Nightmare Fuel / NCIS

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Season 1

• The very first murder the team investigated from our perspective, from the Backdoor Pilot "Ice Queen". A bunch of Boy Scouts are practicing archery to obtain that merit badge, but one boy accidentally plunges an arrow into the dead body of a murdered woman left abandoned in the woods. She has partially decomposed and is missing her entire face. The scoutmaster mentions it made him puke, and he is visibly shaken up upon talking to the crew. And a bunch of innocent children just stumbled upon it by accident, as a lot of these body discoveries play out on the series.
• "Missing". A story is told of a group of women that were smuggled out of the Philippines by Marines in order to continue their relationships in America. They were meant to go to the US, but the Marines' orders were changed so they went somewhere else. They starved to death inside the containers, and the lone survivor was so traumatized she began killing the Marines responsible.

Season 2

• The teaser of "Eye For An Eye": the opening freeze frame is true to its word, as the poor witness receives a box in the mail containing a pair of human eyeballs over dry ice.
• The climax of " The Meat Puzzle". Ducky is Strapped to an Operating Table, gagged, and gets an IV needle inserted into his neck to make him bleed to death. The camera keeps cutting from Team Gibbs and their race against the clock to rescue Ducky to the sight of his blood flowing down a drain. Thankfully, they do save him in time, but one of the culprits decides that he can't handle going back to prison and slits his own throat while his mother screams in agonized horror.
• A quick moment in "Hometown Hero". A video showing the victim is playing in the background and a freeze frame of her face then transitions into a photo of her skull.
• "SWAK" starts off when Tony opens a mysterious letter and a familiar white powder floods out... After a surprisingly comedic sequence of everyone following the proper procedures, it's revealed that the white powder was a genetically modified plague, which Tony is unfortunately the sole infectee. Even after Gibbs learns that the plague was thankfully designed to self-destruct, it still means that Tony has to take the brunt of the symptoms including bloody coughing fits.
• A shocking headshot in the closing moments of the show with probably its most graphic scene to date at that time where a bullet tore through Caitlin's head and a huge burst of blood ripped out. We later learn a grapefruit-size hole was made upon its exit. And Ari Haswari had done this simply to spite Gibbs, after meeting Kate in person and casually headshotting another woman.

Season 3

• The monster that is Kyle Boone. Especially when Team Gibbs finds the scrapbook filled with photos of his victims. And then his lawyer/partner in crime, when he kidnaps Paula Cassidy and gives her a To the Pain description of what he plans to do with her. And finally, we have Gibbs' parting line to Kyle right before his death date comes up. Short and savage.
  Gibbs: Enjoy Hell.
• "Boxed In". Tony and Ziva spend the episode trapped in a shipping container. Also in the container with them is a box of highly explosive and unstable cluster bombs. The kicker? Tony and Ziva are unaware of the presence of the bombs, leading to them unwitting endangering themselves multiple times through the episode as they try to escape the container. Even though the bomb is revealed to be a red herring, early scenes with Tony and Ziva in the container are still tense to watch.
• "Hiatus Part 2" hits Gibbs with this, when in his amnesiac state he only remembers as far back as the Gulf War. Then Franks tells him about 9/11 in enough detail to get an idea of the damages as a result. Gibbs, who had been enjoying a meaty steak up to that point, throws it all up in a nearby dumpster in horror.

Season 4

• In "Smoked", the utterly TERRIFYING Death Glare given by the killer once said killer's been caught. Scarier still, it comes from a female Serial Killer who feigned innocence and forced Gibbs to warn Fornell (mind you, he says this in a stoic but very clearly freaked out tone of voice) to get away from her right then and there out of fear of what she could do the second a crack in the facade shows.
  • Even worse is the moment of in-universe fridge horror when Fornell and Gibbs think about the case afterwards. The last line rubs it in that either she self-mutilated her toe and fed it to her husband or his corpse just in case he was ever found as one long con of false innocence, or they were both serial killers and the wife was just the last one standing. Fornell's expression gives way to clearly not wanting to even think about the implications of that and they both focus on their coffee in silence.
  Gibbs: Why was a toe in [the supposed Serial Killer]'s stomach?
• "Angel of Death" has a patient at Jeanne's hospital who died from a heroin bag rupturing inside him - he was a drug mule. His junkie sister and her boyfriend (who ran the drug op in the first place) show up to get the drugs before they're found. Near the end of the episode, the girl snorts heroin FROM HER DEAD BROTHER'S INTESTINE. Drugs mess you up, kids.
• In "Sharif Returns", it's thoroughly disturbing to watch the normally badass Gibbs become increasingly disoriented to the point of madness thanks to the poison that's been slipped to him.

Season 5

• "Chimera" starts off like your typical death on a Navy ship, up until Team Gibbs arrives on the titular ship and discover no one is there. Then the rest of the episode plays like a horror movie where there's something on the ship that's the cause of all the conflict and Tony is worried he'll be killed for real this time because of a biological virus. At the end, Russian sailors board the ship only for Team Gibbs to run and steal their boat. Thankfully, the object the Russians were looking for was just a lost nuke and not a viral weapon...only for the Chimera to be obliterated by the Navy to cover up what happened onboard, with the implication that Team Gibbs would've been killed too if they hadn't escaped.
  Ziva: How did they know we were off the ship?
  Gibbs: They didn't.

Season 6

• "Murder 2.0": The serial killer murders three people in the most deliberately flamboyant (and gruesome) ways imaginable, places their bodies in a manner designed to shock and terrify bystanders, and posts footage of their deaths on the Internet - all for the sake of "fifteen minutes of fame".
• "Broken Bird". Ducky gets a switchblade shoved all the way through his hand, and the antagonist of the episode, Mr. Pain, is incapable of feeling pain, and used it to horrifying advantage by using Cold-Blooded Torture without sympathy. What makes this so scary is that he is missing his entire right eye, which is now just an empty socket as a result of having it carved out in the Middle East long ago, and the crazy bastard is okay with showing it to people sans eyepatch or the like, as a war trophy and an intimidation device.
• Seeing Gibbs get injured at the tail end of "Dagger" is a silent Jump Scare in and of itself when the perp manages to hit his hand — to which you see the bone sticking out of his finger as the limb clearly is going numb and not usable anymore. With his vision blurry from another bullet nicking the side of his head, he has no choice but to shoot through Lee to kill the man holding her. And this is amidst the perp fiercely assaulting whoever gets near him, including gunning down an innocent woman In the Back just for trying to run Gibbs' way amidst the standoff.
• Ziva getting captured in the Somalian Terrorist Training Camp at the end of Season 6, we don't even get to properly see her face, but we do get to see her Star of David necklace get ripped off her, and her capturer asks her what she knows about NCIS...

Season 7

• Season 6 ended with Ziva (Who left NCIS to return to Mossad) getting imprisoned in a Somalian terrorist training camp. There is a time skip consisting of a few months between "Aliyah" (The finale of season 6) and "Truth or Consequences" (The premiere of season 7, and Ziva is believed to be dead. Luckily by the end of "Truth or Consequences", she's rescued by Tim, Gibbs and Tony. We are left to wonder what Ziva went through the past months, with one of the possibilities that she was raped.

Season 8

• "Enemies Domestic" has Vance nearly murdered by a morphine overdose by his former commanding officer attempting to bump him off.. for something as petty as his job position, because Leon Vance was too good and willing to modernize compared to his attempted killer. Thankfully, Vance sticks a knife in the bastard's ribs, and Gibbs pulls the line before too much can be administered.
• "Kill Screen" starts out tame, with a petty crook at an event trying to pickpocket people with the classic bump-and-rob tactic. Then a cop on security detail catches him with a purse he stole and the guy has no good excuses to get him out of hot water. But then the cop looks into the purse, freaks the hell out, drops the purse, and draws his gun, screaming at the guy to put his hands in the air. When the purse hits the ground, a ton of fingertips and teeth spill out. And somebody was casually carrying this among a large crowd moments before it was stolen. Intermixed with Black Comedy.
  Thief: Dude, this is harassment, that's my purse...!
  Cop: What the hell...? (sees what's inside, drops the purse and draws his gun) HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE 'EM!
  Thief: Whoa, whoa, whoa... (looks down and sees the fingers and teeth) WHOA! That's not my purse!

Season 9

• Carries into the season 10 opener, but Harper Dearing's entire arc. A seemingly normal corporate CEO loses his son in a terrorist bombing of a Navy ship — and subsequently loses his marbles, blames the Navy for the ship's vulnerabilities and NCIS for transferring his son onto the ship, and starts indiscriminately killing anyone in his path as he escalates from more ship bombings (and murdering the people he hired to do it) to outright bombing the NCIS headquarters. And to top it all off, his final scene portrays him Hopeless with Tech, and yet he managed to hack the MTAC firewall, set up numerous explosives, camcorder remote tricks and other methods, and access tons of secret info to the point he knows about Gibbs' revenge, something very, very few ever discovered. It's never explained how he managed any of that, effectively making him an insane boogeyman of almost Law Abiding Citizen levels.
  • The Establishing Character Moment for how much of a bastard Dearing could be that really shows just what NCIS were dealing with? Drugging Vance and sticking him in a coffin with the charred skeleton of the first statistical victim of the bombing that killed Dearing's son. It sends one hell of an effective message: he can kill anyone and everyone he so desired if he felt like it. The main cast are lucky Gibbs catches onto certain inconsistencies, because Dearing nearly kills most of the heroes in one fell swoop out of spite.

Season 10

• "Gone" has a teenage girl being kidnapped to be a Sex Slave.

Season 11

• In "Oil & Water" Agent Borin gives an extremely unnerving and graphic description of what it's like to be blown up. She later confesses to Gibbs that she was standing less than three feet away from her significant other when it happened to him.
• "Homesick", where the children of military families suddenly come down with a mysterious illness. The fact that it happens during the Christmas season doesn't help at all; Bishop being inadvertently overheard by two of the frantic parents when she speculates that it might be a deliberate anthrax attack helps even less.

Season 12

• Enfant Terrible Rachel Barnes in "Parental Guidance Suggested". The entire plot centers around the murder of a family's mother, and all evidence tries to point towards the father as having done it.. but he's so broken up about the ordeal that even when he takes Rachel "hostage", he was never going to seriously threaten or hurt her. Rachel did it, faking signs of abuse from her mother to keep her father home longer, and then murdering her mother altogether when it wasn't enough. As Gibbs interrogates her directly, The Sociopath in Rachel manifests, highlighting a girl that meticulously planned the events out to even make her father take the fall for the murder, and not even caring that she's been found out at that point.

Season 13

• "Incognito" is already a dark story involving how its murders occur, and especially one of the victims found at the very end with her neck snapped and her body shrink-wrapped inside a box. But the scary moment is the killer attacking Bishop from behind, trying to grab and snap her neck like the others. Bishop, in desperation, grabs a pair of scissors, stabs him In the Back, and then he falls over on the scissors in full camera view as they go deeper inside him while he convulses on the ground. Yeesh.
• Similar to Season Ten's "Gone", "Deja Vu", about a human trafficking ring, hits very close to home for any parent; Bishop admits to being shaken, both by the facts that she had thought the NSA had successfully busted the same ring years ago, and seeing one of the ring's victims - a Naval Petty Officer who was shot in the head as an "object lesson" to the other captive girls - has brought her closer to the case than she was when she worked it before. Palmer, in particular, says that things like this rock him to his core, now that he has an infant daughter to worry about.

Season 14

• "Pay to Play": A Congresswoman is sent a death threat with the use of a dead rat in the car. Later on in the episode, Bishop and Quinn find a freezer full of dead rats.
• "Willoughby": Qasim Nasir's death. Right in front of poor Bishop.
• "Beastmaster"
  • At the crime scene, the team finds a bag stashed by the killer filled with lesser spot-nosed monkey skulls. Even though the team quickly rules out any ritual use, the sight itself is creepy enough.
  • During Abby's presentation on a non-profit organization of military veterans who protect animal rights, she shows an "after" photo of a rhinoceros that had its horn (and a good part of its snout) cut off with a chainsaw. The photo leaves nothing to the imagination.

Season 15

• Gibbs' and McGee's torture in "House Divided". Especially Gibbs'. There's some considerable Fridge Horror at one point when one of their captors bangs on their cell door with a baseball bat and Gibbs jumps back fearfully. Just how many beatings has he taken from that bat that he would react like that?
• Bishop's transition while undercover in "High Tide", playing the role of a low-level street thug interested in moving up the ladder no matter what:
  Torres: Come on, we can't get caught on base with a dead body, think!
  Mitchell: We can't get caught with a live one, either!
  Bishop: (with a shrug) So we take her off base, put a bullet in her head, and dump the body.
  Torres: ...Yeah. What she said.
  • Even Torres, who's appointed himself Bishop's "coach" on undercover work, looks freaked out at how convincingly cold she sounds.
• The ending of "Burden of Proof". Gibbs and Jack campaigned against Fornell's testimony that a man could have killed someone on account of the fact the man is not right, but left-handed. Turns out the person they helped get off the hook for murder was ambidextrous.
  Jack: Switch hitter... he played us...!
• Abby's ruthless bluff that she poisoned King with cyanide in "Two Steps Back". It is by far the most cold-blooded thing she's ever done in her whole career, and proof that messing with her and killing the people she loves will bring out her inner demon.
  • Bear in mind, this is a woman who has almost two decades worth of forensic experience, knows chemistry like she's breathing air, and knows exactly how to avoid having a crime detected. Cyanide poisoning was a blessing, given she could have done pretty much anything to him, his drink or even the environment, and he may never have even known. The worst part, the entire possibility that the pill was a placebo, and she could have condemned him to a slow, agonizing death. It was the dawning realization on his face, as she tells him her play was made before she sat down that sells it. If she wanted him dead, he'd be dead.
• Gibbs goes to check on Alejandro Hernandez in prison, suspecting him of ordering the hit on his teammates. After exchanging some spiteful banter, Gibbs firmly grabs hold of him by the collar, coldly and calmly threatening to KILL HIM if he finds out Alejandro has ANY involvement in this.
• Season 15's finale. In what is a franchise-wide Cliffhanger where ALL THREE NCIS SHOWS leave us in the lurch on their season finales, this one actually has the most hopeful situation. r. Vance is kidnapped by a man pretending to be friendly and ambassadorial as long as it suits him... and then drops the act once he gets the chance to snatch the Director of NCIS, calling him an "infidel" in the same hateful tone of voice Jack dreaded hearing.

Season 17

• It's nightmare fuel enough in "On Fire" that Torres was nearly killed as part of an undercover job gone wrong, and Bishop is on a warpath to put the man who did it in the grave. Several times throughout the episode it's blatant that she's been strongly contemplating committing murder, especially since he's about to leave the country, and Gibbs himself gets on her case wondering if she's really willing to do such a crime of vengeance like he did. The man's then found murdered in his own home, shot to death, and there's even blonde hair at the scene that seems like it'd be hers — though it instead matches the culprit's girlfriend. But when McGee questions the woman, who played her significant other like a fool and tried to off Torres to make sure there were no witnesses, she denies killing him, and Bishop stiffly declines having done it to his face. The episode closes out on an ominous tone as Gibbs walks out of the office behind them, strongly implying he did it for Bishop because his team was hurt, and framed the girlfriend with something that she can't plausibly deny.

Season 18

• "Watch Dog" is the ultimate culmination of Gibbs' feelings of anxiety, depression, and his inability to be there for the departing Sloane or the loss of Fornell's daughter Emily coming to a head. When the team find out some idiots driving a convoy swerved to avoid hitting a dog, which dropped a live missile on the side of the road, it seems like it might be a funny episode — until Gibbs sees the dog responsible with a bullet wound in her, and the local vet says two more dogs were found in a similar state by Boy Scouts. When he goes to investigate and a local old lady gives him the lowdown on the area and a local Jerkass of a dog owner, Gibbs gets curious about a fishing line in the nearby water and pulls up a kennel with a drowned canine, immediately driving the lady to a breakdown at the sight. And the result is sheer, Unstoppable Rage as Gibbs attempts to murder Luke with his bare hands for how many lines the son of a bitch crossed within the span of a minute, while McGee's body camera was on the whole time, completely lacking context as his assault ends up destroying his career in court thanks to anti-police bias from the media.
  • Perhaps an understated part of nightmare fuel is how Gibbs' own team, despite him telling them to tell the truth, immediately opt to commit a series of Blatant Lies under oath after realizing how much of an asshole Luke was to try to get Gibbs out of trouble. When that fails, as the trio know how much they screwed up with that alone, they decide to try to erase the video footage of the incident, this time losing what sympathy they had entirely in the matter besides McGee being pressured into it and not wanting to see his surrogate father figure in NCIS get screwed over. It ends up justifying the media's response, given they'd prioritize one of their own over a scumbag and commit multiple felonies to do it. After all is said and done and they're mercifully demoted off of major cases temporarily rather than fired outright, Bishop and Torres continue to act indignant like they've been personally slighted, meaning they took all the wrong lessons from the series of events.