Tonight on CBS NCIS: airs with an all-new Tuesday, May 12 2026, season 23 episode 20 called, “Sons and Daughters” and we have your weekly NCIS recap below.
In tonight’s NCIS season 23 episode 20, “Sons and Daughters” as per the CBS synopsis, “One year after a deadly coffee shop bombing, a new explosion proves the attack wasn’t the work of a lone wolf.”
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In tonight’s NCIS episode, there was an explosion a year ago. It nearly killed Kayla Vance. She was the late Director’s daughter. The two of them were actually facetiming when the explosion at a nearby coffee shop went off. Kayla quickly ran back into the destroyed area. She helped as many people as she could.
Only she never found the bodies of a little boy or his father. The most she found was little Evan’s toy. He had seen her badge and thought she was a superhero.
Kayla gave him a badge sticker to help feel like a superhero himself. And it’s because she connected with him that she was left unable to sleep while his killers are still out there.
ATF as well as the FBI had both ruled this as a lone wolf incident. It was just Kayla that felt they were wrong. Kayla tried to convince her father. He couldn’t help her at the time. Now, there’s been a second bombing. Her father was now gone and it was his team that’s been called to solve the murder.
The second bombing wasn’t a mass casualty event. It was a lone event that took out Ryan Wallace. They initially thought he was Petty Officer Lee. They then found Lee still alive and miles away.
Wallace had no Navy or Marine affiliation. He was alone. They feared he might’ve been a lone wolf’s bomber. His car was found close by and it was full of backpacks for bombs. Like the coffee shop bombing. The signatures also matched. The bombs were sophisticated.
They couldn’t be done by one teenage boy. It had to be a network or so Kayla thought back then and that Kasie was now confirming. It was never publicized that Kayla was almost a victim of that bombing. The director didn’t want it to be public knowledge because Kayla couldn’t withstand media attention.
Kayla wasn’t just struggling with sleep. She was dead set on investigating what really happened. She applied for a private grant and she put together a team to track extremists online. It was privately funded so she didn’t have to answer to NCIS about it. Director Vance found out what she was doing, but he encouraged her.
He liked seeing her take the lead. It made him proud. He also suggested that she might feel the Director seat one day. There was a lot he hadn’t told his team so they were surprised by everything that Kayla did back then and continues to do now.
Kayla’s team found a lot. They were slowly following the breadcrumbs. They knew that it went quiet right before the bombing. It happened again with the second one. Kayla was juggling a lot because she was a NCIS Agent. She was also running her own investigative unit.
There was apparently a truth that those that multitasking couldn’t do anything well. Kayla ran herself ragged and she missed something. She missed that one of the grants that she received came from dirty money. She found out when Associate Attorney General Gabriel Laroche came back to shut NCIS investigation down.
Laroche said that they could continue the bombing. It just had to be without Kayla or her team. The dirty money put every case she worked at risk.
It was called fruits of the poisoned tree. They couldn’t use anything that Kayla gave them to bring down the domestic terrorist they were hunting. It turns out Laroche wasn’t lying about the dirty money either. Kasie found signs of it. She also saw the person who last accessed it two months ago was the late Director Vance. Laroche wasn’t just making a case against Kayla. He was coming for Vance’s legacy as well.
The team just couldn’t figure out why. They tried to question Laroche. He wouldn’t say anything. He buried what he was really doing as he kept pursuing the case.
The team tried to focus on what they could do. They secretly used Kayla’s findings to determine who was the puppeteer in these bombings. The sayings were all coming from a book to radicalize people online. The book was called “Agnors Bliss” by Isaac Wren. Wren was radicalizing young angry men furious with capitalism. It’s what his book was about it in spite taking place in space.
Hank Hammersmith was the father of the coffee shop bomber. He realized that someone turned his son in that monster. He found out he was being radicalized online so he went looking for that person.
He found out about Wren a little before NCIS did. Hank planned on using a bomb to take him down when Kayla stopped him. Kayla mentioned that she recently lost her dad. She was angry with him before his death. She always thought they’d have time to make it better and sadly time ran out for them.
Hank has already lost a son. He doesn’t need to throw his whole life away on a man like Wren. NCIS found out that Wren was shorting stocks right before the bombings.
This was all about money for him. He wasn’t getting rich off of royalties. He thought the stock market would be a better fit and he became what his book fought against.
Kayla promised Hank that they’d arrest Wren. He’s spend his whole life in prison. It was enough to get Hank to let go of his anger. He was arrested for the attempted bombing and Wren was arrested for the actual bombing.
Torres also learned that McGee’s son Mateo accessed their servers by pretending to fill out an intern application. He later tracked the kid down and found him with a gun. Mateo kept telling him to walk away, but he couldn’t do it. And a gunshot went off on tonight’s season finale.
THE END!
