The latest season of NCIS gave us our usual case-of-the-week antics, but it also put Agents Parker (Gary Cole) and McGee (Sean Murray) into the spotlight with their individual overarching storylines. From the very first episode of Season 22, the presence of a potential mole within the ranks of NCIS was suspected, and McGee made it his personal mission to expose the mole, particularly since he believed it was the new deputy director LaRoche (Seamus Dever). Meanwhile, Parker is being haunted by his own past, both psychologically and in terms of past cases, as a familiar face comes blasting her way back into his life. By the Season 22 finale, many of these mysteries are solved, but there are still several storylines being teed up to play major roles in the already confirmed 23rd season of NCIS.
‘NCIS’ Season 23 Needs To Address the Mystery Around Parker’s Visions
While the penultimate episode centered on McGee’s investigation into LaRoche, the finale shifted its focus onto Parker and his past. Throughout the season, Parker was plagued by visions of a mysterious little girl called Lily. They began during the NCIS Season 21 finale, where Parker had separate hallucinations of Lily and his mother on the boat. Due to this, as well as conversations with the bureau’s therapist, he believes the ongoing visions of Lily are somehow connected to his mother. He finally manages to get his father, Roman (Francis McCarthy), to reveal the truth about his mother’s death. Parker knew she had died during a car accident, but didn’t realize that she had been drunk-driving.
Following this revelation, Parker hunts down the related news clipping and sees that Lily was in the photograph; she had been questioned as a witness to the accident. We still don’t know who Lily is to Parker specifically, how or if they’ve ever met before, why he started hallucinating her, and why the visions started on a ship. The finale thickens Parker’s mother’s side of the mystery, as he asks Jimmy (Brian Dietzen) to figure out the new location of his mother’s grave. When Jimmy tracks it down, he claims that there is something strange about the grave, leaving us with even more burning questions about Parker’s family and history.
‘NCIS’ Season 23 Already Has a Looming Villain
Alongside questions about Parker’s past, we also have some about his future, especially as NCIS sets up a formidable villain by the end of the Season 22 finale. Carla Morina (Rebecca De Mornay) was discovered to be the head of the elusive and powerful Nexus cartel, and also revealed her personal vendetta against Parker, who she held responsible for her son’s motorcycling accident. In Parker’s FBI days, he had exposed the extent of Morina’s criminal activities to her son, and the latter ran away in response, which is when he had his accident. So, in the finale, Morina’s doles out her revenge in an unexpected way; she kills Roman, leaving her lipstick-marked wine glass there for Parker to find.
By the end of the season, Morina is still at large, and after his father’s murder, Parker is likely highly motivated to apprehend her (or worse). Going into Season 23, we are already thrown into a cat-and-mouse chase between these two powerful forces, both driven by their own personal thirst for vengeance. As level-headed as Parker’s character is, considering his recent keen interest in his family, especially with the hallucinations indicating how psychologically affected he has been by it recently, his emotional state going into this feud may give us a very different character.
Will McGee Finally Be Promoted in ‘NCIS’ Season 23?
The other potential major change to the Major Crimes Response Team is that LaRoche decided to leave his position as deputy director in the finale. Although he wasn’t a Nexus mole and was just an undercover agent for the Department of Justice, his unstable dynamics with the team due to his secrets pushed him to leave. He had also blown Torres’ (Wilmer Valderrama) cover in the season premiere to infiltrate the cartel, which left little trust between team members anyway. With the deputy director position opening up again, this leaves space for McGee to apply for a promotion like he did at the beginning of the season.
As the longest-serving character in the show, McGee’s role in the team has become stagnant, and if McGee were to remain in the cast, NCIS may need to shake things up a bit, hence giving McGee the promotion. While this may mean McGee would be involved in storylines in a limited capacity, it may also open up the potential of a new face in the team, something we haven’t had since the addition of Knight (Katrina Law) in Season 18. That being said, the show may end up hiring someone else in the role of deputy director. Either way, the team is likely to experience a slight shake-up in Season 23 due to Laroche’s departure, but with Parker’s new preoccupations, it will certainly experience an exciting shift in dynamics.
