SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for NCIS Season 23, Episode 16.

NCIS Season 23, Episode 16 being titled “S.O.S.” tells the audience everything they need to know about it. This is a whole episode about characters being stuck and needing rescue. What’s great about it is that the CBS show makes room for all of its main cast members—including one who isn’t here anymore.

The story follows a Naval officer named Rebecca Lee (played by Jane the Virgin alum Yael Grobglas), who is rescued six months after the plane she was on crashed. Grobglas is convincing as she plays all the angst that her character is going through, and she gets great support from Sean Murray as Timothy McGee can relate to Rebecca’s plight. One of the neat things about NCIS having run for 23 seasons is that the main characters have so many experiences to draw upon that can be useful in any given episode.

“S.O.S.” works because the plot twists of the week add to the story, instead of just being there for the sake of having a plot twist. Some of them are more farfetched than others, but they all line up. The flight actually being a secret CIA operation involving an arms dealer? Okay, that adds a bunch of plot possibilities. Having the arms dealer actually be a sort of protagonist? That’s a nice twist, when NCIS could’ve just made him another bad guy and been done with it. Rebecca being pregnant with the arms dealer’s baby? That one feels like it’s reaching just to create more of an emotional reaction from the audience.

McGee and Alden Parker get to work together, while Jessica Knight and Nick Torres keep up their banter when they wind up wandering through the wilderness. And back in the office, both Jimmy Palmer and Kasie Hines have pieces to add. This is an episode that is more balanced than usual not only for NCIS, but for most procedurals. So many shows focus in on one or two characters in a given week, and they lose that “team” feeling that they all want to have. “S.O.S.” feels like a team effort.

What doesn’t work so well is the subplot, which involves McGee trying to bond with his newfound son Mateo (although actor Patrick Keleher does not appear). Part of that admittedly has to do with the idea of McGee having a previously unknown child still not being that convincing, but the other part is the baseball jokes made by various characters just aren’t that funny. The rest of the episode has enough going on in it that this isn’t a deal-breaker, though.

The silver lining is that the episode is directed by Rocky Carroll, whose character Leon Vance was killed off earlier in Season 23. It doesn’t make up for the fact that Vance didn’t need to die, but it’s lovely to see that Carroll is still part of the NCIS family off-screen. He’s also an excellent director, and does a great job particularly in the outdoor scenes with Knight and Torres, keeping them from feeling too visually cluttered. “S.O.S.” is a perfectly solid case of the week episode; nothing groundbreaking happens, but it gets the audience from Point A to Point B in an entertaining way.

NCIS airs Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Photo Credit: Courtesy of CBS.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.