NCIS recap: Whose lives are left in jeopardy?

Pauley Perrette’s penultimate NCIS episode aired and it was everything and you’d expect and more.

Get ready to say goodbye to Abby Sciuto. It’s not clear how exactly she’ll come out of NCIS Season 15, but this episode certainly set up the tearful goodbye. When she wins a free dinner at a prestigious igloo restaurant, she spends the episode trying to figure out which of her colleagues deserves it more. Maybe she would have been best staying home that night, though.

Meanwhile, Gibbs takes on the case of a murdered veteran when he hears the full details of the case. Can he get justice?

Meet Sara Carter

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The episode, titled “One Step Forward,” picks up right away with Gibbs getting stopped from getting onto the base because a woman is trying to force her way through. Sara Carter punches a guard she wants in that much and Gibbs is the one that agrees to talk to her. It turns out she needs her mom’s murder solved.

Her mom, May Carter, was a veteran who was murdered in what looked like a burglary gone wrong. However, as pieces of the puzzle join together, it’s soon clear that drugs are involved. The question was whether she was selling the drugs or buying them.

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The team also figure out that Sara was a homeless veteran with a son. This gave Reeves a way in, as he’s volunteering at a charity that offers shelter for veterans just like her. It takes a while and a beating from a masked attacked, but eventually she opens up to Reeves and admits that she didn’t want to ask for help because she feared social services would take her son. When she does open up, she admits that her pills (she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury and needed pills for migraines) had gone missing. She now worried that her mom has stolen the pills and sold them or taken them.

It turned out the mom had uncovered a drug case after accidentally being sent all the shipping numbers of other missing pills when making an insurance claim. May had died because she got too close to solving the drug-stealing mystery. Sara was then later attacked because she got close to uncovering a detail without realizing.

In the end, NCIS figure out that the shipping company was the supplier of the drugs and had ordered May’s murder.

Abby chooses a colleague

When Abby wins a free dinner at a prestigious restaurant that is ice on the inside, everyone starts buttering her up to get to be her dinner date. At the end, she chooses Reeves, as he’s the one that deserves it the most.

NCIS ends Pauley Perrette’s penultimate episode in the most shocking way possible. A man stops them to ask for money. Just as Abby is about to give him some, he pulls out a gun and is offended when she offers to help him. The episode ends with a gun shot and Reeves pushing Abby out of the way to try to stop the man.

It was a shocking way to end the episode, but completely makes sense. If (and it really is an if right now) Abby is killed off or seriously injured, it would be the only realistic option to write the character out. Abby wouldn’t leave NCIS. And despite the promo for next week, it’s Reeves I’m worried about the most.

Next: NCIS recap: Gibbs and co. get to the bottom of a meth conspiracy

Who will live and die? Are we saying goodbye to two characters in NCIS Season 15? Share your thoughts about that dramatic ending in the comments below.

NCIS Season 15 will wrap Abby’s story next Tuesday at 8/7c on CBS.