Over the summer, spoilers were leaked that the NCIS season premiere would begin with a bang. They weren't kidding. Last night's show was a spine-tingling puzzle of an episode that unraveled scene by scene, building suspense to the ultimate -- satisfying -- conclusion. If you were thinking that, like last year, the team was going to be torn asunder after the way things ended with Ziva being returned to Israel, you were pleasantly surprised. More after the jump.

However, there's another story to report. The overnight ratings are in and the viewers have spoken. Twenty million of them! The return of NCIS zoomed to the top of the ratings with 20 million viewers tuning in. That helped CBS launch NCIS: Los Angeles, opening with 18 million, and also bolstered The Good Wife with nearly 14 million. Any way you slice it, those are stellar numbers. The folk at the Black Rock must be dancing in the hallways.

In sports parlance, every now and then a rookie sensation comes along and is an instant success. Like Robert Redford in The Natural, only it's fact and not fiction. In TV parlance, Simon Baker -- who kind of looks like younger Redford (think The Sting and The Way We Were) -- has pulled off a rookie success that makes him look like pure gold.

The latest weekly Nielsen ratings are in and The Mentalist is number one, just slightly ahead of NCIS, with 18.8 million viewers. Simon Baker has a certifiable, solid and probably long-term hit series on his hands, and you know the powers that be at CBS have to be dancing in the corridors at the Black Rock.