NCIS season 23, episode 18 was all about Kasie Hines and the program that she spent her entire college and post-college days working on. However, her efforts to create something to help law enforcement only ended up being placed in the wrong hands and put her in hot water. How did the team help Kasie get her program from enemy hands?
In 2012, Kasie began working on a personal project during her college years called EDNA. Her invention was the result of her idea of how to use fingerprints to look for genetic traits that could find a suspect. She had spent over a decade working on it before it was taken during the NCIS system upgrade.
She had kept the program a secret from her entire team due to not wanting to be seen differently since if she sold it, she would become very rich. She had gone to a company to see about selling it, and they were excited to work with her. However, it was still a lot for Kasie to even consider the idea of people knowing.
The company’s former lawyer, Elliott Mueller, had recently been let go, so he was a viable suspect. However, he was found dead, and someone had used Kasie’s program to recreate her fingerprint and put it on the murder weapon.
Sam tried to help Kasie escape, and they went to upstate New York to go visit her ex-girlfriend, Joanna, who had her notebook where she wrote out the original code for EDNA. Joanna, however, was still hurt about their breakup, so she refused to give up the notebook at first.
But when the cops caught up to Kasie, they were arrested, but Sam was let out to help the team get Kasie’s name cleared. In the meantime, the rest of the team tried to figure out who would want to use the program.
Eventually, they determined Mueller had been paid to steal the program, and a recent break-in involving stolen weapons for the military was connected. Someone used Kasie’s program to disguise their actual target, which was to get into the vault of someone with classified documents about a military operation.
They needed to find Kasie’s program in order to use the only fingerprint they had of the real killer, which was the duct tape used on Tommy the janitor’s family. Luckily, Joanna had a change of heart and brought back the notebook so McGee and one of Kasie’s tech trolls could recreate it.
Using the biometrics that were uncovered, they realized the person who did all of this was DoD Chief of Cyber Security David Barbado, who was the actual mole at the DoD. Ironically, he had been claiming that there had to be a mole inside the department, and it was none other than himself.
The team was able to stop him from giving the intel to the Russians, thus protecting U.S. troops already in position. After realizing what her program could be used for, Kasie deleted EDNA for good. She also got to reconnect with Joanna, with the audience possibly seeing the two former lovebirds get back together.
Despite the severity of the situation, there were some funny moments in the episode and it gave fans a chance to see more about Kasie’s background. Plus, having Sam there to help her out allowed us to see someone outside the team give Kasie a hand while everyone else did their part to ensure Kasie could get back to what she loved doing at NCIS.
There are just two episodes to go before the season 23 finale airs. For now, you can watch the rest of the season on Paramount+.
NCIS airs Tuesdays on CBS at 8/7c.
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