Everything to Know About NCIS Season 18

NCIS returned with back-to-back episodes that revealed what was behind Gibbs’ shooting of McGee in the season premiere as we come to the climax of Gibbs and Fornell’s crusade to find the head of the drug ring responsible for Fornell’s daughter Emily’s overdose. According to Sean Murray, it's an “amazing” episode that you won’t want to miss.

But the evening started out with a McGee-centric episode in which he and Delilah took a Bahamian vacation that turned into a high-stakes mission and brought the couple closer together.

Here’s everything we know about NCIS Season 18 so far.

When does NCIS return?

The show is on hiatus until April 6, but when it returns, Mark Harmon's real-life wife Pam Dawber will guest star as investigative journalist Marcie Warren on the "Gut Punch" episode, which is directed by series star Rocky Carroll.

What time is NCIS on?

When NCIS returns for its 18th season, it will be back in its Tuesday night at 8 p.m. ET/PT timeslot.

Who died on NCIS now that the show is back in the future and dealing with the pandemic?

It took viewers by shock when on the Feb. 9 episode of NCIS, Jimmy (Brian Dietzen) revealed that he was a solo parent because his wife Breena (Michelle Pierce) was gone. It wasn’t revealed in the episode how she died, but at the end, he does say that he wasn’t allowed in the hospital to see her, which is a COVID-19 protocol.

"We can see within this week's episode that Jimmy is trying to keep whatever happiness he can, trying to say, 'Hey, my glass is half overflowing here. I'm doing really great,' while we as the audience can see that that may not be the case," Dietzen told ET. "He's doing whatever he can just keep his head above water. But there's only so long that that can happen before there's going to be a certain breaking point."

But Jimmy isn’t dealing well with his loss. He keeps trying to be cheerful, trying yoga, massages, a weighted blanket. Anything to pretend that things are normal, which they aren’t. Finally, Gibbs, who lost his first wife Shannon, has to confront Jimmy and tell him that he has to deal with his grief. There are five stages and Jimmy is stuck in the first stage, denial.

Because of COVID-19 protocols, Jimmy wasn’t allowed to have a funeral for his wife, so Gibbs does the best he can. He calls the team back to the office that night, instructing them to wear suits, and they have a memorial for Breena to help Jimmy face his loss.

NCIS has a second death in the season -- Who else died?

Former FBI Agent Tobias Fornell (Joe Spano) and Gibbs teamed up earlier this season to take down the drug dealers responsible for putting Fornell’s daughter Emily (Juliette Angelo) in the hospital as the result of an opiate overdose. And they were successful in shutting down the drug ring. But it wasn’t enough. They may have been able to save a lot of other people’s lives, but it was too late for Emily, and she died after a relapse.

NCIS Season 18 episode recaps

Episode 399: “Sturgeon Season”

NCIS welcomes back Tobias Fornell (Joe Spano) in a story that takes us back a year in time to November 2019. Fornell updates Gibbs that his daughter Emily’s opioid addiction is behind her, but now it is time to track down the leader of the drug ring who supplied the pills to his daughter.  And he knows just how to do that: by following an errand boy named Josh. Also, the team deals with the case of a missing cadaver–Marine corporal Richard Darby–from the NCIS autopsy room. It turns out Darby was murdered and his corpse stolen so his greedy neighbor could use his hand to open a safe containing $106,000.

Episode 400: “Everything Stars Somewhere”

The 400th episode takes us on a flashback to the year 1980 and reveals how a murder case was responsible for U.S. Marine Sgt. Leroy Jethro Gibbs meeting a young, new-to-America Donald “Ducky” Mallard for the first time and how they became friends. And in a twist, it is Ducky who saves Gibbs’ life, rather than the other way around.

Episode: 401: "Blood and Treasure"

Gibbs and Fornell continue their secret investigation into the opioid drug ring from the "Sturgeon Season" episode, with Fornell going undercover as a fast food restaurant employee -- and then disappearing. Meanwhile, the team, after a night of possibly too much alcohol,  investigates the discovery of two dead bodies in a forest that takes them into the wild world of modern-day treasure hunting.

Related: Fall TV 2020 Schedule

Which NCIS cast members are returning for Season 18?

Mark Harmon (Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs)

Sean Murray (Special Agent Timothy McGee)

Emily Wickersham (Special Agent Eleanor “Ellie” Bishop)

Wilmer Valderrama (Special Agent Nicholas “Nick” Torres)

Maria Bello (Special Agent Jacqueline “Jack” Sloane)

Brian Dietzen (Dr. Jimmy Palmer)

Diona Reasonover (Forensic Scientist Kasie Hines)

Rocky Carroll (NCIS Director Leon Vance)

David McCallum (Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard)

Will Ziva (Cote de Pablo) be returning to NCIS for Season 18?

Not likely. For now, Ziva’s story was wrapped up with her four-episode return in Season 17, when she left to fly to Paris and reunite with Tony and their daughter.

“We loved the Ziva character going very deep, and so, it was such an honor to get to revisit that story and tie up some of the loose ends that we had, and it was such an honor to get to work with Cote again,” co-executive producer Gina Lucita Monreal told Parade.com. “If there’s more story to tell, I’m the first to jump on board. I love that character, and I hope that it showed through those episodes.”

Who is leaving NCIS for Season 18?

Maria Bello is set to leave NCIS sometime during Season 18, which will mark the end of her three-year contract with the hit CBS procedural drama. Bello joined the cast in Season 15, playing forensic psychologist Jacqueline “Jack” Sloane. If NCIS hadn’t been forced to wrap early as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bello would have exited at the end of Season 17, but with the shortened season, she owes the series more episodes.

According to TVguide.com, fans have predicted that Sloane will die, rather than exit for some other less dramatic reason. But showrunner Frank Cardea told the publication that if word got out that she was going to be killed off--which he didn't say had been planned--then the writers would change the storyline.

Related: Everything We Know About Law & Order Season 22

What else do we know about the plot of Season 18?

NCIS had four episodes yet to film when production was shut down as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. And those four episodes will be filmed first when production resumes.

“When we come back into production again, that’ll probably be shot first,” Cardea told Parade.com. “Assuming everybody’s well and all the actors are available, we will shoot it then. There are two other scripts right behind it that we’re close to getting ready to go and they’ll probably be shot in that order, and then we have a lot of flexibility to begin the new year. Because we have such lead time, we can air the first five or six in almost any order we want, and we’ll make that decision after the episodes are shot.”

One of the things that works so well on NCIS is that with its longevity and its multiplicity of cases, the series has laid in a lot of stories that can be revisited. That is what will happen when it returns sometime, hopefully, in November, when the fall season seems slated to actually begin, at least for dramas.

In this instance, NCIS will be revisiting Season 17’s episode 8 in which Gibbs disappeared without informing his team what he was doing or where he was going.

“We had an episode last year called ‘Musical Chairs,’ where Gibbs vanished from the squad room to go on a mission, and then he shows up at the end of the episode with a black eye,” co-showrunner Steve Binder told TVLine. “We are going to pick up Season 18 with that mission that Gibbs was on, back in time.”

So, when it begins, NCIS will be existing in a pre-COVID-19 world, but that will change later in the season, but not until 2021.

Before that happens, NCIS will air its 400th episode, which initially was set to air during Season 17, which actually ended with episode 398. Now, episode 400 will air during Season 18, and showrunner Cardea also told TVguide.com that it will be a flashback episode.

“It’s about how Gibbs and Ducky met,” Cardea said. “It’s a case that brings them back. There are wonderful moments and we see how Ducky and Gibbs met under strange circumstances.”

And to make the 400th episode even more special, returning to the cast for his sixth appearance as a young Leroy Jethro Gibbs will be Mark Harmon’s real-life son Sean, according to TV Guide.

Related: Everything We Know About Grey's Anatomy Season 17

How many episodes of NCIS Season 18 will there be?

Instead of the normal 24 episodes, CBS has back the order to 16 episodes due to COVID-19.

What happened in the NCIS Season 17 finale?

As a result of the early shut down of production, Season 17 of NCIS ended up with only 20 episodes instead of the usual 24. Nevertheless, the episode, “The Arizona,” turned out to be the perfect ending to the season.

Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the team tries to verify the identity of Joe Smith (Christopher Lloyd), who claims he served on the U.S.S. Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor and wants to be buried with his fallen comrades upon his death. The only problem is he needs help proving that he was actually stationed on the ship because he had assumed his brother’s identity at the time he enlisted, being too young to enlist under his own name.