Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS episode “Empty Nest” are ahead!
Katrina Law knew early on that Jessica Knight would stick around for NCIS Season 22, and now that the premiere, titled “Empty Nest,” has aired on the 2024 TV schedule, the public knows how that came to be. After six months of working as Camp Pendleton’s chief REACT instructor, this season’s opening case made Knight realize that this wasn’t a job she wanted anymore, so she decided to return to the squad in Washington D.C. Unfortunately, she’s coming back as a new threat has emerged, as there’s something shady about Seamus Dever’s Gabriel LaRoche, and Law told CinemaBlend what fans can expect from this bad bad who’s “kicked off McGee’s Spidey senses hard.”
Introduced as the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, LaRoche is now the Deputy Director of NCIS, the position that Sean Murray’s Timothy McGee was hoping to get. This end reveal came just moments after McGee started sensing some sketchiness afoot with LaRoche and his involvement with this episode’s case. Ahead of the NCIS Season 22 premiere, I had the pleasure of speaking with Katrina Law, and here’s what she teased about LaRoche:
Well, this guy who has now been promoted into the NCIS world, it has kicked McGee's Spidey senses off really hard. McGee, he's been a great agent, so when his Spidey senses go off, they're usually not wrong. Now that he's honed in on him, I don't know how, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to end well for this guy. Somehow he's going to mess things up for us before we can figure out how to take him down. Yeah, having a leak, a mole, a bad person in their organization is not what this team wants, and they're going to do everything in their power to take him out.
Gabriel LaRoche came into the picture when McGee asked for the DOJ’s files on the Nexus drug cartel and its leader, El Padre, to aid NCIS in tracking down the missing Nick Torres, who’d gone undercover with the cartel. Strangely, LaRoche seemed reluctant to provide this intel, though he ultimately came through. Where things really got weird was when McGee passed along to Torres and Alden Parker that while Celia Torres, the attorney who’d secretly been working for El Padre, admitted to leaking the REACT intel, she never admitted to blowing Torres’ cover.
While we technically don’t know with 100% certainty who perpetrated that deed, a suspicious McGee pointed out that other than the looped-in people at NCIS, the only other person who knew Torres was undercover with Nexus was LaRoche. So now a suspected mole is NCIS’ newest deputy director, which will make it even harder for McGee, Parker, Torres and Knight to look into him and present their findings to Director Leon Vance. Naturally we can count on the good guys to emerge victorious in the end, but as Katrina Law told me, LaRoche won’t make it easy for them.
New episodes of NCIS air Mondays at 9 pm ET on CBS. You can stream the Season 22 premiere with a Paramount+ subscription, which can also be used to view the two-episode debut of the prequel NCIS: Origins, along with all the other shows in this procedural franchise.
