[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the NCIS Season 23 premiere “Prodigal Son (Part I).”]
Parker (Gary Cole) wants revenge after his longtime nemesis, mob boss Carla (Rebecca De Mornay), murdered his father — using his own gun(!) as we learn in the NCIS Season 23 premiere — and even with the team going against Director Vance’s (Rocky Carroll) orders, he still tries to do it on his own.
“Everything is heightened then maybe from, if there’s such a thing as normal for this show,” Cole tells TV Insider in the video interview above with him and Sean Murray (McGee). “It keeps pushing Parker to the extreme, even though we think he’s reached a boiling point when the show begins. But things keep pushing him over the edge. And the only thing really holding him back is the team itself, which is I think what the thrust of the first two shows are.”
From McGee’s perspective, “I think there’s a lot of concern about how rogue things could go,” admits Murray. “That’s where you get some of that pushback between those guys. McGee’s concerned about how far this could go and what it could mean for the team together for everyone to support each other and get done what we need to do.”
The team — specifically McGee — does, at first, conceal from Parker that it was his gun that Carla stole that was used to kill his father. After the senior agents’ confrontation, Parker seemingly goes home to get some rest … only to instead sneak onto a ship on which Carla is trying to flee the U.S. And with the strong possibility that she could try to detonate a dirty bomb against the U.S. again, it’s up to Parker’s sister, Harriet (Nancy Travis), a Navy vice admiral who has assumed command in MTAC, to give the air wings the “fire” call she’s been ordered to — even though she knows she’s doing so on the same ship on which her brother is. That’s the cliffhanger, but we do know that Parker survives, thanks to glimpses at future episodes.
“I would say that’s a little strong just for a sibling resentment to call out an airstrike on a ship that you’re on, but that’s my sister, what can I say?” Cole remarks. “But he survives that and it’s great seeing his sister for the first time. We’ve heard about her before, but her presence just reveals more information about his family, the resentment between the two of them and both of their relationships with their father who they’ve now lost. So we get kind of a boatload of information there.”
Looking ahead as this arc continues into the second of the two-parter, what McGee sees in Parker “scares him a little bit, I think, to see anyone driven to such extreme having an extreme situation like that,” Murray previews. “He’s worried about Parker. ‘[It’s], ‘How do we take care of our fellow brother here and make this right?’ So it’s complicated.”
Watch the full video interview above with Sean Murray and Gary Cole about the two-part premiere, reaching 500 episodes, the NCIS: Origins crossover airing November 11, and much more.
NCIS, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS