[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the NCIS Season 22 finale “Nexus.”]
The NCIS team might have to do without pastries for a while: Parker (Gary Cole) isn’t going to be the Parker we’ve come to know and love when Season 23 begins.
That’s because the last scene of the Season 22 finale saw him arrive home, after mob boss Carla Marino (Rebecca De Mornay) made it clear she blames him for her son’s death (he told him about her criminal activity) but killing him would be too easy, to find his father dead. Meanwhile, it turns out that Laroche (Seamus Dever) isn’t dirty; he was working undercover for the Department of Justice.
Below, executive producer Steven D. Binder explains Parker’s father’s death, teases how the agent will deal in Season 23, and much more. (Plus, read a deep dive into the finale for Parker with Gary Cole here.)
Why kill off Parker’s father and do so in this way and at this point for him?
Steven D. Binder: The idea of Parker is a pretty chill guy, even though he’s had a different upbringing, a troubled upbringing. Whereas the previous bullpen dynamic was you worked around the clock and never stopped and never had a life, he’s a more balanced individual. Gary’s a very balanced guy himself when you see him and you see that bleed over into the character, and we thought it would be very interesting to take that character and push him into a place where he’s never been before. And that’s sort of been something we’ve been talking about almost from — writers get together and are like, “Yeah, this character is really turning out to be even and balanced,” and then, “Let’s throw him off balance,” just sort of an instinct you have. So that was always there circulating in our head: What is it going to take to send this guy, turn this guy into a man on fire?
Sonja Flemming / CBS
And nothing really was coming along. We didn’t really want to force anything. And then a bunch of things came together and it just seemed like, okay, how do we not do this now? You’ve got this arch nemesis of Parker’s who blames him for — losing a dad’s bad, but losing a child’s considerably worse, and blames Parker for this and is vindictive and evil enough that she doesn’t want to just kill him and end that she wants to torture him and this is the person she’s chosen to torture him with, or who would be the person to torture him with? And it’s really just his dad at this point.
Speaking of pushing him, so far we’ve seen the immediate reaction from him — the sorrow, the rage, getting into that determination to find Carla. What can you tease about what that actually looks like when he’s pushed for Season 23?
He is not going to find his inner zen and not find a good place here. He’s going to be destabilized and he’s going to be out for revenge and out for blood in a way that it will seem very atypical for someone like him, not a way you’d expect a character like him to behave and yet entirely motivated and justified, which is what makes it interesting when people get put in situations where they act differently than they normally would. It’s not fun to see the worst human being in the world go to a wedding and be the worst human being in the world, but suddenly, you see the worst human being in the world go to a wedding and see his childhood sweetheart and now trying to behave. That’s fun. Or likewise, a guy who’s a monk who spent 15 years at a retreat in Tibet coming to the United States, and how do you get that guy upset and then doing it and then see what does he look like when he is upset? We had some precedent in the past in our show with this. Gibbs [Mark Harmon] was a man on fire when his wife and daughter were killed. Bishop [Emily Wickersham] was a woman on fire when someone was attempting to kill Torres. We’re going to see some of that.
What does that mean for the team then? Because he is their leader.
Yes. That’s the problem here is that not only is he their leader, a cop and cops can’t do or not supposed to do things. So you’ll have a team trying to protect him, trying to talk him off a ledge, possibly getting between him and his target in a really uncomfortable turn of events. Not going to tell you how it ends, but it’s going to create conflict. It’s going to create a ton of conflict as it has in the past when we’ve had other people on our staff on fire. I believe, I don’t want to tell you what the writer truly intended, but I believe last time Bishop was in this position and the target of her ire ended up dead, you’re left with a very strong notion that the reason Bishop didn’t go all the way to kill him is because Gibbs got to him first. There’s that shadow of Gibbs in an elevator as the door slowly closes and slow motion. I said I don’t want to speak for the writer. I just remembered I wrote that. So yeah, there is no conclusive line drawn in that episode, but you’re very much led to believe that that’s what happened and that’s messy and that’s dirty, but it’s also protective in a way. It’s protected her from making a wrong decision by going and making the wrong decision first. It’s f**ked up, and I think we’re going to see some of that.
So before that, Palmer (Brian Dietzen) found something in Parker’s mom’s original death certificate that didn’t add up. What can you say about that?
I can say that the autopsy report that he’s looking at, the data in the autopsy report — there’s the collection of things., we collect this, we measure this, we measure that, we come up with our conclusion… I can tell you that the conclusion that Jimmy Palmer saw does not add — he saw something in the data that makes him think the conclusion in that autopsy was not accurate. And by implications, since we’re a cop show and not a kids’ show, someone’s covering something up.
Sonja Flemming / CBS
Can you rule out this is a “she’s really alive” situation?
Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice? That would be nice. I can’t rule anything out because it hasn’t been written yet. The board hasn’t been turned into outline hasn’t been turned into a script. I can tell you that we think of every possibility ever just because that’s what writers do. And I don’t know if there’s value in that. Is there value in it? Can you get there with it? You write whatever you want, but can you get there in a way that has the audience along for the ride and not shark jump? And we talked about it in terms of those terms. We’ve talked about all sorts of things. I can’t commit to anything or rule anything out just simply because it’s not shot and I don’t want to say something and then have it not be true because then you’ll never want to interview me again.
So with Laroche leaving NCIS, what does this mean for McGee (Sean Murray) and the deputy director position?
The deputy director position and McGee’s relationship, that came out of the introduction of this character of Laroche who was a gray character as we learned, a deep cover mole, and right in McGee’s face is insult to injury the guy overseeing — McGee’s desire for that came out of Laroche’s character to begin with. I’m not sure how much fun there is to be permanently putting McGee in a middle management role. Deputy director, director, it’s sort of the same thing on one level. We have a director [Rocky Carroll‘s Vance], we have a manager position on the show. Even if just imagining from the best version of McGee’s promotion is that he actually gets promoted to the real position where things actually need to be done and decisions have to be made, not just some middle management.
I don’t know that we’d want to do that because we would be seeing a lot less of McGee. He’s great where he is. I know Sean loves the place that he’s at over the years. We’ve all talked about promotions. There was when Gibbs left the show, it was, do we make McGee the team leader? What do we do with it? And it just seems to be the most fun and the most entertaining to have him where he is now. It’s only when you start talking about the real world and what would be realistic, would a guy of his experience start moving up? And HR realism doesn’t make for good cop show, I don’t think. There’s no plans to do that. Certainly it’s always been real fun when we’ve had to stick McGee temporarily in that position and he’s enjoying it and he’s loving it and then he is got to hand the keys back to Vance. Or when Gibbs had done it and was just overwhelmed and didn’t want to do it. Even though that hasn’t been fully written, I think we’re going to leave it as is for now.
You’ve sort of taken a step back when it comes to Palmer and Knight (Katrina Law) and addressing anything about their past relationship with everything going on at the end of the season. So what are you planning on doing about that next season?
What we’re probably not going to do is now they’re dating again and then they’re just dating again. We did that. We had that. We ran with that and it went where it ended up going, which is someplace more interesting to a breakup and then seeing what it’s like to work with a coworker who you’ve broken up with or seeing them dating. I want to make sure that this season is reflective of the fact they had a relationship and find a place that’s more interesting or conflict is the wrong word, because that sounds like I’m implying conflict between two of these characters, but I’m using that word in a dramatic narrative writer sense. Where’s it interesting? Where’s the conflict for this dynamic between these two? And I think we’re going to go there now. Could they end back together again? Absolutely. But for now, we broke them up to bring them to a new place. And we’re still in the process of going to that bench touchstone first before we figure out where we’re going to take us. We still have a little more to do.
I cannot wait to see next season.
We’re really hoping to dive into our characters and their lives and their journeys and their pain in a way that we have not done before — or have done before, but have done it more in a back burner secondary to the crime of the week. And I think seeing how Parker — the ignition on Parker is the start of that. That’s no small hiccup in the man’s life.
NCIS, Season 23, TBA, CBS
