NCIS Sleeping Dogs recap: Torres buried his hitman alias 13 years ago — someone just started killing under its name
NCIS spent a decade telling us Nick Torres used to be a scary undercover agent. "Sleeping Dogs" finally plays the tape, and ends with him asking the CIA for more work.
Season 24's third episode, "Sleeping Dogs," aired on CBS on October 20, 2026, and CBS's logline lays out the setup: someone is committing murders under Torres's retired undercover identity, and he has to team up with his old handler to stop it. The cold open goes back 13 years, to a bar bathroom where an undercover Torres kills a man who has just threatened the bar owner's young daughter. Remember the daughter.
In the present, a woman's body turns up in a burned-out car. She's Mandy Dubrow, a paralegal from Baltimore, and the garrote signature on the killing points to Dante Navarro, the hitman persona Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) wore to get inside a Baltimore crime family before he ever joined NCIS. Dante was supposed to have died in a federal file.
Meet Walt Keller
The man who ran Dante is Walt Keller (Mike O'Malley), Torres's handler from those years, now living in a secluded cabin. Torres and Knight drive out to see him, and Keller greets them by faking a break-in to check whether Torres's reflexes still work. He pushes a drink on Torres, who has been sober for years, and pitches him a side job with the CIA.
Keller is also the one who identifies the victims: all of them testified against the crime family and went into new identities afterward. Director Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) reads it as someone resurrecting a boogeyman to scare the surviving witnesses into silence.
"Nick Torres is the cover … Dante's who you really are."
— Walt Keller, to Torres, as quoted by TV Insider
What Dante did
The team gets a look at the old file, and nobody likes it. Jimmy and Kasie listen to interrogation recordings of Torres, as Dante, torturing Michael "Mickey" Fallon (Lucius Baybak), including stabbing the man's hand so badly that Mickey still can't use it. When Torres and Keller go to question Mickey in the present, he's shot mid-conversation.
Torres stays behind to give first aid to a wounded bystander instead of chasing the shooter, Seat42F's recap notes, and Keller calls it weakness. The argument ends with Torres pointing his gun at his old handler.
Later, Torres admits to Parker what actually scares him: back then, he enjoyed it and felt alive. Parker answers that he's done things too, and Torres doesn't need it spelled out, since Parker and Gibbs recently took their own revenge for Vance.
Who's killing as Dante
The money trail does the rest. "Grace" turns out to be a boat connected to $10 million stolen from the crime family, and a bookkeeper tied to the rifle used on Mickey says a federal agent took the cash in exchange for immunity. The name he gives belongs to one of Keller's aliases.
The stolen money leads to monthly deposits for Sasha Norris (Nicolette Doke), the daughter from the cold open. Her father Ray, the bar owner and Torres's informant, testified against the crime family. Keller told Torres the family was safe in witness protection. They weren't: the crime family killed them, Sasha survived by hiding under a bed, and Keller quietly paid for her life with the $10 million.
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Sasha is the new Dante, out for revenge rather than money. At the bar where it all started, she shoots Keller, and Torres steps forward as Dante and apologizes for failing her father. She lowers her rifle, goes for a second weapon, and Keller kills her.
"'Sleeping Dogs' is stronger as a Torres story than as a murder mystery."
— Thomas Miller, Seat42F
Miller's other complaint is Keller. He lied about WitSec, took $10 million and fired the shot that closed the case, and the episode leaves what happens to him for later.
Is Torres leaving NCIS?
The last scene sends Torres back to Keller's cabin to ask one question, via Entertainment Weekly: "Is that side job with the CIA still open?" Recaps disagree on how far that goes, from a simple question to Torres accepting the offer, but nobody has him resigning. It's a side gig, and he's still on Parker's team.
"It's not quite jumping ship."
— Wilmer Valderrama, to Collider, on Torres's CIA ask
Valderrama told Parade the plan is to build Torres back to who he was when he arrived in season 14, the deep-cover agent who went missing in Buenos Aires in the 2016 premiere "Rogue." He also said Tony will know about the CIA jobs and Parker won't. In other words, the new director is in on a secret from his own team lead, three episodes into the job.
Episode 4, "Like and Subscribe," airs October 27. Torres goes into it with a side job his team lead doesn't know about, offered by the man who lied to him about Ray's family for years.
Previously we wrote: Why did Kevin Atwater leave Chicago PD? His newborn son was only half the reason