NCIS recap: Sloane's tortured past catches up with her

A good blind date goes exceptionally bad for Sloane this week, tearing down the walls that have been keeping her tortured memories at bay — although, in the end, it's Vance whose life is in jeopardy.

The crime of the week is minor compared to the trauma of Sloane's story, although it does dovetail nicely with McGee's personal history. In brief, a destroyer's 48-hour mission is sabotaged when someone writes a bomb threat in soap on a mirror. The team rules out a few red herrings, including a young sailor whose mother refused to let her ovarian cancer diagnosis keep her daughter from following her Navy dreams.

In the end, they discover that the ship commander's son wrote the threat so his father could attend his high school graduation that weekend. Said commander was an ensign under McGee's father, so he knows that McGee's speaking from experience when he tells the kid that these deployments are hard on both father and son.

The team manages to solve the bomb threat case without Gibbs, whose absence that day confuses the Young Turks. We, however, know that he was bringing flowers to Shannon's grave on her birthday.

Yet Sloane's the NCIS team member who's having the worst day. She's in the "lust at second cocktail" stage of her date with Delilah's friend from Chicago. They've both waved off their friends' "do you need me to invent a work emergency?" calls and are planning to move the action to a secondary location…until a man with a British accent bellies up to the bar and Sloane. freaks. out.

She screams, starts to struggle, and throws a bottle after him as he flees, then insists that the police call Vance when they arrive to arrest her. He arrives, and she insists that the man was Masahun, the torturer who held her squad captive in Afghanistan.

Vance reminds her that not only did Masahun always keep his face covered, but also that he was killed years ago in a drone strike. Sloane insists that she'd know his voice, his accent, anywhere, but Vance wants to know how much she had to drink.

Things at NCIS are a little off-kilter the next day. McGee worries that since the date his wife arranged didn't go well, things might get weird between him and Sloane. This prompts Bishop to call Delilah, who says the date was so bad that her friend's already on a flight back to Chicago. Torres suggests that Sloane's crazy, but in a cool way. (Not for nothing, but this is the kind of language that both helps stigmatize mental illness and perpetuates the "women be crazy" stereotype, so thanks for that, Nicky.)

Anyway, Vance asks McGee and Kasie to keep it on the DL while they check the restaurant's credit cards receipts against the terrorist database that runs the security footage through facial recognition. When Gibbs arrives (In the lab! In person! Two weeks in a row!), Kasie gets suuuuuper weird about not being able to tell him why the facial recognition program's just spit out a match.

After he leaves, she frets to Palmer and Ducky that Gibbs is angry at her secret keeping, but they assure her that Gibbs respects the chain of command and always follows orders. Well, Ducky amends, "Always. Ish."

Armed with the facial recognition match, Vance heads to Sloane's office, where she's been studying a photo of her squad, the Wingos, and flashing back to herself bloody, crying, and begging for the life of one of her friends.

The man from the restaurant is Nigel Hakim (Pej Vahdat), born in Saudi Arabia, raised in the U.K., and now a humanitarian fundraiser who has diplomatic immunity through the British embassy.

She begs Vance to let her hear Hakim's voice again and promises to tread lightly. Unfortunately, when she's face to face with Hakim and the deputy ambassador, she doesn't keep her cool for long. He says he was in Afghanistan raising money for refugee children in 2007, when Sloane was being tortured.

Vance mentions the physical and psychological damage Masahun did to Sloane, and she confirms that these wounds came roaring back when she heard Hakim's voice last night. Then she demands that he say one word for her: Infidels.

He declines, and the deputy ambassador starts to hustle him out. Sloane extends a trembling hand in apology, then pulls him close enough to confirm that he's wearing the same cologne and has the same glint in his eye as Masahun.

Vance tells her she needs to drop it and sort herself out, or she'll be fired, so she heads to her office for some therapeutic painting. Gibbs finds her there maniacally covering up her cheerful tangerine wall with a drab greige, which speaks volumes about her emotional state.

Gibbs offers his help, so Sloane drops the roller and removes her shirt to show Gibbs the whip scars marring her back. Then he becomes the only person besides her and Vance to hear the full story: Her squadron was held for nine months, and Masahun soon transitioned from trying to extract information to straight-up torture for his own sadistic kicks.

He eventually forced her to choose which of her squad would be executed next, and by the time Vance's team showed up on their rescue mission, she was the only survivor. "I've owed him ever since," she says. Then she laments that she didn't keep her cool in the restaurant so she could follow Masahun outside to kill him in an alley. "It would've been so much more satisfying."

But Gibbs disagrees. He just celebrated his late wife's birthday, and he tells Sloane that hunting down and killing the man who murdered her and their daughter has never eased the ache in heart. And now she's the only one he's told — which is quite a compliment, and an exceptional bonding moment for these two.

Afterward, Gibbs bursts in to yell at Vance for not telling him about Sloane. Vance says he had his reasons (of course he did!) and he's also feeling terrible for not believing Sloan because he just learned that nobody ever used DNA to confirm that the drone strike victim actually was Masahun. But he has a plan to prove that she's right.

His squad was in Afghanistan 10 years ago to rescue Marine Capt. Chester Kelb, who was tortured along with the Wingos and who's now in a VA hospital struggling with PTSD and early onset Alzheimer's. Vance secretly recorded their earlier conversation with Hakim, and when he and Gibbs arrive at the hospital, they find that Kelb isn't terribly lucid. But as soon as he hears Hakim's voice, Kelb starts to shout the name "Masahun."

It's the evidence they need, and when the British deputy ambassador tells them that Hakim's chartered a flight back to London that night, they race to figure out which airfield he's leaving from. Once the team locates it, they arrive moments after Sloane, who's grabbed her gun and gone on a solo mission to find him herself. However, when she and the rest of the team surround the charter plane, the flight crew inform them that their passenger had booked two flights and took off a few minutes ago on his backup plane. Sloane storms away in fury.

Then we cut to Hakim's other flight…where he takes the hood off a bound figure to reveal Vance. Masahun exults at capturing the man who killed all of his brothers so many years ago, hissing "Infidel" into Vance's ear.

Stray shots

• You know, Maria Bello hasn't always felt like an integral member of the NCIS team this season, but never once have her acting chops let her down, and she's excellent tonight as a woman unraveling. Here's hoping they not only get Vance back in next season's premiere — but maybe she'll also get another shot at the Chicago blind date dreamboat.
• Mad props to Bello's hair acting. It's normally gloriously curled and bouncy, but tonight it gets scragglier and scragglier as this episode progresses in a nice visual reminder of Sloane's distress.
• Does anybody else feel exceptionally old when Bishop offers to give Sloane her blind-date bail-out call at 10 p.m.? Honestly, if I haven't been home and in elastic-waist pants for at least 90 minutes by 10 p.m., I count the night as a failure.
• Kasie showed a little more personality this week, hitting Palmer with her sweet self-defense moves and letting him stream her music of choice — Woolly Bully — through the lab's speakers. She could fit in here, I think.
• Well, are you going to spend the summer fretting about Vance's safety and well-being? Let me know in the comments!