NCIS has several mysteries up its sleeves with its characters, but none as mysterious as Parker’s (Gary Cole) Lily hallucinations.
Beginning in the Season 21 finale, the show teased a buried history in Parker’s life when he started seeing someone while on an abandoned ship. He ignored the hallucination when they got all better, but Lily returned in Season 22, Episode 8, and the mystery deepened. Showrunner Steven D. Binder talked to TV Insider about this mystery that seems to grow with every passing episode. He said that Lily’s identity is not what people think, and a deeper story will be explored. “If it’s a theory, it’s probably wrong. This is not his sister, and I wouldn’t even say her name is Lily necessarily,” Binder said, shattering the running theory that Lily is Parker’s sister. It turns out she’s not, and she might not even be named Lily! The showrunner teased a deep dive into Parker’s family history, saying,
“We all have family lore that gets passed down to us by our elders. And what is going to trigger Parker is he’s going to go dig into some family lore and find out it’s not what he had been told, that he has a memory of events and then there were the events that his father (Francis X. McCarthy) told him and then there are the events that actually happened. We’re going to see Parker’s father again. Parker’s going to get a chance to go question his father about this and realize that what his life — or some life history that he thought was real is not actually his history.”
Bear with ‘NICS,’ They Know What They’re Doing with the Lily Mystery.
Granted that the mystery was introduced in the Season 21 finale, the Lily mystery has been running for two seasons! Binder addressed the decision to extrapolate it. “Every time we go back to the storyline, I do promise that we’re going to take it to a new and interesting place every single time. We’re not going to draw anything out,” he said. Binder explained that the mystery was too good to burn through in a few episodes, saying,
“We’re going to take you through this and get you to the place where we’re going. But it’s a really interesting sort of messed up history that Parker has and that we don’t want to blow all in one episode.”
Tune in to CBS on Mondays to discover how the Lily mystery developed when NCIS resumes this January. Catch up with past episodes on Paramount+.