It was lights out but electricity on for NCIS this week, with a power-outage premise tailor-made to give every member of the ensemble ample opportunity to generate their own voltage. Much like the Halloween episode from a few weeks back, “Power Down” was sheer comfort food, with only a sense of whimsy, and not the world, at stake.

An opening shootout left one errant naval officer dead and most of D.C. without power, including government facilities like NCIS HQ, which had to rely on generators. (At last, there was a realistic reason for workplace lighting to be as shadowy as all contemporary dramas make it nowadays.) Soon enough we discovered that McGee (Sean Murray) and Ziva (Cote de Pablo) had been trapped in an elevator overnight. The sight of Ziva getting testy with McGee and smashing his watch against the wall was a welcome one, after so many reaction shots this season in which these two shared conspiratorially beatific smiles after putting DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) in his place.

Gibbs (Mark Harmon) had a chance to earn some additional merit badges for no-power preparedness, of course, showing up at crime scenes with Polaroid cameras—way to stock up on the film stock before they stopped making it!—and… sardines? Possibly the best completely throwaway moment of the episode was the sight of Ziva flinching when Gibbs put some muscle into making the mimeograph machine work. If only this episode came complete with Smell-o-Vision cards.

No, take that back. The best throwaway gag had to do with a naval commander (Mark Harmon" target="_blank">Cara Buono) under questioning who developed an allergic reaction to DiNozzo’s choice of showerless soap (eau de cologne). Again, where’s the Smell-o-Vision when you need it for Tony "Pepe Le Pew" DiNozzo? In a twist that stretched credulity—but hey, not for the first time in the history of NCIS—this naval commander turned out to be a knockout blonde in disguise, albeit working for the good guys, unlike the gal who was almost the death of McGee last week.

The plot thickened, as plots will do. Was that corpse splayed open by Ducky (David McCallum) down in his morbid lair—which, amusingly, doubled as everyone’s food locker this week—a rogue baddie or victim of some supervillain’s evil scheme to bug the eastern seaboard? The latter, we learned, thanks to Ducky being able to deduce that this poor woman had developed cankles by choice. (Let’s all remember this excuse as we head into old age.)

But there wasn’t much time to feel the weight of tragedy here, not when DiNozzo and McGee are debating the merits of Dr. Who or showing their age differences when it comes to old TV cop shows (wouldn’t have McGee at least have heard of Kojak? No?). Or when Abby (Pauley Perrette) is demonstrating that when life you gives you lemons, make lemonade, in the form of boom-box juice. Or when Gibbs gets to say, "Book 'em, Dan-ozzo." Gibbs was the most lighthearted he’s been in about 15 or 20 seasons here, and why not, when the forced-Luddite circumstances allowed him to be most in his element? I’m not sure I bought the finale, in which he turned off his monitor right after the power finally came back on. Is there any NCIS devotee who doesn’t believe our leading man would have been first to say, “Back to work”? But after all he’s been through, not many fans would begrudge a freeze-frame smile for Mr. Old-School at the end of such an old-school episode.

Were you turned on—or off—by "Power Down"?