Greetings of the season! Let's recap the final NCIS episode of the year.
On a cold December day 14 years ago, a Marine platoon on patrol outside of Sangin, Afghanistan, listens as one of their members reads aloud from A Christmas Carol. Their lieutenant highlights the moral of Dickens' story: All of mankind is our business. Then gunfire tears through the night.
And in the present, all of mankind at the Naval Yard huddles around a photocopy machine in the big orange room. With the building's heat broken, making copies of their hands is the only way to stay warm.
Rising above the cold, they share their holiday plans: McGee (Sean Murray) will be in the warm embrace of family; Knight is (Katrina Law) playing board games with her dad, who's irritable in retirement; and Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) says he's hanging with Palmer (Brian Dietzen) and his family.
My man Parker (Gary Cole) then arrives with Norwegian kringla -- and tell us again how you don't have any residual trauma about your mom, who left for pastries when you were a kid and never came back?
Yet despite the excitement over the baked goods, the mood plunges when word spreads that LaRoche (Seamus Dever) is in the house, which gets McGee's hackles up.
By all accounts, McGee has made his peace with LaRoche getting the deputy director job. Then again, he's also been closely following the man's two-month tour of NCIS offices across the globe to determine what kind of political ladder he's trying to climb.
Even though LaRoche tries to be a cool boss when he arrives, he can't help but remind the team that each ream of photocopy paper costs $7.29. (Who knows that off the top of their head?) Then they're called into Vance's (Rocky Carroll) office.
Apparently, Leon's been hoarding all the heat, and everybody strips out of their indoor winter wear to hear the rundown of this week's case.
The crisis du jour is an upcoming tell-all book Darkness at Dawn: The Until Story of Sagin, which according to leaked excerpts, accuses Marine Lt. Merritt Hastings (Demetrius Grosse) of gross negligence during the Taliban ambush we saw at the top of the episode that resulted in the deaths of three Marines.
Nobody knows the author, Marley Jaggers, but they do know that Hastings threw back a Taliban grenade that cost him the use of his arm when it exploded midair.
"Attacking a wounded vet at Christmas? Who wrote this book, the Grinch?" Parker asks.
Veterans turn out to be the possible reason for the timing of this book; Hastings is the face of a veteran's bill that SecNav is backing, and the bad press could scuttle it; hence, the presence of LaRoche to oversee the team's work.
Yeah, the team's as excited about that as you can imagine. McGee, Knight, and Torres step onto the Elevator of Schemes and Secrets full of speculation, like why is LaRoche interested in scoring political points with this case, and what kind of coward hides behind a fake name anyway?
That last one's from Torres, despite Knight trying to wave him off. McGee -- who, you'll recall, is a bestselling mystery author under the name "Thom E. Gemcity" -- points out that he's not using his nom de plume to attack anybody.
They're all headed to the morgue where it's slightly warmer, and when LaRoche tries to pop a mint, Palmer firmly tells him that there's no eating or drinking in his lab. Sir. Warn a woman before you go full stern daddy. (The look on Jess' face tells me she agrees.)
LaRoche puts away his ever-present mint container and says he'll simply observe, like Jane Goodall with gorillas. Nobody else is amused by this comparison.
Palmer reports nothing suspicious about the attack at Sangin: standard Taliban weaponry, no signs of friendly fire. So Parker heads to Hastings' custom bike shop with LaRoche in tow to ask some questions.
But Hastings has no interest in NCIS helping him fight his battle over the story of a skirmish where he lost three Marines.
Before they leave, one of the shop employees, Brian Zanella (Sommer Carbuccia), speaks up for his boss, saying, "That man would do anything to protect his people." And Brian should know: He's the man Hastings dragged to safety. He ended up losing a leg, but not his life, in the attack. And he now works at the shop alongside the other vets that Hastings employs.
At Kasie's (Diona Reasonover) lab, she and Palmer are wrapping her equipment to protect it from the cold (LaRoche nixed a space heater because of building safety regs), and McGee arrives in time to compliment Palmer's double tuck-and-tug swaddling technique. They also learn that Torres told Palmer he was doing Christmas with the McGees. So what's the real story?
Before we tackle that mystery, Kasie reports that she tracked the IP address of an online commenter with opinions about Darkness at Dawn who also submitted FOIA requests for after-action reports about Sangin. (We're all politely ignoring Palmer saying he didn't understand any of those words, right? Because what?)
That IP address belongs to Samuel Cross (Garrett Hines), a former Marine corporal from the platoon at Sangin whose brother Evan (Ramsey Thoms) died in the ambush. So the book is personal, not a smear campaign.
When Parker and Torres arrive at Sam's place, they find a laptop, a loose gun, and every wall covered in notes, pics, and other murder board stuff. Sam orders them to leave, shouting that the government covered up what happened at Sangin and nobody's stopping him from publishing the truth.
Back in the big orange room, LaRoche chides them for paying Sam a visit without him and blows off the suggestion that McGee might be able to use his pull in the publishing world to get his hands on a full copy of Sam's manuscript.
The brewing fight over LaRoche's attitude is interrupted when Brian arrives with letters of support for Hastings, but when he spots Sam's pic on the monitor, his mission changes. He and Parker head to the outdoor coffee patio, which is snowy and decorated for the holidays.
Brian says Evan's death broke Sam, who was in the med tent with a knee injury the night of the attack. To prove how tight the unit was, Brian gives Parker a memory card with video of the group off duty prior to the attack.
While reviewing the footage in Kasie's lab, she and Knight flank Torres and cheerfully grill him about his real Christmas plans. He insists that he just wants to spend it alone. Then they turn to the footage, which is glitchy but still captures Hastings laughing with the Cross brothers.
McGee, meanwhile, hasn't given up on using his literary connections to see what the full book contains, so Knight poses as his manager to set up a meeting with Sam's literary agent (Cameron Bender) at the diner. Tim's in full Gemcity mode in lime-green glasses, responding to Martin Gates' compliments with, "Words... they come to me."
To McGee's dismay, Knight strikes a deal: Gates will get first crack at the new Gemcity book if they can see Sam's completed manuscript to be sure the agent can handle sensitive, boundary-pushing material. Gates is so thrilled with this development that he tries to order a round of martinis. Martinis! At the diner!
Once the book's in their hands, they read Sam's allegations that Hastings ignored radio transmissions warning of the attack. LaRoche is useful for a change, confirming through his Department of Defense contact the original record was lost due to a "data corruption issue."
Back to Hastings they go, and instead of trying to clear his name, he asks how Sam's doing. Laroche ignores that and encourages him to deny the existence of the transmission. Since the radio operator died in the attack, there's nobody to contradict him. But Hastings insists on taking responsibility.
The radio operator who died was, of course, Evan. McGee finds a history of human errors causing missed transmissions, which makes LaRoche wonder why Hastings would take the blame if it jeopardizes the veteran's bill.
That's when the maintenance worker tasked with fixing the heat problem in Vance's office speaks up: Marines don't usually worry about politics. At least, that's what he's learned by keeping his ears open on the job. Vance thanks Mr. Sinclair (Derek Anthony) for his insights and then tells the team to check with Evan's wife.
LaRoche scoffs at the idea of a widow willingly tarnishing her husband's legacy, but Mr. Kincaid again interjects, suggesting that a Marine's family would rather tell the truth to protect the unit.
Evan's widow, Em (Boyana Balta), became a grief counselor after her husband's death. She says Evan was quite good at his new job and shares a video he sent her, which is also glitchy. She also says that her brother-in-law isolated himself after he got home, turning to the bottle instead of getting help.
A strange look crosses Torres' face, and he quietly asks if Sam's an alcoholic. Afterward, Knight checks that he's okay. His response -- "Old ghosts" -- has her joking that he and Parker could compare notes.
They're then called to a disturbance at Sam's apartment, which turns out to be Brian and the rest of his unit (minus Hastings, of course), there to angrily confront him. In the scuffle, McGee gets elbowed in the face, and the moment's captured on the Hill Hype website with the headline "SEMPER FI-IGHT!"
At this point, Vance shuts it all down and says JAG's taking over. And naturally, that's the end of it. The team all head home for plum pudding and eggnog -- JK, no they don't. They convene in Ducky's repurposed office to go over what they know, and Palmer accidentally cracks the case by causing the power to flicker when he plugs in a space heater.
It gets Parker thinking, and soon enough, Kasie has their answer: The radio equipment had an internal flaw that kept messages from being delivered on the correct frequency. No matter how good with tech Evan was, he wouldn't have known to look for that, which means no one's to blame for the missed warning.
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Even with this evidence, though, Sam refuses to retract the book, so Torres has Em invite him to the diner, where he finally confesses what's been driving him all these years: He was the radio operator Evan replaced when that knee injury kept him off patrol.
But it wasn't a new injury. Sam hid it in order to deploy, unaware that it would get too bad to ignore. If he hadn't lied, his brother would still be alive. Just as he's about to break down, the men in his platoon arrive in the diner to surround him as he breaks down in tears.
Sam agrees to rewrite the book and add a chapter on veterans' support, and LaRoche steps forward to take all the credit for uncovering the truth. But hey, at least the heat's been fixed! Mr. Kincaid wishes everyone a merry Christmas on his way out the door.
Guys, was... was Mr. Kincaid the Ghost of Christmas Present? A Clarance-style guardian angel? Or, ya know, maybe just a helpful repair person.
In the final minutes of the episode, Torres escorts Sam to the machine shop, where he starts to apologize to Hastings. But his former lieutenant cuts him off, saying, "It's not about me. How are you?"
Sam's face crumples, and when he says he misses his brother, Hastings folds him into a hug.
Satisfied with this resolution, Torres turns to leave but pauses to send a text, assuring someone he calls "babe" that they're still on for Christmas.