Special Agent Alden Parker will be dead set on revenge when NCIS Season 23 rolls around this fall, says series star Gary Cole.
Speaking with TVLine West Coast Bureau Chief Dave Nemetz at Wednesday’s CBS Fest ’25, celebrating the release of the network’s programming schedule for the 2025-26 TV season, Cole pondered how Parker will respond to his father Roman’s murder at the hands of, it sure seems, Kansas City crime boss Carla Marino (played by guest star Rebecca De Mornay).
“He’s pissed. He’s really pissed,” Cole asserts in the red carpet video above. “I’m not sure how that’s going to play out, but I know it’s going to have something to do with revenge — whether accurate [by targeting Carla] or misplaced…. [But] it can’t not have any consquences to him mentally.”
In the moment that Parker found a lifeless Roman, with bullet wounds to the chest, he first broke down… but then, upon spying what appeared to be Carla’s lip mark on a nearby wine glass, he let out a frustrated howl, smashing the nearby TV to the floor.
Cole says he was “intimated” by that sequence, “because normally you have a scene where just one thing happens,” like discovering the body. But in this instance, “in the same moment, he comes to a full realization… that he knows who did it, immediately.”
Opening up the video above, series vet Brian Dietzen ventures that whatever the next beat may be in the on-again/off-again romance between Dr. Jimmy Palmer and Special Agent Jessica Knight (Katrina Law), “I think it’s gonna be fun.
“Whether or not they get back together, those scenes” likely will be “interesting stuff,” Dietzen posits. After all, “it’s Katrina Law, be honest, guys,” he is quick to note. “Who doesn’t want a scene with Katrina Law?”
Short of a Jimmy/Jess rekindling… in the wake of a recent hint that Kasie (Diona Reasonover) is ready to re-embrace the dating scene… and given that Parker is also quite single, Reasonover pitches a group speed dating outing for the three co-workers.
“How does that go wrong?” asks Dietzen, sarcastically — though Cole is quick with a deadly serious answer!
