Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS episode “God Only Knows” are ahead!
NCIS Season 23’s two-part premiere may have wrapped up the Carla Marino storyline, but we’re far from done with arcs revolving around Gary Cole’s Alden Parker. First, there’s the ongoing mystery of the little girl known as Lily, whom Parker started seeing when he was injured in the Season 21 finale. Then in the Season 22 finale, Jimmy Palmer discovered some kind of discrepancy with the death certificate for Parker’s mother, Eleanor, who died when he was a child.
Well, “God Only Knows,” which just finished airing on the 2025 TV schedule, finally revealed said discrepancy, and the dark twist paving the way for a new mystery on NCIS. Taking into account what little we know about Lily, who is a real person rather than a figment of Parker’s mind, I’m now wondering how this new information is going to tie into what really happened with his mother.
What Parker Learned About His Mother’s Death
After getting confirmation in “Page-Turner” that his suspicions about the death certificate were correct, Jimmy finally shared his findings with Parker at the start of “God Only Knows.” For decades, it’s been assumed that Eleanor died in a car crash while she was intoxicated. However, Jimmy noted to Parker that the coroner’s note of Eleanor suffering “acute trauma of the occipital bone” doesn’t make sense, as the back of her head wouldn’t have been injured in a front-on collision. Meaning, Jimmy’s now wondering if foul play might have been involved in her death, so he asked Parker for permission to exhume her body for further study.
So now the possibility that Eleanor Parker was murdered is on the table, but strangely, her son didn’t immediately give his blessing for Jimmy Palmer to investigate this discrepancy further. Instead, he was angry that Jimmy did more than find his mother’s gravesite like he originally asked and instead made “a federal case” out of this and shared it with the rest of the NCIS team. Parker was looking for closure with his mother, and instead this opened a new wound.
Parker changed his tune by the end of the episode after speaking with a chaplain involved in this week’s case (stream “God Knows” with your Paramount+ subscription to learn what happened with that). The chaplain advised Parker that perhaps God is talking to him, but he’s refusing to listen. He aded that His message, most of the time, comes “from the people closest to us,” and that if Parker truly wants answers, he has to be prepared to not like what he finds. So with that in mind, Parker gave Jimmy his approval to exhume Eleanor’s body.
What Does This Mean For The Lily Storyline?
As mentioned earlier, we know Lily is real because Alden Parker spotted her in a newspaper photo of his mother’s crash site. So it’s inevitable these storylines are going to intersect, so how will that happen? Assuming Eleanor Parker was murdered, is Lily associated with the killer or someone who was at least involved with her death? How did she end up at that crash site? And to widen our scope a bit, what kind of people was Eleanor affiliated with that would lead to her being killed?
I’d be remiss if I also didn’t mention a third lingering Parker-related plot thread: the identity of the woman Roman Parker was having wine with before Carla Marino killed him. Will Parker finally meet her (again) as he looks deeper into his mother’s death? With two episodes of NCIS to air in 2025, it’s hard to say if any of my questions will be answered before the year is over. Still, with the way things are progressing, I suspect these storylines will finally come to a close once NCIS Season 23 finishes airing on the 2026 TV schedule.