Nick Torres may have found a door out of NCIS, and he walks right up to it at the end of NCIS Season 24, Episode 3, “Sleeping Dogs”. After Walt Keller offers him a CIA side job, Torres goes to Keller’s cabin to talk it through, turning a one-off offer into something that could change where he works next.
That is why NCIS like and subscribe is getting attention now. The episode aired on CBS on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, and it does more than revisit Torres’s undercover past. It connects his old identity, Dante Navaro, to an NCIS case and puts Keller back in his path after the two worked undercover together before. Keller says he recruited Torres right out of FLETC, a reminder that this is not a stranger making a pitch. It is someone who helped shape the career Torres has spent years trying to keep under control.
Torres’s reaction carries the weight of the episode. He tells Alden Parker that he enjoyed the horrible things he did undercover and how alive he felt afterward. That lands because it goes beyond job loyalty or tactical skill. It suggests the undercover life still gives him something the day-to-day work at NCIS does not, even as he keeps describing his current role as the safer version of himself. In the episode’s logic, his “cushy desk job” at NCIS is the real disguise, not the dangerous missions.
That is also where the story starts to split. Keller presents the CIA work as a side job, but the setup makes it hard to believe it would stay small. Torres would not be handling paperwork on the edge of the action; he would be tied to deep-cover work that could pull him farther from the NCIS team and, eventually, out of the series altogether. The show has done this kind of move before. In NCIS Season 18, Ellie Bishop left NCIS for deep undercover work on a top-secret CIA mission with Odette Malone, which gives Torres a clear precedent if the offer turns into a real exit path.
For now, the answer is not that Torres is leaving. It is that he has taken the first step toward a job that could make leaving possible. The next conversation with Keller will matter because it should show whether Torres wants the freedom of the undercover life badly enough to trade the team he still calls home.
