Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS episode “Nexus” are ahead!
Last week, Wilmer Valderrama shared that the NCIS Season 22 finale would deliver a major death, though it thankfully didn’t end up being any of the characters I speculated about ahead of time. Instead, “Nexus,” which just finished airing on the 2025 TV schedule, ended with Gary Cole’s Alden Parker discovering his father Roman, played by Francis X. McCarthy, having been poisoned by Rebecca De Mornay’s Carla Marino, the head of the Kansas City mob. It was one hell of a game-changing scene to wrap up this season, and Cole told CinemaBlend why he found it “intimidating” to shoot what’s unquestionably Parker’s most emotionally devastated moment on NCIS yet.
There were a lot of twist and turns to account for in this episode following the big shakeup to the LaRoche storyline delivered last week, but arguably the most notable of them was that Carla Marino was actually the new head of Nexus, the drug cartel that’s been causing trouble since the start Season 22. But even when remembering that she and Parker have also been adversaries for years, the fact that Carla stooped to murdering Roman was shocking. In real life, Gary Cole was pleased with how this twist turned out, tell me during my interview with him earlier today:
I mean, we know when we do the last show, they’re gonna push things. But I thought it was a really dynamic ending, and the way they arrived at it I thought was, as I always think about our writers, well thought out. You didn’t really necessarily see it coming, which I think is good. I was glad to have something to play that was that intense. It intimidated me because a lot of things had to happen quickly in the in the last scene, but I think the way that they built it was good.
Carla Marino was introduced in the episode “Knight and Day,” where it was established that Alden Parker had tried for years to apprehend her when he was working at the FBI. So there was already no shortage of attention when she returned in “Nexus” to offer her services to NCIS to help with stopping Nexus. But as mentioned, it was actually Carla running the cartel these days, with the originally-presumed leader known as The Butcher being fictional. And while Nexus did indeed want to steal uranium to make a dirty bomb so Carla could eliminate the heads of the other four crime families, she was also insistent on exacting revenge for the role she believes Parker played in her son’s death.
Carla had discovered Alden Parker was the one who told her son Jason about her criminal activities, which is what caused Jason to flee from her and put him on the path to dying in a motorcycle accident. After kidnapping Parker during “Nexus,” it initially looked like she was going kill him, but not so. Instead, Parker came back to his apartment and found his father’s lifeless body sitting in a chair in front of the playing TV with blood on his shirt. When I asked Gary Cole how into the right kind of mental headspace for this scene, he started off by saying:
Well, the one thing I recognized was that just as you described it, there was a big transition, maybe even two transitions, and that was a little intimidating. I was like, ‘Boy, is that gonna work?’ But the way it was laid out and the way we shot it and the way José [Clemente Hernandez] directed it, I think it was pulled off. One is obviously just the discovery of the body. So that’s a shock.
So how do we know with 100% certainty that Carla Marino killed Roman Parker? Well, earlier in the episode, Carla stopped by Parker’s place as he and his father were having dinner, and she invited herself in. Roman, unaware of Carla’s criminal activities, was charmed by her, so evidently he let her into her son’s apartment while Parker was gone, and they enjoyed some wine together. Sadly, Carla laced Roman’s wine with poison, and the lipstick stain left on the other glass was enough to clue Parker in on what happen, sending him into a rage and throwing his TV to the ground. Gary Cole continued:
Then there’s the immediate recognition that it was a murder, which kicks it up even another level. Because discovering a dead body is one thing of a loved one. Discovering a loved one that is murdered is a whole other animal. Because all of a sudden, you’re not just in shock and grief. You’ve got shame and guilt and rage and everything blowing through your head. It’s hard to process. And then the necessity was for it to turn into just vengeful rage. Or at least the premeditation of something to come. They built in something physically with destroying the television and all that stuff.
Parker already had more than enough incentive to put Carla Marino behind bars, but now she’s taken away his father away before it was his time. It’s hard to say how soon this will be followed up on in NCIS Season 23, but I’m already curious to see if Parker will step outside the law to dispense what he sees as justice to his adversary. “Nexus” also ended with yet another tease with the show’s ongoing Lily mystery, with Jimmy Palmer telling Jessica Knight that “something doesn’t add up” with Parker’s mother’s original death certificate. Something tells me, though, that Parker’s not in the right frame of mind to go down that road right now.
NCIS Season 23 premieres this fall alongside NCIS: Origins Season 2, and we’ll let you know when the specific day and time is announced. NCIS: Tony & Ziva will also premiere on Paramount+ around the same time, while NCIS: Sydney Season 3’s arrival isn’t narrowed down just yet.
