Wow! We’ve all come to expect the NCIS season finale to be packed with sufficient misdirection to leave us breathless through the summer. Tonight we saw the creativity of the show’s producers. On the very day the finale features Richard Parsons, a Special Independent Counsel of the Inspector General pursuing Leroy Jethro Gibbs, the White House and the Obama administration are defending themselves from an Inspector General report that the IRS is targeting groups who are critical of the President. Talk about fiction imitating reality.

Season 10 of NCIS has been all about family. Tonight, we see Gibbs’ squad come together like family in his defense. Mike Franks, Gibbs’ former boss and mentor makes a surprise appearance, as does former Admiral A. J. Cheggwidden from JAG. Ziva reveals the emotional turmoil the entire team is going through when she fires back at Gibbs in his cabin, “I’m not talking about my job. I’m talking about my family.”

In response to being targeted by Parsons, Gibbs relives his past decisions through a vivid flashback. Dead bodies float to the surface around his fishing boats. He also has a troubling dream where he and Mike Franks are in the woods with rifles. Franks peels back the layers and starkly portrays the risks NCIS Special Agents face daily. “We made some good decisions, some bad. We helped some, hurt others. We made sacrifices and we have to live with them.”

Franks appears again when Gibbs leaves the cabin and goes home, which is still a mess from whoever trashed his things, looking for evidence. Here, Leroy Jethro Gibbs has an epiphany: “I will fight.”

Astonishing threads from previous episodes unravel. Is Parsons a power-mad blackmailer? Did the CIA kill Eli David’s Iranian friend? Will the former NCIS director, who is now with DHS, come to the aid of Leon Vance?

Leon rises to the top. He is no longer at odds with Gibbs. Rather, he feels a strong kinship with him as they now share a similar loss.  What Ziva, Tony, and Tim do at the end has us wondering what Season 11 will bring. With great determination, Vance puts a file through his shredder, which will no doubt have future implications.

What do you think of the last few seconds of the show? What kind of mission did DHS send Gibbs on? We suspect the person he sees in his rifle scope (FBI agent Fornell) is not the person he fires at. We’ll all have to wait and see. Hopefully, Parsons will slither back into his spider hole and never be heard from again.

Two final notes. The Judge, opposing attorneys and defendant (Gibbs) would never meet and discuss the case in a hallway, as we saw tonight. Federal Judges maintain very high decorum. Lastly, stay tuned to our NCIS blog. We are getting ready to have a drawing for one of the NCIS caps.

Be Blessed, Diane and David