NCIS season 15 episode 12 review: The ‘Dark Secrets’ of many revealed

Tonight, NCIS season 15 episode 12 brought you a good example of what the show does best: A good mystery. Some of their cases can be a bit by-the-numbers, whereas some others can be a little action-heavy.

Personally, we do love a good whodunnit more than almost anything, and this is precisely what the CBS crime procedural ended up delivering with Tuesday night’s new episode. For the first half of the episode, the entire NCIS team for the life of them couldn’t figure out what was going on with Melissa Newhall. She was a prominent JAG lawyer who supposedly committed suicide under mysterious circumstances, and for most of the episode nobody could figure out precisely what happened … other than that it seemed like a murder case. She had a fiance, but there was no sign of wrongdoing there. She had sex at some point prior to her death, but she was not sexually active with her partner.

As the case progressed, the team figured out that Melissa had lived a secret double life in what seemed to be within the world of S&M. She had a fantasy that she lived out aside from the remainder of her life. This, in turn, opened up the possible suspect list to a lot of different people beyond just some of the standard people who were after her because of her job.

Suffice it to say, the moment that this was revealed the entire case started to blow up.

Related – Want more news about the NCIS return date after tonight’s episode?

Through some work from McGee, the team realized that Newhall may have been sexually abused when she was a teenager by a former teacher, and this gave a little more of a clue as to what she was going through. This teacher disappeared a long time ago, and it was eventually was determined that she Melissa and her friend were there at the time he went away. They didn’t kill him, but they decided not to help him when he had a heart attack.

It turns out that this said friend had discovered her body and hid the suicide note. As it turns out, it was a suicide; yet, the mystery was solved. This was not a case about the killer so much as figuring out the motive … difficult as that may be. All of a sudden, the title of “Dark Secrets” suddenly makes more sense.

There was an interesting tease at the end of the episode regarding some of Sloane’s own secrets as she went to tell Melissa’s parents with Gibbs. It’s not clear what those are just yet, but it’s a nice cliffhanger of sorts.

Torres’ quest for a new photo

Is Nick really so vain that he was desperate to get a new ID photo? Apparently, but there was some comedy in seeing how far he was willing to go in order to replace his bad ID.

Final Veridct

NCIS season 15 episode 12 wasn’t exactly an episode full of significant character revelations, but it didn’t need to be. Sometimes, NCIS just needs to tell a great mystery and give its characters questions to answer. Tonight’s “Dark Secrets” did that while giving you a great cameo from none other than Bud Roberts to boot.

What did you think overall about NCIS season 15 episode 12? Sound off now in the comments!

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