Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS Season 22 finale are forward!
NCIS Season 22 wrapped up on the 2025 TV schedule on Monday, and the finale ended with Gary Cole’s Alden Parker returning to his condo and discovering his father had been killed by Carla Marino, head of the Kansas Metropolis mob. As somebody who’s been watching this standard procedural for over 15 years, it ranks as one of the crucial devastating endings to a season for me. Now we have now to attend till CBS’ 2025-2026 fall TV lineup begins to see how NCIS Season 23 follows up on this surprising flip of occasions, and I’m intrigued by what Cole instructed me about how issues is likely to be completely different for his character going ahead.
Throughout my latest dialog with Cole, who joined NCIS as a sequence common after Mark Harmon exited early into Season 19, I requested him if he thinks Parker will go rogue to actual revenge on Carla, or if he’ll proceed to work inside the confines of the legislation to deliver her down. Whereas he doesn’t know the reply to that simply but, he did say the next:
… I feel the bottom has been laid that he definitely would go exterior the bounds of the legislation. I feel it might be out of character for him to try this. I feel he is definitely greater than able to that, and I can not consider a circumstance extra excessive than this one that might trigger him to try this.
Carla Marino was launched within the episode “Knight and Day,” the place it was established that Alden Parker had gone after her when he was working on the FBI. Carla got here again into the image in “Nexus,” when it appeared like she held the important thing to bringing down the drug cartel Nexus. Sadly, it was ultimately revealed that Carla had change into Nexus’ new chief, and together with finishing up this ruse to acquire nuclear materials to construct a unclean bomb to wipe out the heads of the opposite crime households (that plot was foiled), she additionally took Parker captive.
She’d discovered that he was the one who instructed her son Jason about her legal actions, which led to him working away from house and dying in a motorbike accident. Carla needed Parker to endure for what she noticed as driving Jason away, solely somewhat than simply kill him, she let him go so he may return house and discover Roman Parker’s poisoned physique. Afterward in our interview, Gary Cole famous the way it’s for him to think about that this received’t result in a shift in characterization, saying:
… I am guessing that after this season, we’re gonna must see some sort of a change as a result of these circumstances are too excessive for them to be ignored. I do not suppose it may be enterprise as normal. You may’t play darkness on a regular basis and be heavy on a regular basis. Human beings, they are not constructed for that. However here is the potential of him going off the rails just a little bit and possibly not being as pastry, fowl watching cheerful as he has been up to now.
Along with Alden Parker’s unresolved battle with Carla Marino, he’s additionally nonetheless coping with the thriller of Lily, the little lady from his previous he began seeing within the NCIS Season 21 finale. Parker discovered in Season 22 that Lily is in some way linked to his late mom, who died when she crashed her automobile whereas drunk. Nonetheless, after Jimmy Palmer received a replica of her unique dying certificates, he instructed Jessica Knight that one thing didn’t add up with it, however we didn’t study what he found.
It’s exhausting to say if NCIS Season 23 will wrap up each these plot threads proper out the gate or if one can be dealt with before the opposite. Both approach, now I’d wish to see Parker go down this darkish path that Gary Cole theorized he’ll… however not too far down it. I don’t need his place as crew chief jeopardized.