NCIS season 23, episode 17, “Reboot,” saw the team working with a skeleton crew as the action shifted from the usual daytime case-of-the-week format to a rare nighttime operation at the NCIS headquarters.
The episode found Kasie running point on a crucial update to the computer systems that required them to shut the systems down for two hours. This essentially put the agency at great risk, which was why the update was top secret and moved up to 1 am in the morning to help prevent hackers from targeting the agency. As the update began, all seemed fine, but things quickly began to spiral when Darryl, one of the tech team members assembled to help Kasie with the update, was found dead.
An investigation was quietly launched with help from Parker, Jimmy, and Sam Hannah, who happened to be at the office trying to get some rest during a layover. They’d come to find that it was Tommy the janitor who was behind Darryl’s murder, as his family had been taken hostage and their safety was dependent upon Tommy connecting a drive to Kasie’s computer during the upgrade.
At first, it seemed like the team managed to save the day with the systems update completing and all systems restoring upon its completion. However, as Kasie did some digging to look into whether Tommy had managed to upload anything to the system before the reboot was finished, she found that the attack was successful. While nothing had been uploaded to the NCIS server, something had been stolen: the contents of a folder labeled Edna.
“Edna’s not a who; she’s a what, and she’s gone. It was all about Edna,” Kasie explained to Sam, Parker, and Jimmy. As they pressed for answers about what Edna is, Kasie simply replied that “I’m saying I think I’m the reason why Darryl is dead.”
The episode then ended with a “to be continued” tag coming up, indicating that this is indeed a two-part event. The mystery of what Edna is left fans with a lot of curiosity, and while we’re going to have to wait until episode 18 to find out exactly what Edna is, the promo for the episode did provide us with our first clue about what Edna is.
What is Edna on NCIS?
As we learn via the promo for NCIS season 23, episode 18, “Bad Impressions,” Edna is a program that Kasie created. The program’s exact specifications remain unclear, but what the promo does make clear is that this is a program that could be valuable to certain parties—thus, why it was targeted during the NCIS system upgrade.
Given that someone went to the trouble of blackmailing an NCIS janitor to hack into the system to help them steal the program, we’re pretty sure that the program is extremely valuable and could be very dangerous if it lands in the wrong hands. In fact, we’re pretty certain that the program is one that could put national security at risk.
The synopsis for episode 18 teases that the team will be caught in a widening conspiracy that could compromise national security, and it’s not hard to connect the dots to how this conspiracy is connected to the Edna program.
Whatever this program Kasie has created was, it was valuable enough for someone to seek it out and there was a reason Kasie took extra steps to keep the program secure. With the finale fast approaching, it’s going to be interesting to see if the mystery of Edna is solved in episode 18 or will continue through the remaining episodes of the season as part of the show’s season-ending arc.
Fans will have to tune in on April 29 to find out more details about Edna and see where the investigation leads the team!