NCIS recap: The show goes full Yellowstone thanks to a bag of body parts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a wealthy cattle rancher owns a truly obscene amount of gorgeous natural land, routinely bends the law to his will, has the local constabulary in his back pocket, and runs roughshod over his quietly furious lawyer son.

Nope, it’s not Yellowstone — or more accurately, the Texas-set spinoff Yellowstone: 6666. It’s the penultimate episode of NCIS season 21, and it’s got a whole lot of fun tucked under its Stetson.

First, the unfun part: Marine Tom Riley was believed to have died in a four-person helicopter crash in San Diego two years ago, but his dismembered remains are found stuffed into a pair of garbage bags behind a dumpster in a D.C. alley.

His CO’s baffled, but then again, officials suspect he wasn’t sober when he took the controls that day and his body wasn’t recovered from the crash site.

Palmer (Brian Dietzen) assembles Tom like a jigsaw puzzle on his table. In addition to bits of metal and someone else's blood in Tom's wounds, Palmer reports that he was murdered only 48 hours ago, by someone responsible for the multiple meticulous stab wounds.

“This person has definitely killed before,” Palmer concludes. Yeah, by a murderer who then dropped Tom off at D.C.’s version of the train station afterward.

McGee (Sean Murray), meanwhile, is dealing with a potential crisis at home: Delilah (Margo Harshman) wants to renovate their kitchen. The sink leaks, the outlets are loose, there are handprints everywhere, and drawer pulls are popping off. His coworkers are no help, with Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) advocating for a pizza oven and Parker (Gary Cole) warning that he celebrated his kitchen renovation by getting divorced. 

When Delilah excitedly pops by the big orange room to tell McGee that a renovation reality show might be interested in featuring them, Parker ominously says, “My couch is always available.”

Before any more marriages are tested, Knight (Katrina Law) grabs her Stetson and volunteers Torres to hop a plane with her to Texas, where their victim’s been living as Tom Wade.

The pair check into a hotel in the Lone Star State and learn that the proprietor, Jo (Rose Portillo), is also the sheriff in these here parts. She points them to Fire Creek Ranch, where Tom worked for the most powerful family in the state. 

Patriarch John Dutto—er, Carl Bannon (Antoni Corone) greets them with a gunshot, killing a nearby rattlesnake that he plans to turn into soup. Gator would NEVER. (Actually, Gator might, and he’d make it delicious.)

Bannon swears he’s never heard of NCIS and humblebrags about a 725,000-acre land deal he just finalized as he sits down for a shave from his personal barber.

His lawyer son Jamie — oops, Jackson (Jonathan Keltz) — rushes out to chide Bannon for talking to the feds and then to quietly freak when he learns about Tom’s death.

Bannon talks passionately about the sense of purpose the cattle ranch offers workers escaping a checkered past and lashes out when Jack suggests that the federal agents not wander around the ranch.

Because no Yellowstone homage is complete without some equine acrobatics, Torres watches as a blonde woman (Marnee Carpenter) struggles to break a spirited horse. When she steps out of the paddock, Torres steps in, crooning “tranquillo” until the horse simmers down. It’s a skill he picked up as a child in Colombia, where horses were his playmates. The cowgirl’s shocked to hear about Tom’s death, then says she saw him loading mysterious boxes into his truck not long ago.

Back in D.C., Kasie (Diona Reasonover) discovers that the metal in Tom’s wounds is from chain mail, and the blood isn’t human. Weirdly, nobody jumps straight to, you know, COW.

It's not like McGee’s in a position to weigh in. He and Delilah epically flunk their reality show audition, unaware that Home Sweet Home Remodel thrives on marital discord. Even when they try to force disagreements, they can’t settle on who likes the Pergo flooring and who hates it. You'll never get your own spinoff plus a reunion show hosted by Andy Cohen by being in love, you two!

In Texas, Knight and Torres follow Tom’s GPS data to the temporary location of a local church, where the pastor (Jerry Kernion) tells them that Tom cleaned up, found Jesus, and now donates toys and blankets to the cause, hence the boxes cowgirl saw. Tom, who blamed himself for the deaths of his three friends, told the pastor he'd found something bad at the Bannon ranch and headed to D.C. to get to the bottom of it. 

Next, Knight decides to get to the bottom of the relationship between Jack and Tom, which was romantic but closeted to avoid upsetting Bannon. She urges Jack to help get justice for his murdered love, and after a short struggle with his family loyalty, Jack admits that he doesn’t know why his father recently cut him out of the Blue Bonnet Ranch land deal.

McGee’s not surprised by this; he and the tech trolls have uncovered Bannon’s many shady dealings. Also, Kasie confirms the blood on Tom’s body was bovine (obvi), and Bannon just happens to own a meatpacking plant three miles from where Tom's body was dumped — and where the employees wear chainmail while processing carcasses.

Knight and Torres confront Bannon about what Tom found: three of his employees were spotted on the Blue Bonnet Ranch just before it became the victim of arson, with the resulting destruction forcing the owner to sell for pennies on the dollar while local law enforcement were paid to bury the evidence.

Bannon scoffs off their accusations while I nervously eyeball Sheriff Jo, who’s standing with Knight and Torres and could very easily be one of the evidence-buriers.

Things get wild at NCIS HQ when Parker and McGee question the meatpacking plant manager (Matthew Downs), who recognizes Tom’s picture and promptly has a panic attack that turns violent. He slams Parker’s face into the desk and grabs McGee by the throat until Parker clocks him with a coffee carafe.

Palmer sedates the man, then shares the ZNN breaking news story that 20 other people at the plant are also suffering from the same drug overdose that got their manager all riled up. The culprit is a broken baggie of meth from the stash stuffed into carcasses shipped from Fire Creek Ranch. The workers all ate cafeteria burgers made from in-house meat, and hello, psychotic break.

“Should’ve ordered the fish,” Parker quips, which I’m taking as an Airplane reference.

So Tom was killed by the two D.C. butchers involved in the drug-smuggling operation, which is masterminded in Texas, not by Bannon as we expected, but by the lady cowgirl. Twist! (Sorry to this woman; nobody in the episode actually says her name.)

When cowgirl hotly asks why NCIS is taking the word of two guys in D.C. over hers, Knight gets to say my favorite line in any crime procedural: “We never said it was two guys.”

Cowgirl then draws the gun that sat prominently on her hip during her first scene, shoots Bannon in the shoulder, and flees on a horse. Channeling in inner Llanero, Torres hops on his own steed and apprehends her.

Once it’s all over but the shoutin’, Jack muses that it might be time for some non-Bannons to use this land for something other than making money, which would free him up to live on his own terms. (John Dutton would NEVER.)

We end this week back in the McGee kitchen, where Tim steels himself to tell Delilah that he doesn’t want to do this renovation. But she beats him to it, pointing to the twins' hight chart on the door frame and saying that every nick and scratch in the kitchen tells the story of their family.

They’re both delighted to be on the same page and plan a kidless date night that could very well produce McGee offspring No. 3, if I’m reading those heated looks correctly.

Stray shots

• Sheriff Jo, I apologize for doubting you.
• Care to guess which two NCIS employees are deeply committed to protecting the bees? Yep, it’s the P & P Pollen Factory. But as dedicated as Parker is, it's Palmer who has such a thing for honey that Knight looks a little haunted by it.
• Speaking of the lovely Jess, how much did you enjoy watching her nosh her way through Texas barbecue and biscuits during her trip?
• Can we all agree that the real MVPs this week is Marty the bee removal guy (Lincoln A. Castellanos) and freaking AMBULAR from CLUELESS (Elisa Donovan). For the record, Donovan’s graduated from full-on Monet to total Baldwin, and I snort-laughed at Marty’s terrified, “I was wrong! They smell fear!”
• Truly, we could not ask for anything more from this CBS-ified spin on the Paramount Network's smash cowboy hit. The writers have had a ball this season, and we've all benefited from their playful storytelling flourishes.

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