On this week’s episode of NCIS the plot gets especially intricate as a government computer server farm is burglarized and a federal agent is murdered, but nothing is neither stolen nor left behind at the crime scene. To make matters worse, the NCIS team is forced to investigate the break-in in the dark, making their best tools their flashlights. The intruders cut the power to the grid which forces the team to solve the crime without lights or any of their high tech equipment, making this case an especially difficult one to solve.

Their initial suspect is the woman the security guard managed to handcuff at the crime scene, but since her accomplices decided to kill her it leads them to a dead end at first.  After some manual investigation they discover that this woman’s history makes her extremely suspicious.

They are able to track down her car as it is parked near a hidden safe house and inside is found multiple passports with the woman’s pictures on them but providing different names for her.

Most of the plot of his episode revolves around finding out who this woman is and why she would wanted to break into a secure government office for no apparent reason. A clean sweep of the server farm room reveals all the computers are accounted for and there were no bugs or spy devices left behind.

While the team is crying about how hard it is to work without computers and the Internet, they discover that they can still solve a case using good old manual labor and ingenuity.

It turns out that the woman killed at the crime was an undercover government agent and not a criminal. She was kidnapped and used to gain entry into the server farm because of her high security clearance. The real criminal turned out to be the security guard who had created the story about catching the murdered woman to begin with.  He used the blackout as a cover to trade out one server for another in hopes of tapping into the government’s secure internet lines to collect top secret information to sell on the black market.