The pardoned sociopath is out there somewhere, and his existence is torturing Kensi. Since the beginning of the season, Hetty has been videoing in from an unknown location — it looks like a war zone and is somewhere she said is “nowhere I want to be” — without giving any details about what she’s up to. Instead, she has had Nell come in to take over her duties, assigns cases (such as via cryptic messages like the one that led them to dead CIA agents), and got former LAPD liaison Deeks (Eric Christian Olsen) into FLETC so he could become an NCIS Investigator.