NCIS recap: Farewell, Abby

After 15 years in her NCIS home, Abby Sciuto has packed up Burt the hippo and exited the building. As goodbyes go, it was emotional, bittersweet—and flashback heavy. Let's recap.

While Abby struggles for her life in the ER, Ducky arrives at the morgue to find Torres, Bishop, and Palmer circled around Reeve's body on the autopsy table. Torres lashes out in pain and rage, then he and Bishop exit to do their jobs and find his killer while Palmer steps up to assist Ducky on the procedure. "Don't worry, Clay. You're in good hands," he whispers, stroking his friend's head.

Following surgery, Abby's stable but critical, and Gibbs stands over her bed to apologize for letting her down. Then we flash back to them huddled together in "Kill Ari" as Gibbs promises to always keep her safe. In the present, he strides out of Abby's hospital room to do just that.

This leaves McGee to keep watch over Abby until she wakes up, no matter how long it takes. Palmer encourages McGee to talk to "the indomitable Abby Sciuto" while she's unconscious, but McGee doesn't even know how to begin telling her what she means to him.

In the big orange room, grief doesn't keep Torres from a tight t-shirt or Bishop from her snacks, although in her case, they're chips that Reeves special-ordered and kept in his desk for her. She regrets not telling him that he was like a brother to her when she had the chance.

Police have ruled the shooting a mugging gone wrong since Reeves' wallet and Abby's purse are missing, and Ducky found bruises on Reeves' hands consistent with a struggle. Palmer took his clothes to the lab for analysis, but who will do it?

The job falls to Bishop and Torres, who fumble their way through Abby's equipment and find blood on Reeves' shirt matching dishonorably discharged Army Specialist Ken Marshall. When the team burst into Marshall's home, they find a gun, the missing wallet and purse—and Marshall, his throat slit from ear to ear. He also had a dossier on Abby, which turns this into a murder-for-hire investigation.

So which of the hundreds of people Abby helped put away might have wanted revenge? One suggestion is Terry Spooner, who ordered a hit on Abby before his 2006 embezzlement trial. But he's on probation and walking the straight and narrow with a location-tracking ankle monitor to prove it. So that's one red herring eliminated.

Sloane then suggests that the actual murderer is calculating, connected, and holding a serious grudge, which leads Gibbs to Alejandro Rivera. The inmate takes great delight in asking Gibbs if someone died, but a literal Gibbs ear twist forces Rivera to spit, "If I was going to order a hit on anyone, it would be you, not Abby." In fact, Rivera tried to warn Abby back in the day about the cloud of death that follows Gibbs. "It's the ones closest to you who end up paying the price," he taunts, and Gibbs flashes back to the deaths of Kate, Ziva, and Mike Franks.

In the hospital, McGee takes a call from DiNozzo. Although we only hear McGee's end of the conversation, we learn that Tony doesn't come up with any McMean nicknames, and he forces Tim to say "I love you" back to him before handing up. Awww! A tearful McGee tells Abby how scared he is and begs her to wake up. When she finally does, her first question is about Reeves.

Two days later, nobody's slept. Abby remembers nothing from the shooting, and the team can't find anyone matching Sloane's (super vague) profile. Then they discover that Marshall was stationed at the same security post as Robert King, who tricked Abby into developing a bioweapon for him in season 6 and has a variety of black ops killers on speed dial.

But the slippery King has escaped from solitary confinement by forcing a guard to take his place in his cell by threatening the man's grandchildren. The guard tells Gibbs that King plans to leave the country once he's tied up some loose ends.

Speaking of loose ends, it took McGee 10 tries to master the art of symmetrical pigtails; he's helping out since one of Abby's wings is in a sling. They're in her apartment, which looks…well, exactly the way you'd expect. The coffin, the ornate goth touches, the contents of her closet lovingly on display, even a mini-lab. Remember last season when everybody was complaining about the cost of housing in the area? Well, dang, Abby must've made some smart investments, is all I'm saying.

Anyway, she feels guilty that Reeves died when she was the target, and she's frustrated that she can't remember the shooting. But she does discover that the email invitation to The Cooler dinner was a setup to get her in that particular location, and she's able to track the IP address of the sender.

The agents arrive at the address she gave them, find an abandoned building, and realize that Abby sent them to the wrong place so she could confront King alone and without backup. She eluded Torres, her minder, by accusing him of being too scared to get into her coffin and then locking him inside when he climbed in to prove her wrong. Ah, yes, the old Joey Tribbiani mistake.

When Bishop, Gibbs, and McGee free him, Torres is shaken. "You know what goes through a person's head when they're locked in a coffin?" he asks. "I don't like this new Abby." Thankfully, McGee finds the actual address, and they head out to the café, where Abby's reenacting a scene that mirrors her season 6 encounter with King.

She threatens him with Rule 45, but seriously, "Clean up your own mess" probably doesn't mean to go haring off on your own to confront a prison escapee/well-known murderer who wants you dead. While she's standing off with him, she has a memory of the shooting in which she realized that the shooter wasn't there for money and Reeves struggled with him before being shot. It makes her realize that every time they put a bad guy away, another one takes his place.

She then drops her veneer of civility and tells King she slipped cyanide into his coffee, and she'll only hand over the antidote if he confesses his actions. "Kate, Jenny, Dorneget, Ziva, Reeves. I am tired of my hero friends dying while villains like you get to live. Everyone has their breaking point, and this was mine."

As King sweats and struggles to breathe, he confesses that he ordered the hit. Abby tosses the antidote on the table and walks away, leaving Gibbs and Torres to arrest King after he tries to leave. (King may have taken a gun butt to the nose courtesy of Gibbs during the scuffle.)

Abby heads to the morgue and places the photo of Reeves and his mother next to his body and vows to do right by them both. Then she breaks the news to the team (who've just ascertained that she used crushed Caf-Pow pills and not cyanide, natch) that she's flying to London to make arrangements for Reeves' funeral and then staying there to create a charity in his mother's honor, as Reeves always wanted to do.

"You have to go with your gut, and my gut is telling me that I have to go," she says, which could double as a meta statement about Pauley Perrette's decision to leave the show.

She goes around the room to hug everyone in turn, and I'm guessing all of the tears on display are real. Then the doorbell at Chez Gibbs rings, and he finds a letter from Abby taped to the door. In a voiceover, she tells him that if they spoke, he might ask her to stay and cause her to waiver, so she chose the old-fashioned route. As she thanks him for every moment, every lesson, and every hug over the years, we see flashbacks of their old scenes together. The montage ends with Abby asking Gibbs in season 7 to tell her that she's been like a daughter to him and that he'll love her no matter what.

In the present, Gibbs looks out his window and sees Abby across the street, watching him. They silently pantomime "I love you," and then Abby heads to her lab to pack up all of the items that flashed her personality like a klieg light for 15 years. She leaves a copy of Abby's Lab for Dummies on the table for the next inhabitant, then tucks Burt under her arm and takes one last, teary look around before flipping off the lights.

Stray shots

• Deep breath. Everybody doing okay? It's lovely that the show let Abby leave under her own steam rather than in a body bag, and doing good has been the character's calling card for years. But here's hoping she finds a way to use her formidable scientific talents in London.
• Okay, time for a bit of conspiracy talk: Abby's farewell episode relied heavily on the past closeness between Gibbs and Abby, and the flashbacks did the bulk of the emotional heavy lifting between these two characters. This starkly highlighted the fact that these two didn't share a single in-person scene this season until tonight—and let's be honest, tonight's scenes could easily have been filmed separately since the pair never exchanged dialogue or even appeared together in the same shot. It was a tiny sour note in an otherwise lovely goodbye.
• While we're saying farewell, let's also shed a tear for Clay Reeves (and his portrayer, Duane Henry), who added a dash of wit, style, and charisma to the show for the past two seasons.
• How much would you love to be part of a poker game featuring Gibbs, Sloane, Fornell, and Grace Confalone? Those are some tough-to-buff cookies there, but Gibbs still pulls it off.
• Best wishes, Pauley! May the future be as pigtail-less as you'd like!