Tonight on CBS NCIS returns with an all-new Monday, October 18, 2021, season 19 episode 5 called, “Face the Strange” and we have your weekly NCIS recap below. On tonight’s NCIS season 19 episode 4, “Face the Strange,” as per the CBS synopsis, “The NCIS team investigates the death of a Navy commander whose body suddenly explodes before Jimmy can examine it.”
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In tonight’s NCIS episode, three juvenile delinquents were given a choice. Either they go to adult prison or they live outside for a week with a hard lesson in tough love. The three kids chose the great outdoors. However, their first night was interrupted when they ran into a man dying out in the woods. Petty Officer First Class James Bolton was dying of exhaustion and dehydration. He was still alive when the teens found him only he died before they could get help.
The body had shown evidence of trauma and the identification of the victim as being Navy personnel meant that NCIS was called in to investigate. The team went out to see the scene and they were joined by former FBI Special Agent Parker. Parker had been offered a job at NCIS. He turned it down because he said he wanted to take some time off and so he was just hanging around when Palmer came in with news about a “zombie”.
Parker had never seen one of those before. He joined the team as they went to look at the body and it turns out the victim was called a zombie because that’s what everyone thought he was when they first stumbled across him. Only he wasn’t a member of the undead. He just didn’t have enough energy to form the words “help” and so Parker had been disappointed but he was shaking it off when the case became interesting again.
The body exploded when he helped loaded it into the back of Palmer’s car. The Medical Examiner’s van was totaled. Nothing and no one else was hurt. Palmer called in Ducky for his assistance and Ducky helped him put together Bolton’s body. Together they realized that the tragedy could have been much worse.
The explosion hadn’t come from outside. It came from inside of Bolton’s body. Bolton swallowed a bomb and the only reason he would have done that if it was he trying to smuggle a bomb pass detection. Bolton had been a suicide bomber. He had been killed before he could detonate that bomb but it doesn’t change the fact that he had been dangerous and that people he was working with can also be dangerous.
Bolton was military intelligence. He worked at SATCOM. It’s the satellite networks that the military uses and the military as well as their weapons program would be lost without SATCOM. Parker was familiar with the network. He was also asked by a General to lead the joint task force run out of NCIS into any remaining suicide bombers.
Kasie also found out that Bolton was selling his services online as a hacker when he got a partner a couple months back. It was after he had had taken a partner that Bolton started to become political and so finding his partner was imperative. The team looked into anyone else that might have been in on the plot and connected to Bolton. They found out he visited a federal stenographer before he death. They spoke to the man and he had been gob smacked.
He had no knowledge of Bolton. Bolton pretended to be his cable guy to get into his house and the two talked over lemonade. The man claims not have revealed any important information. He was one of the few men and women who were allowed into high security federal buildings to take notes and the job is serious to him.
He couldn’t even reveal to NCIS where he was going to be working soon. He told them that they needed a subpoena before he could release any information and so the team worked on one. In the meantime, Kasie made another breakthrough. She found out that Bolton was paying for his bomb making materials by rigging the lottery and that he’s won the lottery four times. The latest time was an hour after his death.
A woman went in with the winning ticket. Her name is Lillian Beck and Kasie suspect she could be Bolton’s mysterious partner because she was the one collecting the money. Kasie passed on the tip to Parker. She also told him that she was willing to work with him as long as he remembers that in the future she was going to need someone who shoots first and asks questions later when her life is on the line.
Kasie had heard about what Parker said earlier. Parker had been talking about when LaMere took her hostage and was almost killed by Gibbs. Parker thought they should have risked the hitman. Kasie therefore was telling Parker that her life was always going to be more important than any hitman. Parker understood Kasie’s request. He agreed to prioritize her and they moved. Parker arrested Beck. He brought her in for questioning. She revealed she works for a lottery company that handles thirteen states’ lotteries but that she couldn’t keep winning herself. She and Bolton were convincing people to claim the lottery winnings for him. The stenographer had also lied to the team. He did know Bolton and he paid Bolton twenty grand to hire a girl he met at a bus stop. Her name is Helen.
Helen gave the guy her phone number. The guy lost the number and so he paid Bolton to find her. He only met Bolton because Bolton really did pretend to be the cable guy. Bolton’s explosives turned out to be hidden inside of him during surgery. The people who hired him to contact Roy had used Bolton to trial run a bomb but he died before the bomb could go off and so they fixed the kinks and called in the stenographer.
They tricked Roy into thinking he needed to update his pacemaker. They then put the bomb inside of him and he was supposed to go after he taken notes for a star witness in a mob boss’s case. The mob boss had already gotten rid of four other witnesses and the star witness was the last on the list.
Palmer and Ducky got the bomb out of the stenographer. The case against the mob boss went ahead and attempted murder was now added to the charges. And to top it all off, Roy ran into Helen at NCIS. She was in the military and she had been waiting for Roy to call and so it’s a good thing they met.
Parker in the meantime considered the job offer to replace Gibbs and he’s seriously considering it.
THE END!