‘NCIS’ Boss Confirms ‘Someone Was Hit’ in Finale Shooting Cliffhanger

Hold on, is NCIS about to kill off another major character while everyone’s still mourning the loss of Director Vance (Rocky Carroll)? The Season 23 finale ends with a moment that leaves one of the team’s fate uncertain. TV Insider spoke with showrunner Steven D. Binder about that, the major return in the episode, and more. Warning: Spoilers for the NCIS Season 23 finale ahead!

The team works with Kayla Vance (Naomi Grace) after a bombing in an alley links back to one in a café from a year earlier. And in doing so, we get flashbacks to when she spoke with her father about her concerns about the first one (she’d been right outside) as well as the side work she started doing away from NCIS about it. She couldn’t do both, he’d told her … and what she didn’t know, until near the end of the finale in the present day, was he’d left her an envelope to allow her to make the call herself about which she’d choose.

Meanwhile, the thorn in everyone’s side, LaRoche (Seamus Dever), returns and investigates Kayla for the money used to fund her side project and accuses Vance of possibly being dirty. Parker (Gary Cole) does convince him to drop that, but LaRoche says his job is to restore confidence in the agency by publicly clearing Vance’s name of any wrongdoing … and he seems to have designs on the director’s chair. Uh-oh!

But the real shocker comes in the final scene. McGee’s teen son Mateo (Patrick Keleher) tours NCIS but seemingly decides the cyber internship (and NCIS) isn’t for him … only for Palmer (Brian Dietzen) to note to Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) that he apparently used a workstation to fill out an application. When Torres looks into it, he can’t find an application. Torres confronts Mateo in an alley, and the teen insists he drop it, revealing he’s armed. “They could be watching,” he says. The finale ends with a gunshot ringing out, but it’s unclear who fired.

Showrunner Steven D. Binder breaks down the Season 23 finale and rules out one outcome of that cliffhanger when the series returns in the fall.

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Why have it be Torres who become suspicious of Mateo?

Steven D. Binder: I think that will become a little more clear when you see where the story goes, but in terms of that’s working backwards to a conclusion, but I think it’s, who do we have on the table? It’s going to be one of the three people that McGee works directly with. It’s going to be Knight [Katrina Law], Torres, or Parker. And it just seemed like he’d be watching his buddy a little more closely maybe than some of the other characters. They each have some other things going on, especially given the penultimate episode. Parker’s got some things on his mind perhaps. And he’s just the one who’s more contemporary to being a father of roughly the same age as McGee. So I think he’s just watching a little more closely. Also, he’s one of the more suspicious guys. He was undercover. It would be in his nature to look sideways at anybody, including family.

There’s one gunshot, but we don’t know who took it. Can you confirm if someone’s dead or injured or if someone was hit?

Someone was hit. I can confirm that. I sort of had my fill this season, all of us, of killing people. So I can rule that out. And also, there’s not a lot of fun there. When someone’s dead, they’re dead. It’s much more interesting — I’ll think back to when Gibbs shot McGee. It’s much more fun when someone’s alive and been shot than when they’re dead. And by fun, I mean, interesting.

Speaking of McGee, what can you tease about how he’s going to react to whatever’s going on? Because we know Mateo is caught up in something because he says to Torres, they could be watching.

Yes, yes. He’s going to be all kinds of conflicted. Obviously, as a law enforcement officer, if crimes are being committed, that’s going to pull him in one direction. But if it involves family, it’s going to pull him in another direction. He’s experienced this before when his sister came to his door with her hands covered in blood and said, “Tim, I think I killed somebody,” and he was caught between a rock and hard place, the rock being Gibbs and the law and the hard place being his loyalty to his sister. And there’s a moment where, and I think what can be illuminating for the present is a line that McGee says to Gibbs when Gibbs comes at him and it’s like, “What are you doing, man?” The idea that anyone on the show would try and pull a fast one on Gibbs. Gibbs was a father figure to them. He never would do that. And McGee’s standing there with Gibbs and McGee says to him, I don’t remember the exact line, but it’s something like, “You are my mentor, my teacher, my father figure, you’re everything to me, but she’s my sister.” And I think Gibbs can understand that and I think everyone can understand that. And I think when push comes to shove, that’s where McGee’s loyalties are going to lead him, but it’s not going to be an easy — It’ll be an easy decision, but not an easy experience.

Talk about bringing Rocky back in such a substantial way and in this way.

When Rocky and I had the conversation about what was going to happen in the 500th, one of the first things I said to him was, “Look, on this show, dead never means gone.” And with a character like that and an actor like that, you can’t let him go. He’s too good. You got to use him. So we always knew if something was going to happen and things will continue to happen, I’m sure, in that regard. But like most things, you don’t want to force it like, “Hey, let’s do a Vance flashback episode.” The story sort of dictated that. We knew we wanted to bring Kayla in, and it just seemed like we never got a chance to see her with her dad. It just seemed like that was the thing that you should do. That’s what you wanted to see. If we’re going to bring Kayla in, and that seemed like something we had to do, it was obligatory even, then it felt obligatory to see her with her father.

LaRoche has designs on the director chair; we got that very pointed look at it. But you’ve left that chair vacant of a permanent replacement thus far. Why only bring in these interim directors that we haven’t even seen for the rest of this season?

The answer to that is going to be a testament to Rocky Carroll. When the show began, we had a director, but he was not a regular fixture. The structure of the show didn’t really support that in a way. Sure, if you want to do the cliche thing where the boss is telling you, “Speed up the case,” or “SecNav’s leaning down my neck,” or things like that. But we skipped by those sort of classic, and by classic, I don’t mean great, types of storytelling. And I think that partially is responsible for some of the early success of NCIS is we just didn’t do things the regular way. So the role of the director was not necessarily supposed to be all there all the time. And we trialed Lauren Holly for a while and she was fantastic, but it was just very difficult to write that character in, which is why we wrote her off partially.

And then when Rocky came on, he was not hired for that many episodes. We were going to use a director sporadically and sparingly when we felt like we needed it here and there. And what ended up happening was Rocky was just such a fantastic actor and such a great guy to work with that he just ended up being in the show more and more. Even though structurally, it still sometimes was difficult to find a novel and interesting place for a supervisor to show up because that’s really what he was. He was a supervisor. He wasn’t really doing the work. And sometimes we did episodes that were all about him and those were some of our best episodes. But as a supervisor character, that’s not necessarily great storytelling.

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So, when Rocky exited the show, we weren’t feeling like, my gosh, we need to get a manager back in here. We need to get that supervisor character back in here. Unless there’s a strong reason to do it, again, we’ve been letting the stories dictate where we go with the director chair. And other than playing the loss of Vance, and that sort of has given us some things to play about, OK, what’s going to happen now? The idea that we all landed on and gravitated to is we want to address that because we have to, and then we want to get back to telling stories with our core four and Kasie [Diona Reasonover] and Jimmy Palmer down in autopsy and telling the best stories we can there. And that usually doesn’t mean involving a supervisor.

So then you’re just going to feel it out going forward? You don’t have plans for anyone to come in? Or is that going to be the story with LaRoche? Does he fill that spot?

We’ll see where that goes. We’ve sort of played this game with him a little more than —  yeah, he’s fantastic too, by the way — we’d initially intended. And I think that’s also because when we’re looking for stories to tell, he’s great. We are on hiatus now, so there hasn’t been a lot of deep thinking. But I think we’re going to play out his story probably once and for all in regards to his designs, and then we’ll see where that lands us. The designs are what is the best story. That’s really the design. I know that may feel like a punt, but I think one of the other secrets to our success is we don’t make these grand decisions upfront and then try and service them because sometimes, and oftentimes, and most of the times, things just want to go a certain way. And if you’ve already decided you’re going to do this, it handcuffs you and then you can’t go off in interesting and surprising ways.

You played a bit with Torres and Knight and what could be between them this season, but then there still is Knight and Palmer. What can you say about those dynamics going forward?

It’s interesting because I really do try to not read anything about it because it gets in my head, but I have, unfortunately, and gets in all of our heads. And there are very strong feelings about Palmer and Knight of the kind of, can’t they just get together because they’re such a happy couple? But that’s limiting storytelling. Having two people as a couple together is then there’s just a couple. There’s nothing to play. There’s nothing to see. There’s nothing to do. We’re a cop show, so they’re not at home having the regular squabbles that you’d see if you lived together and were at home. They’re in an office. And how many fights or dramatic moments can they have, especially when they’re both extremely emotionally mature people, especially Jimmy Palmer, I’d say, he’s been through a marriage and has children.

Torres, not so much. And so it has shaken things up. And again, that’s something where we’re just going to see where it goes. If we do go in a shocking way, the only thing I’d say is sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants and right or wrong or fair or not, it’s not a question of what you want, it’s how it plays out, what you do with it. And I think we’re still feeling it out in the way that these people in the real world of NCIS, the fake real world of NCIS, I think they’re all still feeling it out. They’re all feeling out how they feel, and we as the writers are right along with them.

The world of NCIS is expanding. You have New York coming, and in show-wise, their locations are pretty close to each other. So it feels like crossovers should be more possible, but then I know it’s going to depend on in real world where you’re actually filming. So what can you say about any crossovers next season? Have you started those conversations?

I have not had those conversations. There’s been a consistent desire for crossover episodes since the dawn of time. So, I can’t imagine suddenly this is the year they say, “Hey, let’s not do a crossover episode.” I don’t know. Something tells me they’re going to be shooting in New York, and that’s just going to make it a lot more difficult because then you have to lose actors to travel them and it becomes very difficult. If they were in LA shooting, we could do a lot of crossovers because, can we borrow them for the afternoon? But when you got to fly someone out and fly someone in, you’ve lost two days and that doesn’t even count the shooting days that they’re going to be there for.

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What else can you say about Season 24? And of course, I have to ask about seeing Mark Harmon considering you brought up Gibbs in the penultimate episode in a major way.

Yeah. Maybe if you gave me one hand to choose the things I’m most proud of on this series, that’s going to be on the hand for sure. Earlier, I was just talking about seeing where the day takes us and not making these broad decisions. There have been multiple times … I mean, we brought up Gibbs. There was a mysterious money deposited into people’s accounts. His name has come up, but one of the things we’ve resisted doing is placing him in any specific area or job or location. I know Origins has done that to some degree, but you don’t necessarily know what time when Gibbs is sitting around the fire, you don’t necessarily know when that storytelling’s occurring. It could be at any point. It could have been the night we dropped him off in Alaska.

We’ve been specifically avoiding Gibbs because I’ve always felt that Gibbs is a larger-than-life kind of guy and you almost imagine he’s transitioned to another plane of existence. I don’t want to think of Gibbs living in an apartment in Anchorage. That’s not what I want to think of him. I want to think of him permanently in the woods, fishing, however that works. So I’ve been very careful about when we bring him back, if we were to bring him back in any way, that we don’t burst that bubble and we continue letting him be this larger than life character.

And then the second piece is it had to be worthy, had to be worthy for Gibbs to come back. And what happened in the penultimate episode, I think, is about as worthy as it gets: protecting his family.

So then going forward, that’s what you’re looking at, right?

Yeah.

And what else can you say about Season 24 in general?

It’s a little too soon to commit to anything. It’s still blue sky right now. The only thing I could say is this last season, I think we went to some very interesting places with our characters, and we’re going to try and build on that and continue in a way that still also tells just some good week-to-week mysteries, balance those two things.

NCIS, Season 24, Fall 2026, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS

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