'NCIS' Character Killed off After COVID-19 Battle

A dilemma  TV and film creators faced at the height of the coronavirus pandemic was how their creations and productions should address real world events. Should it be ignored? The virus left out to satisfy viewers seeking escapism or should it be included directly? NCIS is the latest show navigating the pandemic, with the latest episode featuring a COVID-19 death hitting the show's main team. In Tuesday's episode of NCIS, it's revealed that medical examiner Jimmy Palmer, a fan favorite, lost his wife to COVID-19.

Bishop asks Palmer whether his mother will be living with him permanently, and the usually jovial Palmer shared the sad news. "You guys were so great, when, you know... I lost Breena," Palmer says. "But between work, single parenting, school, it just got to be too much. So, I called in a lifeline."Brian Dietzen, the actor who plays Palmer, was interviewed about the episode for ET, and he revealed that he knew about his character's loss before he received the script and that the situation offered a lot of growth opportunities for his character.

"We can see within this week's episode that Jimmy is trying to keep whatever happiness he can, trying to say, 'Hey, my glass is half overflowing here. I'm doing really great,' while we as the audience can see that that may not be the case," Dietzen explained. "He's doing whatever he can just keep his head above water. But there's only so long that that can happen before there's going to be a certain breaking point.

"Well, I think that unfortunately in our country — and across the world I should say — that's been the case for a lot of folks who have dealt with COVID so closely," Dietzen said." Certainly, as a medical examiner, he [Palmer] would have dealt with the lines on his face from the N95 mask he'd worn 12, 14 hours a day dealing with bodies. And a lot of times these folks who are working closely with COVID, whether it's a medical examiner or respiratory doctors, pulmonologists, they have lost people in their lives because of their proximity to the disease. Prior to the vaccine, there was no way to protect other people from it, aside from the prophylactic procedures of masks and gloves."

"I think that was one of the interesting and obviously heartbreaking things about this disease that we've all seen, is these people on the front line were working as doctors who are working as EMTs who have had to go through heartbreak on their own," Dietzen continued, praising the work of real-life medical workers. "And yet they're asked to just continue working because if they stop working, then we don't have our frontline there for us anymore. In many ways, this episode turned out to be a recognition of people who have lost others during this pandemic. If you wanted to get more specific about it, it's about our frontline workers and about people who have helped us deal with this pandemic going through their own trials and continuing to show up for the rest of us."

Dietzen said that the team behind NCIS made a conscious decision to handle the pandemic on the show, instead of avoiding the issue. "It's interesting because different shows have treated COVID differently," he said. "Some of them have said, 'We're not going to deal with this at all because we don't want to have to deal with those storylines and whatnot.' But in the history of NCIS, when major things have happened in our country or in the world, there have been stories about it."

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