NCIS recap: Enter the extremely haunted hunting lodge

Like a plastic jack-o-lantern stuffed with a Costco-sized candy mix, tonight’s NCIS was full to the point of bursting with storylines.

First, the crime, which we’ll call the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of the episode because it’s the most important candy of the bunch.

Navy SEAL Bryce Prescott (Justin Bruening) returns home from a one-month deployment to discover a Halloween party in full swing at his house. Problem is, he knows none of the partygoers, and they all insist that this is Hal’s house, not Bryce’s.

When the costumed revelers refuse to leave, Bryce — who’s just endured 19 hours of travel in the back of a Boeing C-17 — sighs and asks, “Do you have insurance?”

Let the ruckus commence! Also, if a SEAL asks after the quality of your medical care, you should already be running.

Now to the Skittles plotline of the night, which is sweet and has several flavors: The NCIS team has to decide what to do with Ducky’s office, which has been untouched since his death. Torres  (Wilmer Valderrama) is lobbying for a state-of-the-art gym.

This prompts McGee (Sean Murray) to ask Knight (Katrina Law) what Palmer (Brian Dietzen) might think about that. She awkwardly says she has no idea, but don’t worry. Things between them are fine! Just fine! (Jimmy and Jess are the Sour Patch Kids portion of the episode. Their relationship was once sugary sweet, but it’s turned acidic.)

The discussion about Ducky's office is interrupted when they’re called to Bryce’s Halloween brawl. As Knight happily hands out candy to the kids still ringing the doorbell, the team gets to the bottom of what appears to be a squatter situation.

Bryce explains that this is his grandmother’s house, which he inherited when his father died. But Hal’s girlfriend Mary (Chrissie Fit) swears that Hal lives here and will sort things out once he arrives.

Ah, but Hal’s already there, in the basement with a hammer embedded in his skull. (Good luck sleeping tonight with the memory of that squelch as Palmer removes it!) Not to criticize Mary's choices, but having an actual body at your Halloween party is taking your decorations a step too far.

In the midst of this discovery, Phil (Christopher M. Dukes), the delivery guy from Global Courier, arrives with all the packages Bryce had him hold while he was away. Phil takes an interested look at all the action, then grabs a huge handful of candy from the bowl by the door and heads out. I like his style!

Things are a little testy between Knight and Palmer in the basement, where they’ve discovered several large holes in the drywall. Then the mystery deepens when Hal is revealed to be the alias of Felix Pitts, who met Mary a few weeks ago at the bar where she works. 

Once Hal-turned-Felix’s body is removed, Palmer continues to cheerfully, almost maniacally, insist that everything is fine. He’s fine with changing Ducky’s office, just like he’s fine with the change in his relationship with Jess. EVERYTHING'S FINE, OKAY?

Mary points the team in the direction of Big Bark (Paul Zies), Hal’s former cellmate who got into it with Hal at the bar last week.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Big Bark tells the team that Hal owed him back rent for crashing at his apartment for so long that he had to be forcibly removed. But when BB — I’m sure he won’t mind if we call him BB — heard that Hal had rented a house using an app, he figured Mr. Get-Rich-Quick was working on a big score.

This brings the team to Bryce’s grandmother, Wanda Prescott. She’s the widow of billionaire investment guru Gavin “Goldmine” Prescott, who was worth almost $2 billion when he died in 2003, leaving behind two children and three grandchildren, including Bryce. 

Even more importantly, Wanda is played by Donna Mills of Knot’s Landing fame! She and her personal assistant, Leonard (Dominic Burgess of “hey, it’s that guy!” fame), arrive at NCIS HQ to get to the bottom of how her house ended up on the Host Hopper app for $90 a night. (Wanda and Leonard are crisp and delightful, making them the fun-sized Butterfingers of the episode.)

Wanda’s shocked about the murder and the short-term rental situation. Leonard is… less so. Naturally, the team detains him for further questions.

 Within moments, Leonard’s posh British accent disappears, and he whines that he’s underpaid while Wanda’s spoiled grandkids will inherit everything. Who can blame him for trying to earn a little cash on the side? In addition to renting out Bryce’s house, he also listed the family hunting lodge, which he billed as “extremely haunted.”

The extremely haunted hunting lodge is clearly the Payday candy bar storyline because it is absolutely nuts. But more on that later.

For now, the team’s still debating the issue of Ducky’s office. Palmer’s already declared that Ducky would want it to be a space that would assist them in doing their jobs well. For Parker (Gary Cole), that’s a place to eat lunch that isn’t his desk. For Kasie (Diona Reasonover), that’s a place to meditate. In honor of the man who brought her into the NCIS fold, Kasie commits herself to finding the best use for the office.

When Knight and Parker head to Hal's storage unit to investigate, she asks about the ghost (or was it an angel?) that he saw in the season 21 finale. Again, we flash back to Parker’s vision of a little girl, but he declines to share the details with Knight.

Parker’s ghost sister: the rock-hard Tootsie Roll of the episode. This memory’s been hanging around Alden's psyche for a long, long time.

Hal's storage unit contains treasure-hunting supplies, house floor plans, and a 1982 magazine with an article about Wanda and Gavin Prescott’s “priceless treasures.” 

Back they go to Wanda, who insists that the treasure Gavin meant was his family. Also, Leonard came clean with her, and she rewarded him with a big, fat raise. “I only hired him to see how long he could keep up that terrible accent,” she explains. WHAT A QUEEN! When we finally eat the rich, we eat her last. Also, Burgess is British IRL, so props to him for faking a bad accent, then using a put-on American one for the rest of the episode.

Wanda explains that Gavin started referring to the hunting lodge as haunted because of a mysterious fire that destroyed the porch and a few back rooms in 1987. Leonard adds that he’s experienced spooky things like cold spots and weird sounds.

Last season, aliens. This season, ghosts. I, for one, welcome the show’s slow transition to The NCIX-Files.

The hunting lodge reveal splits the team into those who geek out about haunted houses and those who do. not. mess. with. ghosts. McGee and Parker are in the former group; Knight and Torres make up the latter group.

I mention this split to explain why Parker and McGee practically skip away like little kids as they leave Knight and Torres on stakeout duty when they learn that Hal’s Host Hopper account put in an offer to rent the extremely haunted hunting lodge.

NCIS’ two toughest agents are jumpy as heck as the front door creaks open and they’re greeted with, as Knight puts it, “a dead animal depot” of stuffed hunting trophies.

Things get even worse when they realize the next room is full of dolls, bewigged mannequin heads, and occult books. “Why,” Knight breathes. “Just… why?” This is the most important question of the night, and sadly, it remains unanswered beyond “sometimes the rich have appalling taste.”

In the middle of their possibly haunted surroundings, Jess tells Nick that he can stop being the supportive best friend to both her and Jimmy because they truly are okay. But her statement is undercut when a creepy talking doll yeets itself off the fireplace mantle in her direction.

Naw, girl. Get out of that house.

The agents are braver than I am, and Torres slaps the doll back into place, then confesses that after almost getting killed in his most recent undercover mission, he wants to start training hard and getting his mind right so he can go looking for love.

Iiiiinteresting. Let’s call this the episode’s box of Red Hots. (The reason for this, I hope, is self-explanatory.)

This ghost-averse heart-to-heart is interrupted by clanging in the basement that turns out to be Mary, who broke in and discovered a small wooden crate that she believes to be the Prescott treasure.

She’s the one who rented the hunting lodge to continue Hal's search, which she learned about after Global Courier delivered a bunch of metal detectors to Hal at Bryce’s house.

But wait! Didn’t Phil the candy-grabbing delivery guy say he hadn’t been to the house during Bryce’s absence?

Sure enough, when Phil made the delivery for Hal, he figured out what was going on and demanded a cut. He and Hal argued over it, so Phil delivered a hammer to Hal’s skull.

With the murder solved, Wanda and Bryce join the team to open the wooden chest from the extremely haunted hunting lodge. Its contents are, in fact, priceless: decades-old photos, an old perfume bottle, the music box Gavin bought Wanda on Coney Island in the ‘50s, a locket containing pictures of long-gone family members.

Wanda’s overcome with emotion at learning that the fire didn’t destroy these irreplaceable memories, and she hands Bryce a photo of his father on his fifth birthday. “He would be so proud of you,” she tells her grandson.

Tear Jerkers. That’s the candy for this part of the episode, as well as what's to come. Because Ducky’s office has become the Dr. Donald Mallard Memorial Multi-Purpose Room. Torres is happily doing curls in one corner while  Kasie gets her ohms on and Parker and Knight nom their lunches at a table that’s definitely not their desk.

Vance (Rocky Carroll) and Palmer are delighted at the harmony the new space has brought to their work family, and in place of the cumbersome room name, Palmer suggests calling it simply “Ducky’s.”

The only person missing is McGee, who's still feeling chippy about losing the deputy director job to that mint-mucher Gabriel LaRoche. Naturally, he’s poking through LaRoche’s files before joining the team at Ducky's.

That’s right. We’ve ended this week on the Peppermint Patty storyline: McGee's suspicions are rich, complex, and a little frosty.

Stray shots

• It’s unclear how Torres can get into even tip-toppier shape, but I’m excited to watch him try.
• Best callback of the episode: Knight telling Parker that she finally watched The Poseidon Adventure and learned that Shelley Winters does, in fact, die while rescuing Gene Hackman. Of course, our girl also confirms that she would’ve jumped into the frigid water to save Parker even if she’d known that. 
• Speaking of Knight, how much longer are we giving this whole “Jimmy and Jess are fine being just friends” situation? Because I’m about ready to lock them in a room and chant “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” a la New Girl. 
• Hey, friends. Meet me at Ducky’s!