The NCIS Season 23 Finale Delivers a Final Heartfelt Goodbye — And Ends on a Major Cliffhanger!

Critic’s Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

4.5

The NCIS Season 23 finale wasn’t supposed to hurt as much as it did, but it did so in a beautiful way.

After episodes of wondering how Vance’s children were taking his loss, we finally get to see Kayla.

The best part about the hour is that we get to see the storyline from 12 months before, meaning we get to see Leon Vance one last time as NCIS Season 23 comes to an end.

Kayla Vance Steps Up as Her Father Would Expect

There’s no doubt that I smiled when I saw Leon Vance pop up on Kayla’s phone and then again in the boxing ring.

It’s rare that we ever got to see Vance with his children, but we know that he was a devoted and loving dad.

He always wanted the best for his children, and while he wanted to keep them safe, he knew that he had to let them live their lives.

That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do some spying on them when he needed to, and it causes friction with Kayla throughout the NCIS Season 23 finale.

She doesn’t need her dad checking up on her, but then she misses it when it’s no longer possible. 

Many children who lose parents fight this feeling of wishing they’d allowed their parents to baby them more, regretting some of the horrible things that were once said.

However, Kayla doesn’t focus too much on things that she can’t change. While there is regret, she doesn’t make that her personality.

Instead, she focuses on being the daughter her father would have been proud to see, and I love that Parker points that out to her.

She remains calm in a scary situation when a grieving father has his hand on a detonator for a bomb, and she remains focused when LaRoche rolls in with claims that the money used for her moonlighting operation was dirty.

There are all these accusations being thrown around against her and against her father, and that could have led to her spiraling.

Maybe it would have if it weren’t for the rest of NCIS by her side, but she still managed to remain clear-headed to get to the bottom of the case that had been eating at her for a year.

She proves that she is her father’s daughter, and that could eventually lead to her sitting in the director’s chair.

It’s just not what she wants right now, even if Vance really wanted that for her.

I’ll give him his due. In one of the flashbacks, we see him step back when Kayla points out that being the Director of NCIS may not be something she wants.

At the end of the day, parents have dreams for their children, but they should also want their children to do something they love. I get the feeling Vance was reminded of that just before his death.

It is a bittersweet ending to Vance’s story on NCIS, but it is necessary, and it adds power to a finale that could have felt like someone was missing.

The Perfect Cliffhanger to Keep Us Invested

The minute Mateo walked into NCIS, I felt like something was off.

He was too happy that McGee was heading off on another case and that it would be up to people who didn’t know him that well to give him the tour.

This was always a man with an ulterior motive, not to get an idea of whether he wanted to apply for the NCIS internship.

He had already made up his mind, and he slipped up when mentioning it to Torres.

Of course, Torres is going to remember a conversation like that because it directly connects to a friend.

It’s this side of Torres that made me annoyed so much during NCIS Season 23 Episode 18, as he sulked so much about Kasie not paying for dinner.

He is capable of thinking of others, and sometimes the writing regresses him too much. 

It’s time to keep him with consistent growth, or at least have someone call him out when he regresses.

But back to the entire situation, because Torres knew that something was fishy when he learned that Mateo suddenly decided to apply for the internship after all.

Palmer wants to think well of people, but Torres knows the realities. On top of that, he’d just been involved in a case that had a son who had been brainwashed.

There were even hints that Mateo’s story was coming to this cliffhanger conclusion, as McGee chatted to the father of the original coffee shop bomber.

You don’t know what is going on with your children, especially teenage and adult children, and I always felt like Mateo wanted to get involved in McGee’s life and work a little too quickly and easily.

When Mateo first met McGee, he didn’t really want anything to do with him. He’d grown up without a dad all his life.

I get that there was some interest at first, once he accepted the situation, but something didn’t sit right with how fast it was happening.

Now I get what that was. Mateo was infiltrating NCIS, and now the big question is why.

NCIS Season 23 Episode 20 ending with the gunshot with the camera above the outside of the building was a good decision.

Now I know I’ll be invested all summer to find out what happened.

Who fired the shot? What happened to the other person?

I don’t think we’ll end up with a character death, as that brings a dead end (no pun intended!) of sorts to Mateo’s story.

If Torres had taken the shot, he would likely have aimed for the shoulder or leg, while Mateo would likely have missed, as he wouldn’t have had the experience.

However, what it does do is set up a huge arc for Torres, Mateo, and McGee that is sure to bring LaRoche back into the story and, hopefully, open the door for McGee to become the new director.

NCIS Season 23 has been a little hit-and-miss, but it ended solidly, giving us a goodbye to Vance and setting up an interesting storyline for the start of NCIS Season 24.

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