NCIS: Sydney Season 3 Episode 3 recap: NCIS encounters a new mysterious man goes by the name "The Ghost"

NCIS: Sydney Season 3 Episode 3, titled “Lost in Translation”, premiered on October 28, 2025. The episode opens with Blue returning to NCIS after her leave, but the office feels different now. Travis has taken over her lab, turning it into a tech-heavy zone. Blue had to reapply officially after her earlier "creative" background check manipulations came to the surface.

The team, this time, is investigating the murder of an Australian soldier, allegedly killed by Rashid Ramati, a former Afghan interpreter. They encounter a turning point in the case when everything they thought about Ramati turns out to be wrong. The real killer is a government agent, removed from all records, tasked to eliminate witnesses of a classified war, and goes by the name "The Ghost".

Read on for the full recap of NCIS: Sydney Season 3 Episode 3.

Here is what happened in NCIS: Sydney, Season 3, Episode 3

As mentioned, Blue rejoined the office after her leave to see Travis taking over her lab and changing the very essence of it, in NCIS: Sydney. Some manipulations in her background check come to light, which leads her to reapply officially again, while AFP insists that she fill everything out manually.

The Sydney NCIS team, along with the Australian Defence Force investigative service, are investigating the death of an Australian soldier. Rashid Ramati, a former Afghan interpreter, turns out to be the prime suspect. Ramati had connections with Australia and US forces in Afghanistan and used to work alongside them until an operation went catastrophically wrong. According to the intelligence, Ramati had betrayed the soldiers, which led them to be victims of the Taliban. After this event, Ramati simply vanished in NCIS: Sydney.

Currently, he has arrived in Sydney the same day that a Warrant Officer Lachlan Yates, who survived the failed operation then, has been found dead. NCIS suspects a link between the two events as they think Ramati is trying to kill people who could expose him. But when they started to investigate the killing, the crime scene had a different story to tell.

The door lock was picked, still the window was smashed, which suggested that the crime scene had been partially staged to divert the authorities. Yates’s bruises were post-mortem, and the cause of death was determined as the use of a toxic injection that left no trace. Therefore, the body was just covered with fake bruises. Doc Roy further confirms that the toxin was synthetic and virtually undetectable. This doesn’t seem like Ramati’s doing to the department, which puts the team in a further spiral.

They discovered that Yates had paid for Ramati's flight to Australia, which was making things more confusing for them. When they arrested Ramati, his story shattered the long-held belief of the department. Ramati claims he’s the one who actually saved the soldiers’ lives, and he has been hunted ever since by "The Ghost".

Here is the truth that Ramati revealed about the killing in NCIS: Sydney

Ramati also tells them that he rescued Yates and Sergeant Henry Ascott from the rubble after an explosion. An American operative known as "The Ghost" is responsible for the ambush under the guise of a Taliban attack. Ramati had filmed the incident on a soldier’s camera and hidden the SD card in Ascott’s jacket, under a flap no one would notice. His goal was to come to Australia and look for Ascott, the only remaining survivor who also possessed the evidence, as shown in NCIS: Sydney.

The team starts to chase the evidence now and reaches out to Ascott, who is living homeless after losing his sight temporarily and being discharged from service. He is living a life under fear and threat, trying to keep himself alive. His memory from the attack was fragmented, and he remembered Ramati setting them up. He also recalled a local family that saved him and Yates and a boy who sang to him when his nightmares went bad. During the interrogation, to prove himself, Ramati sings the same song to him, and that is when Ascott realized that it was Ramati's family who saved him.

Ramati was once a drug dealer, but had left the work behind long before starting to work with the forces. The tragedy deepened when they learned Ascott had sold the old jacket containing the SD card on eBay. The buyer was a woman who was soon found tied up and attacked by the same man Ramati described, "The Ghost".

This is how the NCIS unmasks The Ghost in NCIS: Sydney, season 3, episode 3

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The bullet, which was lodged in Ramati's shoulder, matched only one weapon the special ops unit had during the 2002 operation. The Ghost turned out to be a sanctioned assassin operating in the shadows to eliminate witnesses to a classified war. The investigation revealed that The Ghost is in Australia and Sergeant Jasek Mackey had been in touch with him. Travis uses his tech arsenal to locate the Ghost's signal and guide the team to a warehouse where they find Jasek's daughter, Rebecca, kidnapped, because of which Jasek was communicating with him. Rebecca was standing motionless on a pressure-sensitive bomb. Travis started to work on disarming the bomb while JD and Mackey pursued the ghost.

In a chilling final confrontation in NCIS: Sydney, Mackey faced off against the Ghost in a gunfight. With no other choice, she shot him dead. It turns out that he had been a government secret, a hired phantom who had already been erased from every record.

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