Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS episode “Gone Girls are ahead!
The newest episode of NCIS Season 23 just wrapped up on the 2025 TV schedule. This week’s case seeing the team investigating a U.S. marine who’s believed to have kidnapped the wife of a high-ranking official at the Department of Justice. To cut to the chase, this marine had actually secreted the wife away to a group of women that helps other women escape their abusive spouses.
Where “Gone Girls” really stood out for me was how it included shoutouts to Hamilton and other musicals, as well as Thom E. Gemcity, a.k.a. Timothy McGee’s author alter-ego. More importantly, however, is that we also might have gotten a tease about where Kasie Hines’ career at NCIS could go next.
How NCIS Shouted Out Musicals And Thom E. Gemcity
The B-story of “Gone Girls” revolved around the team being invited to a community theatre gala by Barbara Dunsley, the NCIS accountant who debuted in the Season 21 episode “Lifeline” and returned for two Season 22 episodes. In this fourth appearance, Barbara was going to perform for An Evening of Gilbert & Sullivan, something the team wasn’t exactly excited to experience. Ultimately they weren’t able to make it to the production because of the case, but sensing Barbara’s disappointment about their absence, they arranged to have her performance of “Major-General’s Song” from The Pirates of Penzance in the NCIS evidence garage with some of her castmates.
During this musical sideplot, we learned that Alden Parker had also done a production of The Pirates of Penzance in high school, and that Jessica Knight is not a fan of the genre whatsoever. But it was Nick Torres being a Hamilton superfan that really got me. It’s the only musical he likes, to the point he even squeezed in two references to it within less than a minute during a team briefing, only to be met with metaphorical crickets. Anyone else now in the mood to stream Lin-Manuel Miranada’s classic with their Disney+ subscription now?
Meanwhile, during the investigation itself, McGee and Torres met the aforementioned women’s group, which was initially presented as a book club called Prose Before Bros (best book club name ever) that the marine, Molly Delgado, had joined. One of the women recognized McGee as Thom E. Gemcity, which is the pen-name he used for his L.J. Tibbs novels. It was a nice moment until that woman told him that she’d never read any of his books despite being a fan of spy thrillers.
Will Kasie Hines Start Doing Field Work?
These references were fun and all, but the bigger takeaway for me from “Gone Girls” is that Kasie Hines apparently wants to work out in the field. She mentioned wanting to branch out when Knight stopped by her lab for an update, although it’s initially played off as a joke because Kasie was referring to herself in the third person. However, before leaving the lab, Knight said that she’d “love” to have Kasie out in the field.
Getting more of Kasie outside her lab is something we’ve been wanting stretching back to February 2024, and I wonder if NCIS is finally taking steps to make this happen in an official capacity. That’s not to say we’d regularly see her out and about alongside Knight, Parker, McGee and Torres, as her work as a forensic specialist would still require a lot of indoors work. Still, it’d be nice if Kasie got this opportunity to spice up her job a little bit. Maybe we’ll see her talk to Director Leon Vance about this later in Season 23.
Now that “Gone Girls” has aired on CBS and will be available to stream with a Paramount+ subscription, the next NCIS episode is a big one, as it’s the second half of the decades-spanning crossover with NCIS: Origins. So if you want to watch “Now and Then” live, make sure to tune in to CBS next Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET instead of the normal 8 p.m. ET timeslot that Origins is temporarily taking.
