Since it began airing in 2003, NCIS has been one of the most popular military and true crime procedurals on television. A spin-off from JAG, which ran on CBS for ten seasons, NCIS follows a team of special agents who work for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Originally led by Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon), the team of agents at NCIS solves crimes involving members of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps and their families. Over the last 20 seasons, NCIS has seen numerous team members come and go but has managed to maintain a feel of consistency that doesn’t always exist when shows see major turnover.
10 Best NCIS Season 20 Episodes, Ranked
NCIS has introduced many amazing episodes in its 20 season run so far. But what were the best entries in Season 20 of the series?
Gibbs left the team and moved to Alaska in Season 19, Episode 4, “Great Wide Open,” which meant that the NCIS Director, Leon Vance (Robert Carroll), had to bring in former FBI Agent Alden Parker (Gary Cole) to lead the team. The NCIS team consists of three agents — Timothy McGee (Sean Murray), Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), and Jessica Knight (Katrina Law) — along with forensic scientist Kasie Hines (Diona Reasonover) and Chief Medical Examiner Jimmy Palmer (Brian Dietzen). The team is even joined by Dr. Donald Mallard (David McCallum), the former Chief Medical Examiner whom they refer to as “Ducky” on occasion. Since the departure of Gibbs, the team has had some growing pains, but with Season 21 now underway — Season 21, Episode 1, “Algún Día” aired on February 12, 2024 — audiences everywhere are excited to see what happens next for the long-running show.
10 Season 19’s Finale Concludes with a Crossover Premiere
Season 20, Episode 1, “A Family Matter”
- The Season 20 premiere of NCIS was a crossover with the cast of NCIS: Hawai’i . Special Agent Jane Tennant (Vanessa Lachey) and NCIS cyber intelligence specialist Ernie Malik (Jason Antoon) joined the NCIS team in Washington, D.C., with Torres, Knight, Hines, Palmer, and Parker appearing on NCIS: Hawai’i .
With Special Agent Alden Parker on the run with his ex-wife, Vivian (Teri Polo), the NCIS team must determine who is out to get him to clear his name. With the help of the NCIS: Hawai’i team, they are able to track down the prime suspect — the Raven.
This episode sees Parker dealing with his ex-wife’s potential betrayal while the team tries to determine who the Raven really is and why Parker is their target. After a trip to a safehouse ends in their suspect being abducted in an ambush of his own making, the team must follow him to Hawai’i to finally take him down.
9 Agent Torres and His Therapist End up in a Dangerous Situation
Season 20, Episode 3, “Unearth”
- Laura San Giacomo spends 12 episodes on NCIS between Seasons 16 and 20, but she remains most recognizable from her performance as Kit De Luca opposite Julia Roberts in 1990’s Pretty Woman .
While the rest of the team is trying to determine the motive behind the murder of a man whose body is found at an ancient, cursed burial site, Torres and his therapist, Dr. Grace Confalone (Laura San Giacomo), find themselves held captive in a cage made for large animals. When Dr. Grace refuses to help their captors, Torres is shot and then left to fight off one of the captors alone.
Though the two cases initially seem separate, the team eventually connects them, allowing them to rescue both Torres and Dr. Grace. The episode also pushes Torres to open up to his team in new ways.
8 NCIS Pokes Fun at Itself in This Season 20 Episode
Season 20, Episode 13, “Evil Eye”
- Guest star Tania Raymonde is best known for her role as Cynthia Sanders on Malcolm in the Middle and Alex Rousseau on Lost .
An NCIS prequel series will explore Gibbs’ backstory with Mark Harmon set to return.
On the same day that actress Chloe Marlene (Tania Raymonde) is shadowing Knight, the team must solve a case that starts with a decapitated head and leads them in unexpected directions. When they finally nail down their suspect, though, he’ll only speak to Chloe, who is really only prepared to be an agent on the big screen.
This episode allows Knight and Torres to shine, with the rest of the cast appearing in more supporting roles. It’s also an opportunity for NCIS to poke a little fun at itself by referencing movies and television shows about the criminal justice system never being accurate. The episode gives off great creepy vibes from the bad guy — especially when he’s in the interrogation room with Chloe and reveals something no one ever expected.
7 Agent McGee’s Wife Returns to Help Solve a Case
Season 20, Episode 9, “Higher Education”
- Margo Harshman, who has played Agent Timothy McGee’s wife, Delilah, since 2013, is best known for her role as Tawny Dean on Even Stevens .
When a Navy ROTC Midshipman is hit by a car, the team discovers that he’s been using burner phones and only pays with cash — and he knows McGee’s wife, Delilah. When brought in on the case, Delilah reveals that the midshipman, Will Watson, was one of her students. They had been meeting together regularly to discuss his research, and Delilah is devastated about his untimely death.
With a case that includes fraternity brothers, a teaching assistant obsessed with McGee, and an old code of Delilah’s, “Higher Education” is an episode with as much police work as there is personal growth. Delilah and McGee spend a lot of time working together, and McGee even gets back to an activity he hasn’t been able to do since Gibbs left the team.
6 Agent McGee Goes Full Dad
Season 20, Episode 2, “Daddy Issues”
- When the team is at the crime scene, Agent Parker refers to the congressman’s aide as “Beltway Bob.” This is a reference to Gary Cole having played Vice President Bob Russell on The West Wing , who was often referred to as “Beltway Bob.”
Another of Season 20’s very solid McGee-centered episodes, “Daddy Issues,” begins when the team discovers that a bunker was hacked into using a code written by one of the dads at the school where McGee’s twins are enrolled. McGee must spend time with some of the school’s dads to find out what really happened.
Guest starring Kash Abdulmalik (who has appeared on shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Black-ish), the episode also features a plethora of cheese puns, McGee in a football jersey, and a whole lot of cryptocurrency. It’s an episode of NCIS that is a lot more fun than most of the show’s episodes.
5 Kasie Takes the Lead While Investigating the Team
Season 20, Episode 6, “The Good Fighter”
- This episode of NCIS has several references to older episodes of the show, including the use of “McGeek,” which was coined by Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) during the first 13 seasons, and the “Abby’s Lab for Dummies” manual, which was developed by Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) in Season 6, Episode 21, “Toxic.”
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Kasie, the team’s forensic medical examiner, is the central component of this episode. Though it first appears she might be missing, the team quickly learns that Kasie is doing some investigating on her own — of them!
Recruited by Defense Criminal Investigation Service (DCIS) to find a mole at NCIS, Kasie is nearing the end of her investigation of NCIS and must utilize the team to finally find the mole while they also solve the murder of NCIS Agent Otis Khatri. Diona Reasonover shines in the episode as she takes Kasie’s investigtive skills — and eccentricities — to the next level.
4 Parker and Vance Take on Berlin
Season 20, Episode 5, “Guardian”
- Vance and Parker reference going to see The Third Man , a 1949 film starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Alida Valli that shares some themes with the episode. The film is a favorite of celebrities like Martin Scorcese, who wrote a thesis on the film; Jack White, who named his record label Third Man Records; and even Sir Michael Caine.
After waking up to home invaders, Director Vance expects to skip off to Berlin for a conference with no argument from the team but is instead escorted by Agent Parker, who has assigned himself as personal security for the director. Upon arrival in Berlin, Vance and Parker meet Lena Paulson (Marem Hassler), a German federal agent whom Parker catches making eyes at Vance. When Parker accompanies Vance to her room later that evening, they are shocked to find her bloody and unconscious on the floor.
Against Parker’s better judgment, he and Vance stay in Berlin, determined to discover what happened to Lena, and what they find surprises them both. Plus, audiences get to see McGee in charge back in D.C., a situation that Knight and Torres find particularly amusing.
3 An Immigration-Related Case Hits Home for Torres
Season 20, Episode 17, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
- Palmer’s daughter, Victoria, was born in Season 12, Episode 13, “We Build, We Fight.” Her mother, Breena, was a mortician and died in late December 2020 after acquiring the COVID-19 virus.
In this episode, the NCIS team must solve the murder of a man who was murdered in his garage with a paring knife. Things get really mysterious when it appears as if he was murdered for staying in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal to save the U.S.-allied Afghans left behind.
The case particularly hits home for Torres, who moved from Panama to Colombia to the U.S. by the age of 11. Elsewhere, Palmer is trying to figure out how to handle his daughter growing up and wanting to go on an unsupervised group date for the first time and turns to Director Vance for advice.
2 An NCIS Triple-Crossover Gets the Show Big Numbers
Season 20, Episode 10, “Too Many Cooks”
- “Too Many Cooks” was part of a major 3-episode crossover with NCIS: Hawai’i and NCIS: Los Angeles and the ratings were huge for the franchise. NCIS saw 7.7 million viewers, a record for the season and the highest audience the show had seen since October 2021. NCIS: Hawai’i saw 7.2 million viewers, a new record for the show, and NCIS: Los Angeles had 6.7 million viewers, the show’s highest audience since April 2020.
Agent Gibbs’ Rules were a mainstay on NCIS for a long time. But what was his Rule #1, and why did he have a rule for everything in the first place?
When the retirement party for FLETC instructor Dale Harding (Robert Picardo) is interrupted by his death by suicide, the three NCIS teams — all of whom are there for his big send-off — must partner together to figure out why it happened and what the cryptic message he left behind means. The crossover sees the teams traveling from D.C. to Hawai’i to Los Angeles to solve a case that goes from the investigation of an unexpected suicide to a deep dive into a CIA assassination program.
“Too Many Cooks” kicked off a movie-length night of television that included inside jokes, references to Gibbs, and a lot of crime fighting. Each episode in the crossover is one of the best episodes of each show in the franchise during the 2022—2023 television season.
1 Torres Shines in the Season 20 Finale
Season 20, Episode 22, “Black Sky”
- Wilmer Valderrama got his big break on That ’70s Show , which was filmed when he was a senior in high school. In recent years, Valderrama has been known for his activism work, particularly with Latines and other marginalized communities.
Torres spends much of the final episode of Season 20 undercover hoping to get to the bottom of an attack in Season 20, Episode 21, “Kompromat.” Though things look as if they’re going to fall apart at several points, the case is solved with a number of unexpected twists, including in the final moments.
The episode is well-written and flows beautifully, and Valderrama’s performance is nuanced and powerful. It sets up an incredible cliffhanger, one that audiences were thrilled to see resolved in Season 21, Episode 1, “Algún Día.”
