NCIS Finale Mysteries: How Does Gibbs Get His Boat Out? Had 'Ellick' Hooked Up Before? And More Burning Qs!

Yes, NCIS' Season 18 finale revived one tried-and-true mystery from over the years — how does Gibbs get his hand-crafted boats out of his cellar? But the eventful season ender left us with other burning questions as well. So gear up, team, and put on your NCIS-logo thinking caps, and see if you can come up with any answers.

The episode "Rule 91" (as in "When you choose to walk away, don't look back") revealed that Special Agent Ellie Bishop (played by now-former cast member Emily Wickersham) had orchestrated a career-damning scandal — by outing some NSA files she years ago leaked — so as to established a "disgraced agent" cover for some sort of top-secret op for which Ziva's pal Odette had groomed her. After giving Torres a smooch goodbye, she slipped away, never to be seen again (or until, like, a May sweeps episode).

As for Mark Harmon's Gibbs, he not only finished his latest boat, christened Rule 91, but he (somehow) got it out of the house and into the water, to take him to an area where he might find clues to the murder mystery Marcie had plopped in his lap. But before he reached his destination, the vessel went kablooey. In the aftermath, we saw Gibbs' seemingly lifeless body amid the fiery wreckage... until he suddenly swam away. Death effectively faked?

Review our burning questions below, and 1) let us know your answers/theories, and 2) chime in with any head scratchers of your own!Want scoop on NCIS, or for any other show? Email InsideLine@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt's Inside Line.

How did the leaked NSA files get into the bag full of guns that McGee fished out of the abandoned house's crawl space? (Rewatch the agents' entry and search of the house, and you'll see there is nowhere on her person that Bishop could have been concealing the folder, waiting for the right moment to slip it alongside the contraband.)

Or did Odette's people plant them beforehand? UPDATE: Yes, Bishop confirmed for Torres that Odette had planted the files.

For a wannabe covert operative who was trying to keep her extracurricular training on the down low, should Bishop have been more prudent about casually observing that a seized weapon is a "gas-operated, rotating bolt semi-automatic SEAL team rifle"?

Because Ellie told Nick, "I never meant for us to happen" (emphasis ours), does that mean that was not necessarily their first kiss?

Will NCIS ever have a 'ship that finally kisses... just before one of the two parties leaves/disappears/moves away?

Are we the very last to realize that, as one chess-savvy TVLine reader noted, NCIS "traded a Bishop for a Knight" — as in exiting agent Ellie and new arrival Jessica — right under our noses?

How many large, heavy pine cones could have possibly landed/accumulated inside a small boat, which was presumably docked some distance from trees, that the owner did not pick up and toss them out, simply to keep them from being underfoot?

Ah, yes, the one asked over the years by both viewers and his NCIS colleagues alike:

How does Gibbs get his hand-crafted boats out of his basement? (Tony and Abby once looked around for "seams" in the four cellar walls; a past boat was taken apart/reassembled in his garage; and Gibbs once entertained the suggestion that he knocks out a wall and uses a crane to hoist it out.)

Given that Gibbs is seen here inside the boat an instant before the back end exploded, and there was no "cut," how did he possibly survive, or even be clear-headed enough to play dead and then swim away?

After years of painstaking, loving craftsmanship, couldn't Gibbs — if he in fact staged his death — have blown up replica (or used a rental)?

Following said explosion, for who was Gibbs "pretending" with his Dead Man's Float? (He ended it/started swimming away too abruptly to have been legit dazed.)  And if he was assuming there was an onlooker, didn't he risk spoiling the ruse by swimming away so soon/mere seconds later?

Was Gibbs' switch from "Dead Man's Float" to briskly swimming away intended as an homage to the Jason Bourne movies?

Now that he is "dead," in whom if anyone will Gibbs confide his true status? Surely he won't let his (former) team believe the worst, right?

Or... did he leave to go on the same top-secret, mega-covert undercover mission as Bishop??