Gary Cole’s Alden Parker was badly injured during the NCIS Season 21 finale, and while he and Jessica Knight were waiting to be rescued, he experienced a strange vision in the midst of major blood loss involving himself as a child and a mysterious little girl named Lily. Over the summer, it was revealed that Parker actually doesn’t who the girl is, and earlier this month, the Lily mystery was finally revisited, though it only became more complicated. So there are a lot of questions left to be answered concerning this NCIS plot point when the show returns on the 2025 TV schedule, and showrunner Steven D. Binder shared with CinemaBlend how it will affect Parker later in Season 22.
The events of “Out of Control” saw Parker hallucinating Lily in real life, and it got to the point where he sought the help of Dr. Grace Confalone. While it was to be expected that this unusual problem wouldn’t be solved in just one session, by the end of the episode, Parker read a “note” left behind by Lily that read, “You can’t tell anyone,” making this whole affair even weirder. During my conversation with Binder, which also included him teasing what’s ahead for Deputy Director Gabriel LaRoche and opening up about Nick Torres’ secret girlfriend, I asked how the Lily mystery will impact Parker moving forward, and he answered:
It’s a balance because he needs to function. The guy's got a job, he's got to work. But it’s gonna be a problem for him because he's going to learn things about himself that he thought were always true, and he's gonna find out things are not exactly how they seem and he may not be exactly who he thinks he is in terms of his life history. It's not like he's got a big identity [crisis] or anything like that, but he's gonna have an earth-shifting understanding of his family history, and it's gonna have present-day implications as well. This isn't just a stroll down memory lane for Parker. So it's gonna cause some problems and it's gonna come to a head. We're not there yet. I think all the moves getting there are so interesting in and of themselves that I don't think we wanna rush it, but this is gonna be a long term thing for him.
So whoever Lily is, she’s tied to Alden Parker’s family history, which makes sense given that in his original hallucination, Gary Cole’s character also saw his mother, who’d left him and his father when he was young, and died a few years later. Dr. Grace took interest an interest in Parker’s mother while they were chatting, and while Parker eventually admitted he does have unresolved issues involving her, he wants to focus on figuring out the deal with Lily. So after Steven D. Binder gave me the above statement, I asked for clarification about if Parker’s mother is being looped in with the Lily mystery or if that will be a separate plot point revisited later. He told me:
It's all gonna be tied together, his family and things that may or may not have occurred in his history that he doesn't remember, and he's going to get a refresher from his investigations that's gonna be very disturbing to him.
It’s hard to say when specifically the enigma that is Lily will be revisited in NCIS Season 22, but clearly Parker’s in for a rough patch once answers start coming to life. That’s not the greatest thing for a law enforcement agent to have to deal with, and that’s not even the only problem that’s surfaced for Parker this season. He also ran into an old enemy of his named Carla Morino, and it definitely seems like we’ll be seeing her again at some point.
NCIS Season 22 will resume airing on Monday, January 27, the same night that NCIS: Origins picks back up. You can keep yourself entertained with the entirety of the NCIS franchise over the holiday break by streaming these shows with a Paramount+ subscription.
