NCIS recap: Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War

A phone call in the middle of the night can mean bad news for someone you love. But if you're Alden Parker ( Gary Cole ), a phone call in the middle of the night can mean bad news for the entire world.

Yep, this week's episode of NCIS lets the team add a new line to their resumes: Got arrested while stopping WWIII. Let's recap!

Parker's face tells us everything we need to know about the severity of the call that wakes him up, and he wastes no time doing the same for McGee ( Sean Murray ), ordering him to call the rest of the team. This includes Kasie (Diona Reasonover) in full wizard garb thanks to her all-night D&D session, but not Knight ( Katrina Law ), who's using her time off to kick it in an RV.

The threat: NCIS Naples intercepted an encrypted message from Belarus indicating plans for surprise attacks all over Europe using mobile ballistic missile launchers that were undoubtedly a "gift" from Russia.

The news has Vance's ( Rocky Carroll ) plane to Venezuela making a mid-air U-turn. In the meantime, Parker's the guy dealing with both Gen. Floyd Brancato (Robert Catrini) and FBI Deputy Director Wayne Sweeney (Erik Passoja) on the big screen in MTAC.

NCIS is involved because one of Curtis' (J. Claude Deering) algorithms decrypted the Naples message, and now the health and longevity of mankind depends on Curtis decoding the rest of the message with the location of the launchers.

Aboard Air Force One, the president has ordered a carrier strike group to the Baltic Sea so, as Sweeney suggests, they can "kill the baby in the crib." Both Parker and I visibly recoil at that analogy.

Next, Parker tries to cool things down, but Sweeney refuses to let him warn NCIS Naples or the Belarus ambassador for fear of jump-starting the attack, and the exchange ends with the men shouting at each other. (As a reminder, Sweeney canonically hates Gibbs and has been a thorn in Parker's side before.)

Things dramatically escalate when NORAD loses contact with Air Force One, and we freeze-frame to commercial on possibly the strangest-ever shot selection for this show: Parker, neck-down and from behind as he storms out of MTAC. It's almost like a Yeti sighting, actually.

Better a yeti than the man he's about to speak with. Sen. Judd Larmont (Jonathan Bray) is the president pro tempore of the Senate and the man in charge of the whole dang country, with Air Force One incommunicado while both the president and the speaker of the House are onboard and the vice president's undergoing an emergency colonoscopy thanks to life-threatening GI distress. (The whole room agrees this probably isn't a coincidence because Rule 39, duh.)

Unfortunately, Larmont is, well, a complete dunce. First, he asks for an update from Florida... as in Naples, Fla. Then he rejects the idea of ground troops in favor of tactical nukes. Torres ( Wilmer Valderrama ) points out that under those circumstances, we'd be the ones starting the war, but Larmont is undeterred.

Hey, uh, here's a timely reminder: make good choices at the ballot box on Tuesday, America.

Anyway, more panic ensues when Curtis' algorithm finds a second transmission that was sent the moment the U.S. subs started moving. Is it an order to attack or to stand down? Curtis — in a dragon onesie because he's the D&D group's dungeon master—scampers off to decode as fast as his little claws can go.

Brancato's ready to order a tactical pause, but Acting President Duke Nukem insists on moving forward with the attack. Parker's plea for an extra 30 minutes to decode the second message is denied.

How do you stop WWIII under these circumstances? A little civil disobedience, that's how.

When Parker learns that Curtis hasn't sent the missile coordinates to the Pentagon yet, he orders him not to. Naturally, Brancato's incensed, and when McGee strolls into MTAC, the general orders him to arrest his boss. But one quick explanation later and McGee's on team Give the Nerds More Decoding Time.

And here's where things get politically and professionally dicey for our agents because Sweeney expected trouble and set up shop in the NCIS parking lot. When that trouble occurs, his team jams all communication in and out of the building and storms in to arrest Parker, McGee, and anybody else who wants to interfere with an FBI investigation.

"I'm not required to follow an order I deem illegal, and facilitating the release of a nuclear weapon under these circumstances feels a little illegal to me," Parker shouts in what might be the biggest understatement of the night. (Also, this is your reminder that NCIS agents are not part of the chain of the command, in case you'd forgotten or never knew in the first place.)

As everyone yells at each other, Torres sneaks around the hallways trying to get a signal on his phone. When a hulking FBI agent intercepts him slipping into the elevator and calls him "Tiny," it's clear from Nick's face that he's not going quietly.

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Meanwhile, at 3:30 a.m. in Shenandoah National Park, a hand wraps around the throat of a sleeping Jessica Knight, who wakes up ready to fight.

The hand belongs to Palmer ( Brian Dietzen ), who was dispatched to bring Knight in to deal with this international crisis. (He was searching for her pulse because she wasn't snoring, and it startled him so much that he thought she might be dead.)

The exes settle in for an awkward ride back to civilization. Without access to the most recent intel on events inside NCIS HQ, they think all they're dealing with is possible missile launches and a Russian cyberattack on Air Force One, which is why their stilted conversation involves the fact that they haven't really talked since Jess moved back.

Then Palmer's phone rings with a call from the dating app MateQuest, and Knight accidentally answers. Instead of a hot single in the D.C. area, it's Torres. No, he isn't Jimmy's perfect match; it's the only way he was able to call out.

He's brief and tells them not to come to the office, then ends the call to preserve what's left of his phone battery. Alas, we didn't get to see him go full Captain America in the elevator, but we can enjoy watching him shove the trussed and gagged FBI agent into a cadaver drawer in the morgue.

Back in MTAC, Curtis is locking down all the tech and even programs a failsafe that bricks everything in the building when the FBI goons wrestle his laptop away from him. The lessons of Dennis Nedry won't be forgotten!

Parker and McGee also aren't going quietly, and when an agent herds them onto the elevator, they yell at each other until Parker's able to free himself using his back-pocket handcuff key. Don't leave home without it!

He pops the FBI guy in the nose and frees McGee, and the two of them set off to save the world. This involves crawling through elevator shafts and ventilation ducts, sadly also unwitnessed by the audience, until they reach Kasie's lab, where she's monitoring all the security cams and working on decoding the second message.

"By the way, we're all going to jail, right?" she asks before cheerfully explaining how she's been working to avert WWIII, including opening a TCP portal on MateQuest so they could contact Palmer.

McGee and Parker then locate Torres in the basement, where he's looking for a phone charger in the evidence lockers. They agree that stopping the FBI from sending the missile coordinates to the Pentagon is job No. 1, and they also agree that taking out the power to MTAC is the way to do it. The electrical line's behind a concrete wall, but thankfully, they've got access to sledgehammers that were gathered as evidence in a smash-and-grab case.

As McGee gleefully blasts "Cum on Feel the Noize" over the building's speakers, Torres and Parker sledgehammer their way through the walls (on the beat, no less!). While it's a miracle that nobody gets electrocuted, they do accidentally destroy the electrical breaker and take out the power to the whole building, including the lab where Kasie's decoding.

Just as they're debating using the emergency battery power to the doors to give her lab the juice she needs, Sweeney and his team sweep in to arrest them. Despite his punchable face, Sweeney actually does understand the reasons to disregard the orders of the acting Idiot-in-Chief, but he says they don't have the luxury of second guesses when the stakes are this high.

Thankfully, Kasie's listening in from her lab and uses her walkie-talkie to announce that she's really, really close to deciphering the second message. After a tense moment of eye contact, Sweeney tells his team to hold off on the coordinate upload and gives Kasie three minutes to prevent a war.

Back in the RV, Jess and Jimmy are working toward their own détente so their coworkers can stop walking on eggshells around them. The long and short of it: they still love each other, but Knight needs someone who can travel with her to career opportunities around the world at the drop of a hat, and Palmer needs stability for himself and Victoria.

Love isn't enough, in other words, and they're both emotional as they say goodbye to what they had. Look, I understand this decision, but I also haaaaaate it. Knight-In-Shining-Palmer forever!

Enough of Heartbreak RV; let's go back to Outside-the-Chain-of-Command HQ. Our team's in handcuffs as everyone waits tensely for Kasie to work her magic. She does, of course, sprinting down the stairs with the info because the elevator's still out. (Unclear why she couldn't use the walkie, but maybe Sweeney needed to see the paper to believe it.)

The second message was worth waiting for: Ukrainian special forces have already taken out the Belarus missile launchers, so there's no need for U.S. involvement. Cheers erupt at the news, and alone in an interrogation room, Curtis hollers to ask what's going on.

Three days later, Vance is grimly putting his slightly charred office back together while ZNN reports kinda-true details about the international incident.

Then "the troublemakers" are shown into his office, and Parker and Sweeney settle in for a good talking-to. Vance starts by bringing up the 1956 Suez crisis when the U.S. almost launched nukes against Moscow after an unidentified aircraft flew over Turkey and a British bomber fell from the sky.

Parker and Sweeney both know how this story ended: the bomber actually had engine trouble, and the mystery aircraft turned out to be a wedge of swans.

Vance looks pleased with his problem children and agrees that ill-timed events 70 years ago almost started WWIII, and it was individuals making difficult decisions that prevented it when the system failed.

So. Air Force One's coms went down because of malicious code planted by Leonard Rish's daughter in the NCIS-verse's 1,000th episode , and the vice president actually just ate some bad chicken. Yes, the threat from Belarus and Russia was real, but the rest was — say it with me! — a coincidence. Sometimes Rule 39 takes a back seat to, uhhh, Rule 72 , I guess?

This leaves Vance with the honor of informing both men that he's recommended them for Distinguished Pubic Service Medals for their work protecting the country and its NATO allies. "Just don't do it again — at least, not in my building."

Show of hands if you think Vance practiced his speech in the mirror before he left for work that morning.

Naturally, Parker and Sweeney are relieved as they leave the meeting, although they still need to appear in a DOD hearing to explain what went down. And while these two likely won't ever be friends, they can at least agree that they did something good together.

While Sweeney was guided by his faith, which recommends not shooting first and asking questions later, Parker says he thought about Einstein, who said that he wasn't sure what weapons WWIII would be fought with, but he was sure that WWIV would be fought with sticks and stones. Plus, "I couldn't let someone who is that bad at geography play footsie with armageddon," Parker says.

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