NCIS, season 3
24 episodes · 5 kept in The Essentials
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Season 3 recap Spoilers — open after watching
This recap reveals the events of season 3.
The reply to the rooftop: a hunt, a sister, and the shot that ends it fired by the person it costs most.
The two-part opening hunts Ari with the season's rage barely contained - Gibbs certain, the director's office compromised by Mossad's stake, and a liaison officer arriving with the worst brief in the building: Ziva David, Mossad, sent to protect the asset who is also her half-brother. The resolution in Gibbs' basement is the franchise's foundation stone: Ari, gun rising, killed by Ziva's shot - her brother, on her own judgment - and the debt between her and Gibbs runs the series from that floor onward.
Ziva joins the team in Kate's chair, and the season does the replacement honestly: DiNozzo bristles, Abby grieves loudly, and the newcomer's competence and strangeness win the room by degrees. Jenny Shepard takes the director's office with history in Gibbs' file and an agenda of her own.
It ends with the year's second detonation: a terrorist bombing Gibbs failed to prevent because his warnings were shelved, a coma that strips him back to a buried first family - a wife and daughter, murdered decades ago, revealed to the audience at last - and Gibbs walking away from the agency entirely, handing DiNozzo the team, and retiring to Mexico with the words 'you'll do.'
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