NCIS Season 22 Offers Updates On Multiple Los Angeles And Hawaii Characters (Including Hetty)

Contains spoilers for "NCIS" Season 22, Episode 18  — "After the Storm"

Sam Hanna (LL Cool J) has been quite the journeyman character in the "NCIS" world. He started life as a regular on "NCIS: Los Angeles" and moved on to a season-long stint on "NCIS: Hawai'i," making him ideal to deliver franchise-wide updates on some of the "NCIS" world's most-missed characters. In "After the Storm," he pops up on the mothership program to help the team with a case — and catch us up on plenty of beloved faces from his old stomping grounds.

For those wondering what's happened to Henrietta "Hetty" Lange (Linda Hunt) since she disappeared on a mission in the "NCIS: Los Angeles" finale, it turns out she's been once again spotted on what Leon Vance (Rocky Carroll) describes as "the wrong side of a DMZ." It's strongly hinted that Sam is going to go find Hetty and get her out of another serious calamity, telling Vance, "It's probably better the less you know."

Hetty isn't the only character who gets a big update. It turns out "NCIS: Los Angeles" characters Grisha "G." Callen (Chris O'Donnell) and his wife Anna (Bar Paly) have a baby on the way. On top of that, "NCIS: Hawai'i" stalwart Jane Tennant (Vanessa Lachey) seems to be doing all right; her daughter Julie (Mahina Napoleon) is 15 and apparently survived that nasty Season 3 cliffhanger, while her son Alex (Kian Talan) has made it to college. But the most interesting life update Sam delivers relates to his own career.

In the 2024 two-part series finale of "NCIS: Hawai'i," Sam loses an entire team of NCIS Elite Squad members due to an ambush and teams up with Jane to bring the perpetrators to justice. With the case solved but the guilt and trauma of it all still resting on his shoulders, he's now taken a leave of absence from NCIS business and works on Capitol Hill lobbying for military causes. But when three soldiers die in a shooting and the man renting the room next door (Craig Welzbacher) is also killed, Sam soon finds himself entangled in their deaths. 

A man identifying himself as Sam's old SEAL buddy, Mark, shows up at the NCIS office with intel but refuses to speak to anyone but Sam. It turns out the man is actually Mark's brother, Roger (J. Eddie Martinez), who's been alerted to his brother's disappearance by a strange phone call. Roger leads Sam to a staffing agency which supplies soldiers and ex-military men like Mark to private customers. But Mark and his friends were apparently planning to blow the whistle on one company in particular, Iron Horizon, for recruiting people to commit war crimes in foreign countries. 

Mark (Marcus DeAnda), his cover blown by a mysterious person, has been captured by Russians and is being held on a boat. The team rescues him — then figures out that a secretary working for the agency ratted him out to protect her job and Iron Horizon. Sam's blood is pumping after solving the case, and he tells Vance he's quitting lobbying to go back into the field. Where will he turn up next? Fans will have to watch "NCIS" to find out.