Will ‘NCIS’ Kill off Another Main Character?

Is NCIS about to kill off yet another main character while fans are still reeling from the loss of Director Vance?

The Season 23 finale ended Tuesday night with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger that left one of the team’s fate uncertain — but whose?

After McGee’s teen son Mateo (Patrick Keleher) tours NCIS, he seemingly decides the cyber internship isn’t for him — only for Palmer (Brian Dietzen) to tell Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) that he used a workstation to complete an application.

Torres, however, can’t find said application when he looks into the matter, so he confronts Mateo in an alley. The teen insists he drop it, revealing he’s armed. “They could be watching,” he says.

Suddenly, gunshots ring out. It’s unclear who fired. The season ends.

So who fired their weapon? Could Torres have been hit? NCIS showrunner Steven D. Binder confirmed in an interview with TV Insider that “someone was hit” during the scene, but hinted that fans can breathe a sigh of relief in terms of any more fatalities.

“Someone was hit. I can confirm that,” Binder told the outlet. “I sort of had my fill this season, all of us, of killing people. So I can rule that out. And also, there’s not a lot of fun there. When someone’s dead, they’re dead. It’s much more interesting — I’ll think back to when Gibbs shot McGee. It’s much more fun when someone’s alive and been shot than when they’re dead. And by fun, I mean, interesting.”

Luckily, it appears that fans don’t have to be too worried about Torres’ fate. It’s a good thing, too, as fans likely wouldn’t take well to another death. Rocky Carroll’s character Vance was killed off during the show’s 500th episode in March when he was killed by a corrupt agent who tried to blow up NCIS HQ.

Carroll told TVLine that although he was surprised by his character’s fate, he was more surprised by how quickly he came to terms with it.

“Our executive producer, Steven D. Binder, came into my trailer and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got an idea for the 500th episode. We want to do something that really sends shockwaves through the TV community and the fan base, and your character is central to the storyline,’” Carroll recalled.

“I was like, ‘I’m interested.’ So he proceeds to tell me the storyline that the agency comes under fire, and it’s on the verge of being dismantled and folded into another agency, and… Director Vance saves the agency, and in the process of saving the agency, he loses his life,” Carroll continued. “‘It’s a great story. It’s gonna be really huge.’ And my first thought was, ‘Back up to the part again: He saves the agency and loses his life?’”

“Because I’ve been playing this character for 18 seasons. 18 seasons is a lot,” he reflected. “I feel like being a series regular on a hit show for 18 years is such an anomaly to begin with. The show is on for 23 years, with a 24th season already promised. I never thought that I would be doing this show and playing this character for 18 consecutive seasons. When I started, the show was already five years in.”

“It was towards the end of the fifth season when my character was introduced, and I literally thought when I joined the series that I was coming in probably on the tail end,” Carroll explained. “If it went seven or eight seasons, it would have been a great run.”

“And yes, I would have loved to have been one of the characters who was there for the very last episode, when they board up the windows, and when they officially do say, ‘All right, it’s time for everybody to turn off the lights and go home.’ You’d like to be one of the last men standing,” he continued. “But after 18 seasons, I couldn’t have asked for more. If somebody had told me 18 years ago, you’re gonna do this show for nearly two decades, I would have bet the farm against that.”

“And the more I thought about it, the more I realized if there’s ever a time to write a story where your character is a central figure of it, and there’s closure… I don’t know what the end of NCIS will ultimately be, but at least I feel like my character really kind of came full circle,” Carroll shared. “With the 500th episode, Steve Binder said his objective was, ‘I want this to be a tribute and a love letter to your character.’ And I think that’s what we accomplished.”

Ultimately, fans will have to wait until Season 24 to see how it the Mateo-Torres situation shakes out.

NCIS Season 24 premieres this fall on Tuesdays on CBS.