To kick everything off, however, NCIS delivered a season premiere cold open in which Mark Harmon’s Gibbs was responsible for shooting Sean Murray’s McGee, and then casually never revealed why it happened.
That change-up led the CBS drama’s creative team to reconfigure how they wanted Season 18 to open up, which resulted in several opening episodes taking places in flashback form.
Rather than closing out its seventeenth season in a traditional fashion, NCIS was forced to cap off its various storylines early after productions started shutting down due to the pandemic.