Not Enough To Ruin The Series ...

... but they do bug me: Easily avoided errors in television writing.

In the case of NCIS, the errors are usually concerning fairly mundane military matters.

Yeah, I'm watching NCIS. I managed to go more than two decades without ever doing so, but after checking out the prequel spin-off NCIS Origins and liking it, I decided "why not," and have been watching an episode or two when I have nothing better to do for months now. Not terrible.

I'm in season six, and there were just two such errors in about 30 seconds.

1. "Joined the Marines four months ago. Scheduled for deployment next week."
2. A number, nine digits followed by the letter G. "Could be a military service number" (and it is).

As of 2008 (when season six of the show aired and was seemingly set), Marine Corps boot camp was 13 weeks long. That's more than three months right there.

Since 1989, all male Marines (and since 2018, all female Marines) attend Marine Combat Training after boot camp.

And then there's MOS school, the shortest of which are a month or so long (I haven't reached the part of the episode, if there is one, where the Marine's MOS is mentioned).

So we're well past five months already, even if the guy reported to boot camp the day he signed the enlistment contract ... which doesn't happen. That's usually at least a month, and many people enlist under the "delayed entry program" which gives them up to a year before boot camp.

No, the guy was not scheduled for deployment five weeks after joining the Marine Corps.*

As for the nine digits, followed by a G, being a "military service number" -- specifically that of Leroy Jethro Gibbs, the main character in NCIS -- no. Gibbs, according to the series timeline, joined the Marine Corps in 1976. The Marine Corps stopped handing out service numbers on January 1, 1972 (since then, your "service number" is your Social Security number).

Either the show didn't have a Marine-fluent military advisor for their writers, at least at that time, or they didn't have a very good one.

* I know what you're thinking -- maybe the guy did a hitch in the Army, Navy, or Air Force, then joined the Marine Corps and didn't have to go to boot camp. Nope -- a Marine can skip boot camp when moving to one of the other branches, but not vice versa. Ditto MCT. Maybe -- maybe -- MOS school in some cases, but boot camp and MCT already take up more than four months anyway, even assuming zero time between enlistment and shipping out to a Marine Corps Recruit Depot.