NCIS Season 23 Resurrects Its Own Famously Stupid Hacking Trope

Contains spoilers for "NCIS" Season 23, Episode 10 — "Her"

At least the folks working in the "NCIS" writer's room have a sense of humor about their foibles. "Her" makes ample reference to an infamously stupid scene in Season 2's "The Bone Yard" — then turns the moment on its head by having its characters talk about and then partially reenact the scene with different results.

In "The Bone Yard," Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) and Tim McGee (Sean Murray) try to stop a major hack of Abby's computer in her lab by wildly typing on the keyboard. Their progress is nil and Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) and Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) enter the room and gawk at them. All of a sudden Abby's terminal shuts off and both she and Tim are each convinced that the other fixed the problem. But it turns out Gibbs unplugged the computer.

Fans and casual observers have long laughed at that interlude, but "Her" pays fond tribute to Abby and Tim's follies. In it, Ukrainian cyberterrorist Patricia Kovach (Masha Cima) complains to her colleague Jonathan Lin (Sam Marra) about a novel she's reading. "Do you know what's dumber than running ops from a bombed-out basement?" Patricia asks. He replies, "Don't say, 'Two people typing on the same keyboard.'" She echoes his statement back to him, and he says he warned her not to read the book because it would melt her frontal lobes. Later, after Patricia admits it's the only form of entertainment they have down there, she wonders, "How could the boss read this unrealistic crap?" Jonathan then goes on to defend the plot point. "Okay. Rude. And it is technically possible ... Remap the macros. Assign key clusters left side, right side. Perfect for emergencies." Well, there you have it.

Patricia and Jonathan's boss happens to be former series mainstay and current deep cover operative Eleanor "Ellie" Bishop (Emily Wickersham), who exited "NCIS" during Season 18 and has returned for a Season 23 dual-episode guest turn. She might be reading the novel for one special reason — it's a Thom E. Gemcity tome. Gemcity is naturally a pen name for her moonlighting colleague Tim McGee, and it's not surprising that Ellie's still reading Tim's output, as it serves as a way to connect to her old friends. There have been several Season 23 episodes that have reexamined Tim's feelings about his alter ego; here, we learn he hasn't just pilfered his colleagues' personalities for his books, he's fictionalized things he's experienced at work for his Gemcity stories.

Interestingly enough, when push comes to shove and Patricia and Jonathan are forced to evacuate their basement lair with the rest of Ellie's gang in "Her," they both jokingly start smashing at a single keyboard to reset the computer and hide the evidence, in spite of the danger surrounding them. As silly as it seems, Abby and Tim's brute force attempt at protecting their "NCIS" colleagues has definitely accrued quite the legacy.