NCIS with its Season 22 finale revealed that onetime DOJ Inspector Gabriel LaRoche (played by Seamus Dever) was working “undercover” all this time as the new NCIS Deputy Director, purposely burning Special Agent Nick Torres’ cover in order to become a mole for the Nexus cartel.
With LaRoche himself burned after the events of last week, it fell on NCIS to take down Nexus. To that end, Parker (Gary Cole) very begrudgingly worked in alliance with crime boss Carla Marino (Rebecca De Mornay), who’d been summoned to meet with Nexus’ elusive head honcho aka The Butcher.
As Alden and Carla were en route to the airport, the team back at the office realized that The Butcher was created using AI, and doesn’t actually exist. We then learned that one of the FBI agents escorting Marino and Parker was an imposter employed by the Kansas City queenpin, shooting dead their driver. They then pulled over and Marino monologued about how he son died years ago on that road, because he’d run away from home after Parker told the kid his mom was a criminal.
Carla ordered Alden to his knees and held him at gunpoint, but didn’t kill him; instead, she and her goon ditched him there. But later that night, Alden returned home to find his father, Roman, shot dead in front of the TV — alongside a pair of wine glasses, one with Carla’s lipstick on the rim. Just prior to that grim discovery (and Alden’s subsequent scream of frustration), Jimmy reported to the rest of the team that something about Parker’s mother’s original death certificate wasn’t adding up.
Wait, so Carla’s vendetta, Roman’s murder and the season-long Lily mystery are all connected? Possi-maybe! Here’s what NCIS showrunner Steven D. Binder shared about the finale’s big reveals, and cast member Wilmer Valderrama’s “earth-shattering” death tease than sent a lot of us down a rabbit hole…
TVLINE | Talk to me about Wilmer’s talking points for his press tour last week, because he said the death in the season finale would be “somebody very close to us“; he said it would be “really heartbreaking“; and he said it would be “earth-shattering.”
Well, clearly, Wilmer has become more attached to Parker’s father than you have. I think that he, to be more precise, meant it would be “earth-shattering” for one of our team members.
TVLINE | Absolutely.
I think that’s where he was going with that, and that is what this is for Parker. His father’s been murdered by his long-time nemesis– possibly something more, the way [he and Carla] keep looking at each other….
NCIS Season 22 Finale Death Parker Father Roman
TVLINE | The editing of the finale’s closing sequence at least invited a correlation between Jimmy’s unspoken discovery regarding Parker’s mother’s death certificate and the discovery of Roman’s dead body. Is there a correlation there, or those scenes just simply landed next to each other?
When you’re planning these things — where we’re going to go and what we’re going to do — sometimes things naturally want to connect to themselves, and then we, as the writer, get excited by that because it deepens the tapestry. I can tell you this: when we noticed this connection, very early on, way back when, we were like, “Oh, can we make that work?” So, I’ll leave it at that for now. We’re going to try and make that work.
We always think we know [where a storyline or character is going], but we found that we do better and create a more engaging experience for people when we become viewers along the way, if that makes sense. So, the short version of that is there’s a tree of possibilities before us as writers, and we’re deciding which ones we want to walk down, and I can tell you definitively that we love the idea of connecting those two, and we’re going to work to do it. But maybe we won’t.
TVLINE | Because until we saw the lipstick on the wine glass near Roman’s body, I was like, “Oh, damn, he got killed for something he knew about Lily.”
Right. Right. Right.
TVLINE | You want us to be considering that, is what you’re saying?
I do. I do. Now, Carla can’t be [grown-up] Lily, unfortunately, but—
TVLINE | Oh, that was one of my next questions. I thought the math does work out…?
Maybe in another timeline, but even if she was, I would never tell you. I would give you a misdirect!
TVLINE | Safe to say we’ll see more of Rebecca De Mornay in Season 23?
I hope so. Yeah, I think so.
TVLINE | You seemed to be on a pace where you could have wrapped up the Lily mystery this season. Did you realize it could get bigger and weirder than you originally planned?
Yes to that. As a long-time viewer of the show, you’ve seen that we have our regular standalone episodes, and then we’ll have a very slow-rolling storyline in the background. One of the things I want to explore next season is accelerating and enhancing the presence of these background stories. I feel we’ve been with these characters for a really long time, and my appetite, as an audience member, has changed. We’re not “looking for Mulder’s sister over the course of seven seasons” anymore. I want to explore speeding that tempo up a bit, so when we talked about that, one of the questions was, “Well, do we put Lily to bed, or do we use that as an ignition point for something that can be more present, more engaging, and take us in a whole new direction?” I’d like to opt for the latter.
TVLINE | Will there be a time jump opening Season 23, the usual “three months later”?
I don’t think we’re going to time jump, for the reasons I just said. We’re going to keep the heat going [on the Parker storyline]. That’s something we’re deciding right now, but we want to keep the momentum going.
TVLINE | From the moment you introduced LaRoche, did you know he was going to end up being somebody who was undercover, serving a larger and legal purpose?
We knew. We knew he was going to be a great character, in the vein of CIA Agent [Trent] Kort. Is he your friend? Is he not your friend? It was just a question of which of the shapes that was going to take. And then the question is, which one are we seeing? Have we peeled the onion all the way down? It feels like we have. He really seems like a good guy, but you never know.
TVLINE | Now that LaRoche has stepped down, is there any reason that McGee (Sean Murray) wouldn’t grab the Deputy Director job he wanted to begin with?
It’s a question of whether or not that job was truly open and available, and also whether McGee wants it, at this point, and that’s something we’re going to get into. His desire for it was sort of a creation of [the] LaRoche [storyline]. We didn’t go, “Let’s move McGee up, and how can we complicate it?” It was, “Hey, let’s bring in this guy LaRoche, and McGee wants his job.” Shoving McGee up into an advisory, mid-management level position… just saying that, already I’m falling asleep! Besides, Sean [Murray] is great in the bullpen.
TVLINE | You delighted franchise fans with the recent Hetty update. Who do you run that by, if anybody? Who is “the keeper of the NCIS: Los Angeles bible” at this point, if you’re not texting [longtime LA showrunner] Scott Gemmill?
No, I did not call Scott, because we have [co-executive producer] Andrew Bartels on staff, who was a writer [and EP] on LA. So, we ran that stuff by him, and he functioned in three ways. He said, “No, don’t say that,” “Oh, that’s awesome,” or, “How about this instead?” And I think [regarding Hetty] we got, “How about this instead?” He had good ideas.
TVLINE | Do you want to share anything that he prefer you didn’t say about an LA character?
It wasn’t for Hetty, but another, funny Easter egg we had in there. There was that bit about [Jimmy and Sam Hanna meeting for karaoke nights], and there was a [Sam] line like, “I don’t sing much” or something like that. [Andrew] was like, “We’ve done that a few too many times [on LA].”
TVLINE | Do you know the gender of the baby that LA‘s Kensi and Deeks had…? Because fans are very curious.
No. Not yet. It’s too soon. [Joking] They’re going for natural childbirth this time, so no ultrasounds…. They’re going to do the birth in a tub!
