NCIS: Episode 22:4: “Sticks & Stones”

Here's the call. This is NCIS at the top of its game — a tense, exciting hour with real stakes, laced with the show's trademark humor and even a little romance. The whole thing builds to a moment where one character's Christian faith is what actually resolves the crisis, and that's rare enough on network television to be worth your time.

The only thing standing between this and a clean recommendation is some light foul language. Nothing here approaches the intensity you'd shield a teenager from, but it's enough that we'd steer younger children elsewhere.

So: if you've got teens or you're watching as an adult, this is an easy yes. If little ones are in the room, save it for after they're in bed.

A Belarus transmission — flagged by an algorithm one of the team built — points to mobile ballistic missiles being readied against Europe, fallout from Russia's war in Ukraine. The team is handed the crisis.

But the President and Speaker are stranded on a communications-crippled Air Force One, and the Vice President is in the hospital. That leaves the President Pro Tempore of the Senate as Acting Commander in Chief — and he wants to answer the threat with tactical nuclear weapons. Agent Parker, fearing he'd be striking the match on World War III, refuses the order. What follows is a battle of wits and wills. Who wins it? That's the episode.

Four stars, and the episode earns them. This is a superlative hour of a long-running series that knows exactly what it's doing: the tension is real and sustained, the conflict keeps escalating, and the writers still find room for genuinely funny beats along the way.

There's also a well-judged romantic thread — Jimmy, the lead medical examiner, and Agent Jessica Knight, who've taken a break from dating over a career that may pull her away from Washington. It's a human counterweight to the ticking-clock plot. When a show in its twenty-second season can still deliver an episode this taut and this satisfying, that's craft worth applauding.

This episode carries a strong Christian, moral, and patriotic worldview, and it wears it honestly. At its center is a national-security crisis that could tip into nuclear war — and what defuses it isn't clever tech or brute force, but one man's conscience. A major character says plainly that he is guided by his Christian faith, and that his faith is what finally tells him where to stand. He recalls his father preaching the Gospel and his mother leading the church choir every Sunday. Parker answers him with a line that lingers: "One day my soul will be judged, too."

That's the heart of the thing. Beneath the missile-launcher coordinates and the standoffs runs a quiet insistence that some orders are above any official's authority, and that a life lived before God is a life lived answerable to Him. The patriotism is real too — these are public servants who take their oaths seriously enough to risk everything rather than betray them.

The episode's central conviction — that our choices are weighed by a righteous Judge — is one Scripture states without flinching: "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:10). Parker's line about his soul is closer to the truth than he may know.

Twenty-two seasons in, NCIS delivers an hour that's genuinely tense, genuinely funny, and — remarkably for network TV — lets one man's Christian faith carry the day. A little light language is the only thing to watch for. For teens and adults, this one is easily worth watching.