The season 23 finale of NCIS featured emotional flashbacks of late director Leon Vance while teasing potential danger for his daughter, Kayla. The episode revealed connections to a bombing case from last season and үз her Whistleblower investigation. Instead Kayla got cleared of wrongdoing after the team found the money she had taken was actually being tracked by Vance before his death.
The NCIS season 23 finale brought a beloved character back to life — at least in spirit — before teasing the potential death of a different character.
Warning: Spoilers below from NCIS season 23, episode 20. During the Tuesday, May 12, season 23 finale, director Leon Vance returned in multiple flashbacks after being killed off earlier in the season. The glimpses at the past began 12 months prior when Vance called his daughter, an NCIS agent Kayla , to check in about work. As the two were on the phone, an explosion went off at the coffee shop, Kayla just left.
The next scene showed Kayla boxing with Vance one month later as the bombing continued to haunt her. Kayla was confident that the suicide bomber wasn’t a “lone wolf” and told her father she planned to prove it. Flash forward to present day, when the current NCIS team — who are still without a director after Vance was fatally shot during episode 13 — discovered another suicide bomber with a backpack that looked like the coffee shop attack.
The team then found six more backpacks in the dead man’s car, seemingly proving that Kayla was right and the original kid wasn’t working alone. As the episode continued, the NCIS team crossed paths with Kayla, who had created a special task force to monitor online activity before kids are radicalized and more bombs could hurt civilians.
Kayla attempted to work with her dad’s former teammates before she was benched by former NCIS Deputy Director Gabriel LaRoche , for allegedly taking dirty money to fund her non-sanctioned team.
The NCIS team ultimately cleared Kayla’s name — and realized the reason Vance was the last person to touch the dirty money was because he discovered it and wanted to warn his daughter just days before he died. Therefore, he was not dirty, nor was Kayla. LaRoche, now the US Associate Attorney General, hinted that the scandal would be his ticket back to NCIS, where he seemingly wanted to take over for Vance permanently.
Kayla, for her part, found a letter from her father in her boxing locker, in which he signed a discharge paper so she could leave NCIS if she wanted to pursue her side project full-time.
The letter signified that he was OK with whatever choice she made, and in that moment fans saw Vance one last time standing proudly in the boxing ring. While viewers got to see Kayla and Vance back together, another father-child dynamic could mean disaster for one NCIS team member. Throughout the finale, fans saw Special Agent Timothy McGee interact with his son, Mateo , whom he learned existed earlier this season.
During Mateo’s NCIS office tour, he told Special Agent Nick Torres that he was “overwhelmed” and wasn’t sure if he would apply to their internship program. However, Torres was later told that Mateo asked to use a computer in one of the tech stations to submit his application, which didn’t make sense to him. When Torres searched to see if Mateo did apply, he discovered it was a lie — but for what reason?
During the final minutes of the episode, Torres confronted Mateo in an alley about why he needed to login to an NCIS computer. Mateo told Torres to stop asking questions and revealed he had a gun.
“They could be watching,' Mateo said, as Torres put his hand on his own gun, asking him to stop moving. The screen went black and a loud gunshot went off, hinting that another character could be dead. Fans will have to wait until fall 2026 when season 24 of NCIS premieres to discover if anyone was shot, who may have died and what Mateo was really doing at the office.
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