NCIS Brought Back An Important Character From The Franchise’s 1,000th Episode, But I Especially Liked How Sydney And Other Spinoffs Were Looped Into The Story

Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS episode “Bad Blood” are ahead!

The NCIS franchise hit its 1,000th episode last year with “A Thousand Yards,” the seventh episode of NCIS Season 21, which you can stream with a Paramount+ subscription. In addition to featuring some solid cameos and a cool tie to the very first NCIS episode, “A Thousand Yards” also introduced Fletcher Voss, the creator of Bandium, the app used to alert the team whenever they’re called to a crime scene. Well, Fletcher came back onto play for the NCIS episode that just finished airing on the 2025 TV schedule, “Bad Blood,” but what was even more enjoyable for me was seeing how NCIS: Sydney and most of the franchise’s other spinoffs were subtly referenced in the story.

Why Fletcher Voss Returned To NCIS

“Bad Blood” saw the team investigating the murder of a Navy lieutenant who was trying to subdue a drugged-out man named Fred Sammons who’d destroyed numerous blood samples at a mobile blood bank to mask him stealing a specific sample. The sample belonged to Lauren Hawthorn, who was quickly found at her home… or rather, her few skeletal remains were found in a barrel of acid.

Lauren had just started working at a company called Life Sequence that tailors health plans to a person DNA. It was soon revealed that Fletcher Voss started the company with the money he made from selling Bandium, and he’d only served three months in prison for his inadvertent role in the assassination attempt on Director Leon Vance. He had also been romantically involved with Lauren, and she was pregnant with their child before she was killed.

Initially the team suspected Fletcher killed Lauren because he was in the middle of a divorce, and if his soon-to-be-ex-wife found out Lauren was pregnant, he’d lose his $20 million settlement. However, Fletcher didn’t know about the pregnancy until Alden Parker told him. Oh, and mere moments later, he had a hemorrhagic stroke, which came from trace amounts of warfarin, a blood thinner, that had been spiked into the six smoothies he drank each day.

Holly, one of Life Sequence’s key employees, was first thought to have poisoned Fletcher Voss after it was discovered that she created the company, but sold over the rights to Fletcher so he’d fund it in what turned out to be a poor deal. Thanks to the contract, if Fletcher died, she’d get Life Sequence back. Only, she didn’t want that because it turned out nothing at the company worked.

The true culprit was Life Sequence’s chief doctor, Donovan, whose name was on all the studies. Once Life Sequence’s program went live, he’d be outed as a fraud, which is why he started poisoning Fletcher. He didn’t mean to kill Lauren in the process, but she’d drank some of Voss’ smoothies, and the warfarin reacted badly with medication she was taking. So he worked to rid any trace oh her, which included melting her body in the acid and having her blood sample stolen. But as it usually goes on NCIS, Donovan was arrested, and as a nice bonus, a truly remorseful Voss was saved when he received a blood transfusion from Timothy McGee, who’s a universal donor.

Other NCIS Offices Got In On McGee’s Fundraiser

As this investigation was happening, McGee was selling coffee around the office for a fundraiser at his kids’ school. He drummed up a lot of interest, but Kasie Hines had the great idea of selling the coffee to other NCIS offices. The more money that they raised, the better McGee stood a chance of beating Brendan Banks, a fellow parent who always took first place with these school fundraisers.

This resulted in the first acknowledgement of NCIS: Sydney on NCIS, as Kasie sold 20 bags of coffee to a “Michelle” from the agency’s Sydney office, a reference to Olivia Swann’s Michelle Mackey. While that was the most obvious tie to the wider NCIS-verse in “Bad Blood,” Kasie also set up a white board keeping track of her coffee sales at the other offices. In addition to Mackey, it also listed Kensi Blye and G. Caleb from NCIS: Los Angeles, Dwayne Pride from NCIS: New Orleans, and Jane Tennant and Ernie Malick from NCIS: Hawai’i.

With all these other NCIS shows having either ended on their own terms or, in Hawai’i’s case, been cancelled, it was nice to have the flagship series tip its proverbial hat to them in a way that didn’t interrupt the flow of the story. It’d be even better if one or a few of these characters could stop by so we could learn directly how they’re doing these days, but I’ll take what I can get. Of course, the only NCIS show that was left out of the fun was NCIS: Origins was because, you know, it’s a prequel set in the early ‘90s.

New episodes of NCIS air Mondays at 9 pm ET on CBS. This series, as well as Sydney and Origins, will all be back for the next TV season, and Paramount+’s NCIS: Tony & Ziva is expected to premiere sometime this year too.