[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS: Hawai’i Season 3 Episode 8 “Into Thin Air.”]
Sam (LL COOL J) may have spoken too soon when he tells Ernie (Jason Antoon) he’s not going to meet any members of the NCIS Elite team. The latest NCIS: Hawai’i episode is the last one before the two-part Season 3 finale, and now we know why Jane’s (Vanessa Lachey) team and Sam’s special unit will be working together on its case.
Following Jane’s talk with The Chemist, the Elite team has taken down three of his labs and found a laptop that Sam wants Ernie to decrypt. “Please tell me it’s not all just an elaborate ploy to get me to do tech support,” Ernie says when Sam hands over the laptop and confirms NCIS Elite exists. And so what follows is Ernie proving he’d be a terrible spy as he tries to cover what he’s up to from everyone else and goes so far as to, at one point, hide behind a plant then duck behind desks to deliver information to Sam. (But that’s why we love him.)
Ernie, of course, cracks the uncrackable computer and shows Sam an inventory list—arms, chemical weapons, and bio-agents—cross-referenced to where they’re stored. Elite took down some, but there’s a fourth location, with some major things, including a mysterious Compound X. Ernie’s next update is so important, there’s no time to go to the War Room. He discovered a Trojan horse that was activated the moment anyone tried to break into the internal files, and it infects whatever system tries to access it. Ernie’s system isn’t compromised because he wasn’t the first to access it. The Elite team tried to break the firewall while still in Pakistan, meaning whoever planted it has been in the Elite server for three days and the entire operation has been revealed.
And now we have a bit more information to go with what we already know about the two-part Season 3 finale, airing on April 29 and May 6, and why the two teams will be working together. First, in “Spill the Tea,” when a high-value bioweapons expert is murdered in a secure facility on Hawai’i, NCIS and the NCIS Elite team join forces to track down the killer and discover an even deadlier threat. Then, in “Divided We Conquer,” following a devastating ambush with a deadly bioweapon, the NCIS team must track down a mysterious terrorist group before they can strike again.
Something tells us that the high-value bioweapons expert and the secure facility may very well be the Chemist, in Elite’s secure facility where Sam had previously taken Jane. After all, what better way to ensure that NCIS remains a few steps behind than to take out the person who could tell them what Compound X is?
What are your theories about the two-part finale? Let us know in the comments section, below.
NCIS: Hawai’i, Mondays, 10/9c, CBS