NCIS, season 5
19 episodes · 3 kept in The Essentials
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Season 5 recap Spoilers — open after watching
This recap reveals the events of season 5.
The bill for the frog comes due, and the year ends in a diner with the director dead in California.
The season opens in the wreckage of the La Grenouille operation - DiNozzo's double life exposed to the team, Jeanne's accusation nearly ending his career, and the dealer's death an open file the Bureau would love to hang on NCIS. The fallout episodes are the show's best sustained character work to date: the team re-learning trust, and DiNozzo wearing the damage where the jokes used to go.
The year introduces the parallel office of consequence: an oversight hearing frames the whole season in retrospect, and mid-year 'Judgment Day' arrives - Jenny Shepard, dying quietly of an illness she told no one about, walks into an abandoned California diner to settle her father's oldest account, and goes down firing against five men. Gibbs and the team arrive to the aftermath and to the cover-up she would have wanted.
The cost is structural. Leon Vance takes the directorship with his own locked history and, in the finale's last minutes, breaks up the family on purpose: Ziva returned to Israel, McGee to cybercrime, DiNozzo to sea duty as agent afloat - and Gibbs left at his desk being handed his new team's files, the show betting a season's chemistry that it can put the band back together.
Every episode
