made their equivalent of the Chuck Norris Facts solely for Gibbs.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • Ari shoots Kate and tries to shoot Abby to deliberately cause Gibbs grief, despite the fact that he could have easily shot Gibbs instead at the time and Gibbs was a more tactically valuable target.
    • Ari believes that the missile strike that killed his mother was ordered by Eli David, in order to "harden" him into a better killer. Keep in mind that Ari was a child at the time, and Eli was his father. If that wasn't enough, he orders his daughter Ziva to kill Ari, her half-brother, after Ari proves to be disloyal.
  • More Popular Replacement: Ziva is more widely recognized than Kate, given that the show gained widespread recognition after Kate's departure. As a result, many newer viewers don't even know who Kate is until they either stumble across an episode where she's mentioned or view one of the first two seasons later on.
  • More Popular Spin-Off: NCIS has far outstripped its parent show JAG, to the point that many viewers haven't even heard of the latter.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: Ducky's voice.
  • Narm:
    • The climax of the Christmas Episode Newborn King. A pregnant Marine is giving birth while Ziva holds off the mercenaries who are trying to kidnap the baby...but all dialogue and sound effects are muted, with the soundtrack playing "Silent Night." Painfully overdone.
    • The infamous "2 idiots, 1 keyboard" scene, where Abby and McGee get into a Hacker Duel with someone trying to hack into NCIS...using the same keyboard...
    • The depiction of Marseilles in "The Admiral's Daughter", especially the restaurant signs that make no sense and the accordion background music, more fitting the 1910s than the 2010s.
    • The jury in "Unseen Improvements," who seem to concentrate exclusively on Gibbs' police brutality suspension and gloss over that the person he brutalized was an animal abuser, bred pit bulls for fighting, and drowned them when they lost. As a result, the guy Gibbs is supposed to be testifying against gets a Not Guilty verdict.
  • Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize:
    • In the episode "Dead Reckoning," an international crime lord is played by some guy you've probably never heard of before. Meanwhile, the timid accountant who turns informer against him is played by Emmy Award winner Christian Clemenson. If you guessed just by reading that sentence that Clemenson is, in fact, The Man Behind the Man, you win a cookie.
    • The episode "A Weak Link" had guests Adam Baldwin, Julie Benz and Doug Savant. Subverted - None of them did it, it was a suicide.
      • Some fifteen seasons later, Doug Savant returns as a different character. Apparently, he really needed to be responsible for a crime on this show.
    • Misha Collins guest-starred as someone who gets "Singled Out" as a kidnapping/murder suspect. He did steal the car, but did not kill the navy lieutenant.
  • Nausea Fuel: Sometimes there's a particularly brutal death or physical violence, but where we get the worst of this is Ducky and Jimmy's line of work as the medical examiners, which is much more visceral than some viewers may be used to given they have to find details even mid-investigation where most series gloss over to the aftermath. Some of the corpses and even the conditions they have to recover and/or examine them can step straight into Gorn, which is probably why Ducky often uses some dry Black Comedy to downplay it.
  • No Yay: Ari's interactions with Kate. Especially in his first episode, where he gives her a Pervy Patdown while searching her for weapons, then pulls her against him while taunting her about her failure to shoot when she had the chance.
  • Periphery Demographic: This series is far more popular among tween girls than the typical Police Procedural, thanks to the popularity of Abby Sciuto.
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: The video game wasn't very well received. For starters, only one voice actor from the actual show was in it, it was near impossible to lose, simple plots, poor visuals, etc.
  • Replacement Scrappy:
    • Bishop is still on the receiving end of a lot of vocal fan hate after her second season. She grew out of it, but then fell right back in during Season 18.
    • Both Torres and Kasie were initially received quite poorly compared to their replacements (DiNozzo and Abby respectively).
    • While not a universal sentiment, a lot of people refuse to accept Parker for replacing Gibbs. Doubly so when McGee declined team leadership to put Parker in the role.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
    • Director Vance wasn't well liked until it was revealed there's more to him than meets the eye, and he very likely isn't Vance at all.
    • After she was poorly received for being overly quirky in Season 11, Season 12 cast Eleanor Bishop as a probie taken under DiNozzo's wing and attitudes towards her improved as well, until Season 18.
      • "A Many Splendored Thing" also cast her in a more positive light for some fans, because of her attempt at going after the season's Big Bad by herself, and succeeding at out-gambitting his attempt at Playing Both Sides.
      • Possibly due to just getting used to her after over seven seasons, Bishop now has a fandom of her own.
    • Torres started to come out of this when he started being more than the standard "macho man that makes fun of the nerd" stereotype that DiNizzo was. He's not entirely out of Scrappy-dom for various reasons, but he's still much more well liked now than than when he first showed up.
    • Kasie was initially seen as Abby-lite, but after a few character development episodes and giving her some of her own unique quirks different than Abby, she's garnered her own fanbase as well. It also helps that Pauley Perrette's controversial departure gave Diona Reasonover some sympathy points.
  • Retroactive Recognition:
    • Zac Efron is one of the boys who the team found with the Victim of the Week's phone in Season 3's "Deception" note .
    • Corey Stoll has blink-and-you-miss-them appearances as one of La Grenouille 's minions in Season 4, beginning with "Smoked".
    • Travis, the kid Ziva interrogates about finding a gun in Season 5's "Hide and Seek" is Manny from Modern Family
    • Cameron Monaghan as Nick Peyton, the teenager Vance suspects of killing his parent, in Season 8's "Out of the Frying Pan"; four years later he did it for real.
    • The money launderer who kidnaps Emily Fornell in the Season 11 episode "Devil's Triad" is portrayed by Sterling K. Brown, a few years before his Star Making Roles as Christopher Darden and Randall Pearson.
    • Rachel Barnes the sociopathic little girl who killed her mother, from Season 12's "Parental Guidance Suggested" is Eleven.
  • Ship Tease:
    • Tony and Kate unfortunately she dies before it can go anywhere. He also seems to have... something towards McGee, although that never goes anywhere either.
    • Tony and Ziva's becomes one of the most defining aspects of the show. The two eventually get a Relationship Upgrade, but not until both characters leave the show as regulars.
    • Bishop and Torres became the next teased couple.
  • Squick:
    • In one episode, a woman and her son with a vendetta against Ducky kidnap him, strap him to an autopsy table, and try to kill him by bleeding him out through a huge needle in his neck.
    • Gibbs finds a husband-wife toe-eating team.
    • The Cold Opening of "Murder 2.0". A woman turns on her shower, her husband puts on mood music, Bra Hits Floor, blood starts spurting from the shower head.
    • "Angel of Death". A drug dealer and his addict girlfriend try to retrieve the body of a mule, who had the package burst inside him. While the stand-off happens, the addict gets on the table and begins snorting straight out of the opened corpse. Bonus Squick for the corpse in question being her brother!
    • The exploding bodies in the crypts in "Skeletons." Ducky goes at length to explain that the white mushy goop all over the place in the aftermath is decayed human flesh — and a body is prone to breaking down into it within two weeks if not properly embalmed or handled.
    • In "Detour", Ducky and Jimmy weaponize this trope. When they are kidnapped and forced to perform an autopsy on a dead mole, they purposely sqiuck out their captors with the details so that they vacate the cabin they are chained in. This gives them enough alone time to plan out their escape.
    • Some of the dead bodies, before and/or during the autopsy scenes, obviously count. Those makeup artists have no shortage of fake blood and guts.
  • Special Effects Failure:
    • The show started using some extremely cheap looking CGI in lieu of practical effects in later seasons. Watch the car's sinking in this scene from "Requiem". The explosion at the end of the prior episode "Chimera" is another highlight, clearly being a cheap stock effect pasted on top of a ship that doesn't even so much as shake.
    • The NCIS office set is occasionally rather blatantly not a real building but a TV set area. Nowhere is this more obvious than when a night scene happens to pan over the windows, and show a completely flat image of the surrounding city that outs it as a cardboard wall.
  • Stoic Woobie: Gibbs, Ziva.
  • Strangled by the Red String:
    • Bishop and Qasim. Unlike the time and care taken to develop nearly every other love interest/love story, their relationship is depicted in a grand total of THREE episodes—one to establish that they're dating (before which we got zero indication that she was seeing anyone), one to kill him off a few weeks later, and one a few weeks after that to tell us their story via flashbacks, capped off with the revelation that she would have accepted his proposal had he not died. The sole purpose of the storyline seems to be to give Bishop the same tragic, screwed-up love life that nearly every other character has. Unfortunately, given how rushed it was, unlike the deaths of other love interests—Jackie, Diane, etc—his fails to have any emotional impact. Not to mention that the time frame of their relationship makes it implausible that they could have been together long enough to be considering marriage.
    • Gibbs' relationship with his never before mentioned fiancée Ellen Wallace gets this too. He was in the process of divorcing his third wife in 2001. That leaves very little time for him to meet Ellen, want to marry her, then break up with her the day before 9/11 (she was killed in the attack on the Pentagon). Not to mention that he swore off marriage after the third divorce. It's unlikely that he would have met someone who would have changed his mind so rapidly.
    • Some feel like Bishop and Torres are like this. Part of it is because it's a repeat of Tony and Ziva, including years of Will They or Won't They? with many thinking there won't be a Relationship Upgrade until either the show ends or one of the actors leaves. Part of it is also because some feel that they don't show enough chemistry between the two to justify them actually falling in love with one another, particularly Bishop towards Torres.
  • Strawman Has a Point: Or rather, Abby's psychotic stalker ex has a point, in that if he hadn't been stalking her and taking pictures of her, then he wouldn't have found the other stalker that had just kidnapped Abby on her way to court. Of course since it's Abby she's got the situation well in hand, but he still helped find the real bad guy who Team Gibbs didn't even know existed.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: To say the least, once Ziva left in the Season 10 finale, the series has gradually shifted out several of the old crew over the next decade-plus, culminating in 2022 having McGee, Palmer and Vance as the last mainstays around, with Ducky in a background historian position.note  Combine this with even newcomers over the years like Bishop and Sloane taking their leave, and Mark Harmon being ambiguous about whether Gibbs would return post-suspension and seeming retirement to Alaska, and almost the rest of the new cast hitting very different ideas of characterization, and many fans consider NCIS in a rough patch of not appealing to most older fans while uncertain as to who it's trying to draw in from modern audiences now.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Miranda Pennebacker from "Gone". She's some kind of Anti-Villain who Gibbs apparently got involved with at some point, and mainly deals in stolen jewels and the like, but still considers human traffickers to be scum, and helps rescue a kidnapped girl from such people. Sounds like a cool character, right? Too bad she never shows up again after that one episode.
    • Phineas, Sarah's son from Season 17, develops into something of a surrogate son for Gibbs, so much so that he seemed happier playing with him than he had been in every other season of the show. After Gibbs finds out that his mom was a terrorist that has tried to kill Ziva the past few years and used her son to spy on Gibbs, Phineas is handed off and is never seen again.
      • He eventually does come back in a Season 18 episode, wrapping up his subplot as well as the subplot regarding Lucy, the abused dog Gibbs rescued earlier in the season.
    • Despite both casts working practically in each other's backyard, the show very, very rarely crossed over with its parent show JAG. In fact, its spinoff show NCIS: Los Angeles has had more crossovers!
    • "Identity Crisis" gave us FBI Special Agent Courtney Krieger, a rookie member of Fornell's team, who is tracking an arms deal. She proves to be quite resourceful in the investigation and trades phone numbers with Ziva, but she's never seen outside of this one episode.
    • The season seven premiere gave us a One-Scene Wonder named Heather Kincaid, a Seattle police officer who was applying for Ziva's old job with Team Gibbs. The character had a snarky personality and would have meshed with Team Gibbs better than any of the other applicants in the episode (it helped that her actress had good onscreen chemistry with Michael Weatherly). However, DiNozzo intentionally sabotaged her job interview at the last minute because he was still wangsting over Ziva's resignation, and we never saw Heather again.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
    • Eli David. Every so often the writers make him look like he is misunderstood, that he is some sort of a ultra-dedicated patriot, and therefore Ziva should try to make amends with him. All these ring hollow, however, because Ziva herself has once explicitly stated that, after abandoning her to death in Somalia, for all intents and purposes, Eli is dead to her.
    • McGee, Torres, and Bishop (especially the latter two) fall into this during the Season 18 episodes "Watchdog" and "Gut Punch."
      • In the former, the team is investigating an illegal dogfighting ring when Gibbs finds the guy in charge and starts pulverizing him. McGee, unaware his new experimental body cam is turned on, accidentally films Gibbs attacking him without provocation or reading him his rights and arresting him. As such, Gibbs gets in serious trouble and is arrested himself. He tells the others to simply tell the truth, as Gibbs is willing to accept whatever punishment comes his way. Bishop and Torres convince McGee to go against Gibbs' wishes and they try to erase the video from the database, which is almost immediately discovered. Moreover, all three of them lie to the attorney in charge of the case, which only worsens Gibbs' position. The three continue to take the position that they did nothing wrong. While the criminal did something reprehensible, they are still law enforcement officers and have to be held to a higher standard, yet despite being caught trying to destroy federal evidence and lying to a prosecutor, only Gibbs faces extreme punishment. This especially comes off as tone deaf considering the protests about cops that protect their own when they break the law that took place after George Floyd murder’s by a cop nine months prior to the episode airing.
      • In the latter episode, after Gibbs has been indefinitely suspended, the rest of the team is stuck on COVID preparation duty. Once again, Bishop and Torres complain about having to face punishment for their actions and lament that they are not given any real cases and that they are essentially on the bottom of the totem pole. When they are doing COVID checks in preparation for an event the Secretary of Defense is holding, they discover links between the event and a murder investigation spearheaded by other agents. Instead of relaying this info to the other agents and allowing them to investigate, or even requesting to assist said agents as a team, the group tries to investigate the case themselves and are discovered quickly. The episode gives some lip service to how the group messed up, but it's delivered by a character who was a smug asshole to the group for most of the episode, and much of the rest of the episode seems to give the impression that Gibbs' team is above any punishment, no matter what they actually do, because they're "the cool kids."
  • The Un-Twist:
    • "Last Man Standing" : Evidence indicates that Agent Lee is the mole the team is searching for until she sheepishly admits that her secret rendezvous' were with Palmer. By the episode's conclusion, it's revealed that she IS the traitor at NCIS.
    • "Day In Court": Bishop thinks her husband might be cheating on her until she realizes that the woman she saw him with was from NSA's Internal Affairs department and thus concludes that he's in trouble at work. When she tries talking about him with it, he confesses that he is cheating on her with the woman from Internal Affairs.
      • It gets untwisted even further in subsequent episodes. Given the nature of the show, many viewers speculated that Jake was in fact lying to protect Ellie from something even more nefarious, only for the affair to be confirmed once again.
    • Emily Fornell suffers a drug overdose. Everyone assumes her drink was spiked and sets out to find her assailant. . . and it turns out that she's become a drug addict.
  • Values Dissonance: Tony's Loveable Sex Maniac habits were not so loveable in the very early seasons, where even the old fans tend to agree that he's a walking sexual harassment suit by today's standards. He even imagined his freshly-deceased friend and co-worker as wearing a naughty Catholic schoolgirl uniform as a coping mechanism. And there's the time he harassed McGee and outright accused him of being gay or metrosexual for the crime of shaving his face smooth and using skin moisturizer, something even Gibbs briefly joins the jabs on.
  • Values Resonance: That being said, gay couples have been in the series since the early days as well, even touching upon the tragedy of how it might affect their careers back when the controversies would be relevant, and was fairly progressive for what it tried to do with that. Though, Tony's commentary leaks through.
  • The Woobie: Various characters have been this at times. Tony sometimes skirts into Jerkass Woobie territory.
    • Jeanne Benoit. A completely innocent woman who just happened to be the daughter of a crime lord/arms dealer, and as such, was manipulated by Tony in order to get to her father, only to find out Tony never really loved her. (In Tony's defense, it's implied he really did have feelings for her and didn't like having to do what he did).

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