As NCIS season 24, episode 4 begins, Tony pulls Knight aside to help with the Anderson case as a cover to get her help with a personal matter. When Tali first got to boarding school, she was calling Tony every night and texting him for advice, but now she’s ghosting him, and he’s thinking the worst, to which Knight suggests she’s simply made friends now and is enjoying school. Their conversation is interrupted as McGee comes up to inform Knight they caught a case and head out to the scene where a man’s body has been discovered in the woods.
Jimmy’s initial exam suggests that the victim was killed with an axe, and he finds a superhero costume under his clothes, one belonging to the Greatest American Hero. Torres finds the petty officer’s car, and inside is a briefcase with about $50k in cash.
The victim was an IT guy named Mark, but that doesn’t explain why he was dressed up as a superhero or why he had the $50k in his car. What they do know is that he has a sick kid who is undergoing cancer treatment, which makes the team wonder if he might have gotten up to some shady business to make money for medical bills. Only, it turns out the money they found was not real, as Kasie reveals that most of the cash in the briefcase was counterfeit.
McGee heads to meet with the victim’s wife at the hospital, who informs McGee that her son’s new course of treatment seems to be working. He asks whether there was anything off in her husband’s life, but she assures McGee nothing stood out, as he was always at the hospital when he wasn’t at work and did nothing to make his son happy, including dressing up as the superhero.
She admits that the medical bills were piling up, but a few weeks ago her husband began paying the bills off using some sort of Navy relief fund. McGee informs her that her husband had been on leave the last few months and tells her about the counterfeit cash, which is when she walks away from their conversation, telling McGee to focus on finding her husband’s killer and not in making him out to be the bad guy.
Back at NCIS headquarters, Tony comes to Knight and updates her on Tali; it turns out she has friends who Tony has done some research on and asks for her advice on what to do with the information. Knight suggests he do nothing at all, which Jimmy agrees with as Jimmy encourages him to give Tali some space.
The conversation shifts back to their actual case as Jimmy reveals that the petty officer was tied up and bruising on his wrists, suggesting he was hung up for a long time. What’s even odder is that Jimmy found a scorpion in the victim’s stomach. Kasie was able to track down a buyer, Parker and Torres, and McGee and Knight head out to stake out the place in hopes it might lead them to their suspect. While sitting in their car, Parker and Torres hear a scream and race into action to investigate. The team ends up stumbling into the set of a Squid Game-style game show.
The show’s legal counsel, Chelsea, comes down to speak with McGee and Parker and reveals that their victim was a contestant on their game show. They’re joined by the show’s host, Jordan Jackpot, who confirms their victim ate the scorpion on the show, giving us an answer to another question. Chelsea informs them that their victim was unable to tell his family about being on the show as all contestants sign NDAs, thus explaining why he hadn’t told his wife where his money was coming from.
Elsewhere on the set, Torres tracks down an axe-throwing set on the game and finds that one of the axes from the set is missing, and this seems to be their murder weapon. Jimmy’s tests confirm that the missing axe is indeed the murder weapon as Torres and Knight hone in on three key suspects from the show who are all desperate for cash as well: Rhonda, Jeff, and Stephanie.
Back at NCIS, Tony reveals to Knight he invited Tali and her friends to come to DC for the weekend and get a VIP tour of the Smithsonian. While digging through the tapes, Kasie and Tony found a contestant named Caleb who was kicked off the show after attacking Mark on the show, blaming him for losing a challenge. Caleb seems to be off the grid, but park rangers spot his van, and Tony sends Torres and Parker out to the scene. Caleb tries to take off in the van, but they stop him before he gets away.
Caleb assures them that he was mad about losing the money, but he wasn’t thinking straight as the show kept them up all night and barely fed them as they wanted them to crack to make better TV. Caleb tried to complain to the company, but they leaked his information and pushed him out. After what happened, Mark reached out to Caleb and offered to look into Jackpot. As they chat, Caleb gets an alert and informs the team that Jackpot has released a new video stating NCIS broke into their headquarters, framing them as the villain in this story.
Jackpot begins using the NCIS team’s raid as marketing for the season, calling it the most extreme season of the show yet. Unfortunately for Tony, the marketing put him back on Tali’s bad side, as she’s not happy about her dad’s boss trying to shut down her favorite YouTuber, leading to her canceling the trip to DC and icing him out again.
While looking into the contracts, McGee finds that they all contain a clause requiring all contestants to communicate exclusively through an app. The only problem is that this app is private and invite only.
Tony meets with Jackpot, who films a video clearing NCIS’s name. Jimmy and Kasie are surprised by how Tony seems to glaze over the whole ordeal and worry he was using it for brownie points with Tali when he asks Jackpot to air-drop the video. Jimmy and Kasie are shocked by how Tony handled the situation, which was when he told them that the video was for NCIS PR purposes and the airdrop was a ploy to get Jackpot's authorization token, which will give them access to the app they need.
Kasie begins looking into the app and finds a user named “The Hammer,” who Mark was set to meet up with after he flagged a bug, which Mark called illegal and dangerous. Kasie is able to uncover the name of the user behind the Hammer persona, which leads them to Chelsea, who admits she met with Mark about his concerns.
Parker and McGee point out how Jackpot is set to take the app wide, and she offers to reach out to the company that made the app to flag it as they point out she paid the Russians to build the app, making this a national security threat. She is adamant she had no idea the app was built by Russians and that the developers ghosted her after she reached out to them about the bug. She enlisted Mark’s help in getting to the bottom of things, as he wasn’t trying to expose the company but rather save it.
They find a video from Mark’s computer from minutes before he was killed, and it leads them to Jackpot’s office. Inside they find a secret safe as Jackpot walks in to confront them about breaking in as they hand over the warrant. They make it clear to Jackpot that he either opens the safe or becomes their prime suspect.
Inside the vault they find an old video from Jordan, which proves that Jordan’s friend, Nathan, was the one who cooked up the concept for Jackpot. Nathan is adamant that he didn’t care about Jackpot taking credit for the show, but that’s not what he was killed over. Turns out when the app was sold, Nathan was set to be cut out entirely, which is when Nathan finally cracks. He recalls how Jordan never called him when his mom died and he was going to post the video to show the world the real Jordan.
After closing the case, Knight drops in on Tony, and he reveals that he sorted things out with the Tali and came up with their own unique way to stay in touch without the need for text. As for Jordan, he chooses not to launch the app and to instead use that money to set up a fund for the contestants on the show who were wronged. He then shows up to bring joy to the kids at the hospital, taking Mark’s place as the Greatest American Hero, perhaps showing that he did learn a lesson from his mistakes.
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