Remember when Victoria Palmer was born on NCIS? Well, now, in Season 22, she’s getting involved in a case! Oh, how the time flies.
Elle Graper returns for her second episode as Victoria, Dr. Jimmy Palmer’s (Brian Dietzen) daughter in the March 3 episode of the CBS drama, and this time, she’s the one who brings the case to the team. In “Close to Home,” Victoria texts Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) when she discovers a large sum of money near the naval library, and the team investigates.
Below, Dietzen previews the episode, Palmer’s potential new love interest (Erinn Hayes‘ Wendy), going undercover, and more.
It is so wild Victoria’s old enough to be working on cases. Talk about building that father-daughter dynamic, especially how it’s changed and how we’re seeing it in this episode.
Brian Dietzen: We hear Jimmy talk about his daughter so often in the show. She’s his family, obviously since Breena passed away, that is his immediate family and he loves her absolutely more than anything in the planet. So when we got to meet her, what was it now, three years ago, three, I guess, four years ago now, it was the first episode that I co-wrote with Scott Williams called “The Helpers,” and we found Elle in the midst of Covid casting and all that sort of stuff. She was so wonderful and we were so lucky to have her out on our set and she made such an impression on us. We knew that we had to have her back, and it’s really nice to see this character who’s naturally progressing into her early teenage years and the things that all fathers go through with a teenage daughter, the struggles but also the connection and the beauty of it. I really appreciated that our writers weren’t trying to fall back on like, oh, here’s the frustrated dad with the teenager. A lot of it was really based in how close they are and how much they love each other in spite of having some of those family dynamics
But while they are close, Victoria reaches out to Torres, not to father. How does he handle that?
I’m going to say Jimmy’s super proud that he’s such a good dad, that she feels comfortable reaching out to other family members. [Laughs] because let’s be honest, Nick is Uncle Nick. He’s the guy that’s always there for Victoria no matter what. So I think it’s pretty great, man. That’s the one thing I just love about this show is that if this team ever feels like it’s a family, it’s because it is. And I love that about it.
But there’s the matter of Jimmy and Knight’s breakup, and the show made clear Victoria was upset about that. But Victoria and Knight have their own relationship, too. So what can you say about that and how Jimmy feels about that?
Well, I think that’s the same thing, too, is that the last thing that Jimmy and Jess said to one another regarding their relationship is that they love one another. And until they say that they don’t anymore, I think that’s still there. And that love may have changed into something different, or maybe it’s the same when they’re covering it up or trying to move forward from it. I don’t know. But I think that from Jimmy’s perspective, you can’t really find a person with character that is more admirable and kind of a better female role model than Jessica Knight for his daughter. And I think that while they may not be together romantically right now, he is smart enough to know, hey, this is a really great relationship for my kiddo and also still for me. I think selfishly, he probably loves still having Jess in his life.
We see a different side of Jimmy when it comes to the investigation in this episode because he does undercover work. How does that challenge him?
Well, it’s fun to always see any character get outside their comfort zone. Jimmy’s wheelhouse is definitely crime scenes, autopsies, that sort of thing, bodies that are not moving. And so when he is around bodies that are moving and trying to figure out how to get things going, that’s more Torres’ realm going undercover or McGee [Sean Murray] or Jess. So it was really fun to be able to shoot that. And after a couple decades on the job, there’s still stuff that Jimmy has not done before, and seeing him out of his element, I think is really fun to do. What’s kind of nice is that first time he does that, it’s still a home game because he has this whole team behind him waiting for him and helping him behind the scenes. So it was a fun dynamic.
There’s also this new potential love interest that we meet in this episode, Wendy. What can you say about her and Jimmy’s dynamic? It’s also in the middle of this case, so that complicates matters.
Right. Yeah. Well, okay, first off, I can’t say enough good things about Erinn Hayes. I’ve known Erinn since I was about 18 years old. We went to college together and we first played opposite one another when in a production of Antigone, I was Haemon and she was Antigone. So we go way back to Greek tragedies and she’s absolutely terrific. She’s a hilarious comedian, and she’s also a wonderful dramatic actress. So I was really happy when I saw there’s this character coming up. I said, you got to get Erinn to come on. And she’s obviously been on a number of CBS shows, so they were happy to have her. But I love that what we see here is we see Jimmy really trying to be happy is what it comes down to. We see that it didn’t work with Jess, his wife has passed away. He’s still trying. He’s still trying to find something. He is not an old guy. He’s still middle-aged guy with a teenage daughter. He doesn’t want to hang it up yet. So he’s making his efforts, however difficult it may be in the midst of her potentially, I don’t know, maybe being a murderer. We’re not sure. I don’t know. But I like to see that they’re giving Jimmy his shots at it.
