NCIS (Tuesday, 5/14, 8/7c, CBS)

There are ghosts both literal and figurative in NCIS’s finale, which brings back one character who was killed off two years ago and ­another who hasn’t been seen for more than a decade. It should be bait enough for hard-core NCIS-heads that late, lamented mentor Mike Franks (Muse Watson) makes his second posthumous ­appearance as an otherworldly sounding board for Gibbs (Mark Harmon). But sometimes a guy needs a lawyer even more than he needs a conscience. Enter John M. Jackson as A.J. Chegwidden, who was a regular on JAG when that series launched NCIS as a spinoff 10 years ago. “It is a big stretch of time” after which to revive a character, says NCIS executive producer Gary Glasberg, “yet there’s a connection to those JAG characters that’s similar to the way people feel about our characters.” He says the story “isn’t necessarily JAG-related” but reintroduces A.J. as an attorney who’s now working in the private sector. Gibbs is in need of expert legal counsel because he’s in hot water with a Department of Defense investigator (Colin Hanks) over the team’s aggressive handling of a Mossad leader’s assassination. As for Franks’s latest spiritual appearance, hints Glasberg, it involves a few phantasmagoric scenes “that will leave people questioning whether what they’re seeing is real or not real, and how it’s informing Gibbs’s decision making.”

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