‘NCIS’: Brian Dietzen Says Whatever’s Going on With Knight & Torres Is Palmer’s ‘Blind Spot’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS Season 23 Episode 8 “Stolen Moments.”]

When it came to telling a day in the life of Dr. Jimmy Palmer on NCIS, Brian Dietzen was skeptical. But as the Tuesday, December 9, episode, which Dietzen co-wrote with Jesse Stern, shows, it’s one worth telling and it ends up being an important story for Palmer — could he and Knight (Katrina Law) get back together? — and about AI.

Palmer ends up being the one to carry around the AI chatbot that the agency must test out, and in doing so, he receives the opportunity to eavesdrop on Knight and Torres’ (Wilmer Valderrama) conversation about dating and also admits that he’s lonely (he is alone in the morgue). But, just like when it comes to the tech, is timing just not right for him and Knight? As he’s approaching her at the end of the episode, he watches her leave with Torres.

Below, Brian Dietzen breaks down that ending, ponders what it means for the future, and more.

We get the heartbreaking ending of Palmer watching Knight leave with Torres. When Palmer was going to approach Knight, was he ready to talk about their relationship? He has that line earlier that he’s not 100% sure why they even ended their relationship.

Brian Dietzen: I think that he definitely wanted to go talk. I don’t think that there was a rushing into one another’s arms and then the music swelling sort of thing. But for him, this whole journey, this whole episode really was about how important is time, and more importantly, that currency of time is only valuable if you spend it with someone and saved time doesn’t really get you more quality time with someone unless you spend it again. So I think that he’s realizing, hey, I would love to try this thing. And wherever Knight and Torres are in their relationship or friendship or wherever they’re headed, I think Jimmy’s a little — that’s been his blind spot. He hasn’t seen that at all. And so for him to recognize that there might be something there, I don’t know if it’s maybe something just Jimmy’s seeing or if it’s something that’s the beginnings of a romance of some sort, he’s been blinded by the fact that he’s been so focused on his day-to-day, his saving time in his basement surrounded by dead bodies, and I think he recognizes by the end, man, that’s no way to live. So, I’m hoping to see some cool growth from him after this.

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Is Palmer really worried about something going on between Knight and Torres?

I think that he’s been blind to it. In this episode, he confesses to Nick that he doesn’t know why things ended before, and I think he wouldn’t be talking that way with Nick if he knew that there was something else going on there. So yeah, I think it’s not that Jimmy’s obtuse about it. I think a lot of people could watch this show and not even see that there’s something going there. It is kind of simmering below the surface. And me as an actor, Brian, I don’t really know what’s going to happen on either.

So, in prepping for this episode and writing with Jesse Stern, who’s one of our incredible veteran writers — he left the show maybe 10 to 15 years ago, and he returned just to do one episode and asked if he could co-write one. So we wrote it together and we had a lot of help from the rest of our staff as well, it was really a team effort. But he said he wanted to kind of explore that part of it, the relationship part. That’s what he really has been drawn into with the recent years with the newest cast essentially.

With the show seemingly bringing Palmer and Knight’s relationship back into focus, what’s next with them?

I don’t even know that this is bringing their relationship back into being at all. The thing that made me excited about it was saying, well, I’m not sure where Torres is, I’m not sure where Knight is, but I do think I know where Jimmy is because the last thing he said to her was that he loved her. And so let’s at least set in stone one of the three characters of where they’re at emotionally. So I like the concept of a guy going to maybe not get the girl so much as at least talk to her and then the harsh reality of, oh, shoot, maybe it’s not the right time to do this. It’s kind of a neat quandary. And it doesn’t mean they won’t get back together. It doesn’t mean that they will. But you at least know where Jimmy stands.

When you set out to tell the story of a day in the life of Palmer, what were some of the musts that you had to include?

That was actually Jesse Stern’s idea. He said he really wanted to do a day in the life of Jimmy, and I thought, “I don’t know. Are people going to be interested by that? It’s just me walking around doing stuff. I’m not that interesting.” And they said, “No, no, no. We’ll actually watch you go back to the back elevator and go down and get ready for a case and all that sort of stuff and follow that along.” And then Steve Binder, our showrunner said, “I think that’s pretty cool, too.” So, “OK, cool. I’ll trust you guys. That sounds fun.” I think that was one of the things that was kind of a must have, was some of the stuff we don’t see necessarily, like him prepping the body, unloading it, that sort of stuff, him getting ready to go to the crime scene. And the reason why some of that stuff, I would say normally wouldn’t be all that interesting is because no one there to talk to. He’s not a Ducky [David McCallum] who talks to the dead bodies and goes off on these diatribes about some ancient scrolls or something, or civilizations. So the cool mechanic on this one is having someone to talk to throughout the entire episode. That was a really fun thing.

Sonja Flemming/CBS

There’s a lightness to this episode. You’ve said that you’ve wanted to write a lighter show. Was it purposeful that you did so or did it just happen to fall into place that way?

Yeah, I think any good NCIS show has to have some humor, right? It has to have some lightness to it. If it doesn’t, then it’s not really an NCIS show. The last episode that I worked on with Scott Williams was a tribute to Ducky and also to David McCallum. And there was not much a whole lot of lightness to that, but even that had some light moments when Tony DiNozzo [Michael Weatherly] came back at the end, seeing two friends reconnect. So, whether there’s humor or not, there’s always some heart with NCIS. I was glad that we got to get some humor and heart in this one for sure. But yeah, that was definitely a goal for sure.

There has to be a weight off of Palmer’s shoulders that he’s now filled Parker (Gary Cole) in on what’s going on with his mom and the discrepancies about her death, namely that it looks like murder, right? Her body’s being exhumed. The logline for the fall finale teases that the truth is finally revealed. What can you preview?

That’s one of those things that’s been going on for a year and a half now, is Parker seeing this little girl Lily in his vision. Scott Williams wrote the fall finale. It’s tremendous because we get to have a good NCIS holiday episode but also wrap up some of these lingering questions that Parker’s had and that his team has been trying to help him through. So all this stuff that we’ve been teasing for, like I said, a year and a half is going to come to a culmination of sorts.

This episode also teases that NCIS is seemingly being evaluated and that’s something Vance is keeping from the others. It also explains why, as Steven Binder has said, he’s back to being by the book. How big of a concern is that evaluation? What other ways is that going to come up?

In this age of cost cutting and time saving and all that sort of stuff, whether it’s AI or just redundancy, department of redundancy departments, people are looking out for their own jobs and their own security and whatnot — the government’s going through a lot of that as well in real life, and our show is going to reflect that as well. So this is not the last you’re going to hear about whether or not NCIS needs to be cutting some costs, and that’s going to have a huge impact on our team at some point this season. So, yeah, it’s in the air for a lot of people, I think, in this country right now and worldwide of, will I have a job to go back to tomorrow, those sorts of questions. And like I said, this is going to affect the NCIS team in a big way.

NCIS, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS

—Additional reporting by Meaghan Darwish