“Smoked” has as its pretext the NCIS staff miffed at Agent Tim McGee’s (Sean Murray) book Deep Six, which he loosely based on his coworkers. Front and center in this book is the sexually charged relationship between agents “Tommy” and “Lisa.” Speaking of “sexually charged,” if love was in the air during the previous “Twisted Sister” episode, it comes into full bloom here. We see the return of Forensics Specialist Abby Sciuto’s (Pauley Perrette) love interest Marty Pearson (Michael Gilden), who plays a critical role in the solution of this episode’s case.
And, Special Agent Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) and girlfriend Jeanne Benoit (Scottie Thompson) consummate their relationship. But for Tony, things never seem so simple. He still plays with Ziva, though not as much and not as ardently as he did in “Sandblast” and he is now running special errands for NCIS Director Jenny Shepard (Lauren Holly), who he refers to, with more familiarity than is comfortable, as Jenny (much to the chagrin of Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon). Tony’s love life develops complexly. But we digress at the beginning.
While replacing a furnace at a Quantico Marine Military Base middle school, workmen discover the well-preserved body of a man in the flue. The team quickly determines that the dead man is not military personnel and when Gibbs asks NCIS Medical Examiner Dr. Ducky Mallard (David McCallum) the time of death (TOD) he is greeted by the doctor tersely, further indicating Ducky’s apparent resentment of Gibbs' “quitting” NCIS. Ziva and Tony confront Ducky on his hostile behavior toward Gibbs. Ducky blows them off and estimates the TOD as two to four months previously.
Using Ducky’s TOD, the team scour missing persons’ reports from the period and finds no one meeting the deceased’s description. Ziva and Tony have a close encounter, broken up by Gibbs who wants and ID. Tony admits he has none at the same time that Ducky enters and owns the responsibility because of a faulty TOD. As it turns out, the deceased did not die two to four months earlier, but five to six years earlier. Ducky reasons this is because the body was preserved by the smoke generated by the furnace.
The scene shifts to McGee and Abby in the lab where Abby gets a hit on the corpse’s fingerprints, but is surprised when the AFIS system denies them access and deletes the files. The scene abruptly changes to the NCIS Director’s control room where Jenny orchestrates the surveillance of some foreign operatives entering the states at an air port. She has Tony mark the bags with GPS devices, all without the knowledge or permission of Gibbs.
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