Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS Season 22 finale are ahead!
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 apartment and discovering his father had been killed by Carla Marino, head of the Kansas City mob. As someone who’s been watching this popular procedural for over 15 years, it ranks as one of the most devastating endings to a season for me. Now we have to wait until CBS’ 2025-2026 fall TV lineup begins to see how NCIS Season 23 follows up on this shocking turn of events, and I’m intrigued by what Cole told me about how things might be different for his character going forward.
Mark Harmon exited early into Season 19, I asked him if he thinks Parker will go rogue to exact revenge on Carla, or if he’ll continue to work within the confines of the law to bring her down. While he doesn’t know the answer to that just yet, he did say the following:
… I think the ground has been laid that he certainly would go outside the bounds of the law. I think it would be out of character for him to do that. I think he’s certainly more than capable of that, and I can’t think of a circumstance more extreme than this one that would cause him to do that.
Carla Marino was introduced in the episode “Knight and Day,” where it was established that Alden Parker had gone after her when he was working at the FBI. Carla came back into the picture in “Nexus,” when it seemed like she held the key to bringing down the drug cartel Nexus. Unfortunately, it was eventually revealed that Carla had become Nexus’ new leader, and along with carrying out this ruse to obtain nuclear material to build a dirty bomb to wipe out the heads of the other crime families (that plot was foiled), she also took Parker captive.
She’d learned that he was the one who told her son Jason about her criminal activities, which led to him running away from home and dying in a motorcycle accident. Carla wanted Parker to suffer for what she saw as driving Jason away, only rather than just kill him, she let him go so he could go back home and find Roman Parker’s poisoned body. Later on in our interview, Gary Cole noted how it’s for him to imagine that this won’t lead to a shift in characterization, saying:
… I’m guessing that after this season, we’re gonna have to see some kind of a change because these circumstances are too extreme for them to be ignored. I don’t think it can be business as usual. You can’t play darkness all the time and be heavy all the time. Human beings, they’re not built for that. But here’s the possibility of him going off the rails a little bit and maybe not being as pastry, bird watching cheerful as he has been in the past.
In addition to Alden Parker’s unresolved conflict with Carla Marino, he’s also still dealing with the mystery of Lily, the little girl from his past he started seeing in the NCIS Season 21 finale. Parker learned in Season 22 that Lily is somehow connected to his late mother, who died when she crashed her car while drunk. However, after Jimmy Palmer got a copy of her original death certificate, he told Jessica Knight that something didn’t add up with it, but we didn’t learn what he discovered.
It’s hard to say if NCIS Season 23 will wrap up both these plot threads right out the gate or if one will be handled sooner than the other. Either way, now I’d like to see Parker go down this dark path that Gary Cole theorized he will… but not too far down it. I don’t want his position as team leader jeopardized.