For seasons now, we’ve been wondering about the little girl Lily that Parker (Gary Cole) has been hallucinating during times of stress on NCIS. It began in the Season 21 finale, and in the Season 23 fall finale, we finally get the answer.
The Tuesday, December 16, episode sees Parker learn what really happened to his mother — whose body wasn’t actually in her grave. When Parker was a child, his mother helped a woman with an abusive husband — Lester was a cop — and Lily was her daughter. She and Parker played together as kids. When Lily’s mom was killed in a car accident caused by her husband, Parker’s mom successfully protected the young girl, but at the cost of her own life. (Lester even took Lily to the crime scene, hence that photo in the newspaper.) Lily, now an adult, was the one to visit Parker’s father the night he died and told him the whole story. After some time alone in an interrogation room with Lester, Parker does get the location of his mother’s body, and the finale ends with the team joining him at a cemetery for a proper burial. (That’s also when Emily Wickersham‘s return as Bishop is revealed. Get scoop on that here.)
So, how much of that was planned from the beginning of the arc? Well, as executive producer Steven D. Binder tells TV Insider, it changed along the way.
“I’m a big believer in sometimes it’s interesting just to throw out like maybe Lost did in Season 1 and Season 2, they just randomly threw stuff out. But also at the same token, I believe in the beginning the idea was the island’s purgatory. And then very quickly everyone was like, ‘Oh, the island’s purgatory.’ And then they’re like, ‘OK, well, the island can’t be purgatory.’ I believe it helps to have a guiding light when you start crafting something. And we did,” he explains.
“We had a backstory that was also pretty dark but also pretty heroic,” Binder continues. “As we started building some things out and seeing where the story wanted to go, we realized our original backstory didn’t work, but the heroism — because Parker’s mom is a hero — and the darkness remained. And I think it was helpful to plan out something in the beginning because at the end of the day, that’s what shines through here, which is it’s dark, but it ends pretty well.”
That’s true of the entire episode, with Parker learning his mother didn’t leave him and his sister, as he’d thought, and the case, with McGee (Sean Murray) and Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) tracking down stolen toys.
When it comes to the exact details of what ended up being what happened to Parker’s mother, those “started to come together last year,” says Binder. “Then it was making it work, which, there’s a little bit of meandering to get you there, I think. But the end of the day it lands. It’s a guy who lost his mother and then he finds her again. And she’s not a woman who abandoned him. She was a hero who died trying to protect somebody else. And it’s very dark and it’s very sad, which is why we have the counterpoint of that holiday story, which is very much the same story, [with the toys].”
The original backstory, Binder reveals, “involved an event that was a horrible family event that occurred. It was not similar to Prince of Tides, but we called it the Prince of Tides story because Prince of Tides was about a man struggling with a horrible demon of this horrible dark night that happened in his family that involved escaped convicts and coming to his home and stuff like that. So the original story was based on something, a dark night in Parker’s past, and that would’ve worked if we were going to do it in one or two episodes. When we realized that this story could have legs and go further and not be something we could solve right away, we realized that’s too simple of event. It had to be something that Parker even himself wasn’t aware of. And then it grew into the, I think, two-season arc story that it ended up being.”
What did you think of the reveal about Parker’s mom and the original plan? Let us know in the comments section below.
