‘NCIS’ Boss Rules Out One Lily Theory, Teases Parker’s ‘Messed up History’

Perhaps the biggest question over this midseason break for NCIS is exactly who is Lily? That’s the name attached — more about the use of that word in a moment — to the young girl Parker (Gary Cole) first saw when he was bleeding out on the ship in the Season 21 finale. She has since appeared to him again. Adding this layer to his character has been the plan since “the very beginning with the original pitch to Gary Cole,” reveals executive producer Steven D. Binder.

“There was something, perfect characters who are perfectly well adjusted are not particularly interesting. For whatever reason, this didn’t happen upfront. I think maybe it was trying to transition him into the world first and become a member of the team rather than introduce him with some sort of deficit or fatal flaw or something deep in his past. So we waited a little bit,” he explains to TV Insider.

Like other ideas, these writers like to “let things percolate a little bit,” Binder continues. “What’s the best way to do this thing that we want to do? And when Scott Williams pitched the season finale last year, it just seemed like a perfect match to finally bring in this character from his past — or his present. You don’t really know yet.”

The last time we saw her was in Season 22 Episode 8, “Out of Control,” in which Parker was so distracted he swerved on the road. Then, when he tried to approach her at the end — off Grace’s (Laura San Giacomo) suggestion — she left. But there was a note for him (in his mind, at least): “You can’t tell anyone.” It sounds like NCIS is going to continue to slow play the reveal to come.

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“There’s two trains of thought on this,” says Binder. “One is, let’s just go there and get there and do it. And the other, which I’m more partial to, is there are really so many interesting layers to this that each new layer is its own sort of—imagine if ‘you can’t tell anyone’ was the Act 1 out and then we just burned through all the cool mystery in one episode. I don’t know that it would be as enjoyable if we did that. So every time we go back to the storyline, I do promise that we’re going to take it to a new and interesting place every single time. We’re not going to draw anything out. We’re going to take you through this and get you to the place where we’re going. But it’s a really interesting sort of messed up history that Parker has and that we don’t want to blow all in one episode.” He then pointed out that it took until Season 3 to “really learn what was gnawing” at Gibbs (Mark Harmon).

Binder does share that when it comes to Lily’s identity, “if it’s a theory, it’s probably wrong. This is not his sister, and I wouldn’t even say her name is Lily necessarily.”

Parker had also seen his mother in that vision in the Season 21 finale, though he refuses to talk about in therapy with Grace (for now). “We all have family lore that gets passed down to us by our elders. And what is going to trigger Parker is he’s going to go dig into some family lore and find out it’s not what he had been told, that he has a memory of events and then there were the events that his father [Francis X. McCarthy] told him and then there are the events that actually happened,” teases Binder. “We’re going to see Parker’s father again. Parker’s going to get a chance to go question his father about this and realize that what his life — or some life history that he thought was real is not actually his history.”

What’s your theory about Lily? Let us know in the comments section below.

NCIS, Returns, Monday, January 27, 2025, 9/8c, CBS