‘NCIS’ Season Finale Death Revealed

Spoilers ahead for the NCIS Season 22 finale (“Nexus”)

The NCIS Season 22 finale death has been revealed, and it’s not what fans expected.

After star Wilmer Valderrama teased to PopCulture.com and other outlets about a major and earth-shattering death, fans of the long-running procedural were bracing themselves.

In Monday’s episode, “Nexus,” the team continued to deal with the Nexus Cartel and Deputy Director LaRoche’s connections. Although it seemed like Gary Cole’s Alden Parker would die after getting taken by mob boss Carla Marino, who blamed him for her son’s death after he told him about her criminal activity, she told him that killing him would be too easy. So instead, it seemed like she did the next best thing.

At the very end of the episode, Parker returned home to the TV on, and his dad dead in a chair, having been killed. Additionally, one of two wine glasses sitting near him had lipstick on it, which likely points to this being Carla’s doing. Parker screamed and threw things just as the episode went to black, showing that he will never be the same again.

Executive producer Steven D. Binder told TV Insider the reason for killing off Parker’s dad, saying, “The idea of Parker is a pretty chill guy, even though he’s had a different upbringing, a troubled upbringing.” He continued, “Whereas the previous bullpen dynamic was you worked around the clock and never stopped and never had a life, he’s a more balanced individual. Gary’s a very balanced guy himself when you see him, and you see that bleed over into the character, and we thought it would be very interesting to take that character and push him into a place where he’s never been before.”

“And that’s sort of been something we’ve been talking about almost from — writers get together and are like, ‘Yeah, this character is really turning out to be even and balanced,’ and then, ‘Let’s throw him off balance,’ just sort of an instinct you have,” Binder said. “So that was always there circulating in our head: What is it going to take to send this guy, turn this guy into a man on fire?”

“And nothing really was coming along,” he explained. “We didn’t really want to force anything. And then a bunch of things came together, and it just seemed like, okay, how do we not do this now? You’ve got this arch nemesis of Parker’s who blames him for — losing a dad’s bad, but losing a child’s considerably worse, and blames Parker for this and is vindictive and evil enough that she doesn’t want to just kill him and end that she wants to torture him and this is the person she’s chosen to torture him with, or who would be the person to torture him with? And it’s really just his dad at this point.”

Even though it wasn’t a death that fans were expecting, this will surely change things moving forward for Parker, and probably the team, depending on where the show picks up in Season 23. Especially since Parker was starting to get more answers about his mother’s death, he now has to say goodbye to his father prematurely. Not only that, but he will likely be hungry for revenge, and there’s no telling what will happen.

Fans will just have to tune in to Season 23 of NCIS, premiering this fall on CBS. All episodes are streaming on Paramount+.