At the beginning of NCIS Season 11, Cote de Pablo departed after eight seasons as a main cast member. However, that wasn’t the last we saw of her character, Ziva David, who became a beloved addition to the popular CBS procedural when she was brought in to replace the murdered Caitlin Todd. De Pablo made a surprise appearance in the final moments of the Season 16 finale, then appeared in several Season 17 episodes. Great steps were taken to ensure that the actress’ return was kept a tightly-guarded secret, which executive producer Mark Horowitz described as “invoking Fight Club rules.”
Horowitz stopped by Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch to talk with de Pablo and Tony DiNozzo actor Michael Weatherly, both of whom will be paired back together in the upcoming spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva. When the conversation turned to everything that went into planning de Pablo’s Season 16 cameo, the producer started off by saying:
When you came back for your special episode… and we were all waiting for you. We were very good at keeping secrets. These surprises that happened in front of the audience were a surprise to many, many people who worked on the show that were that were not told about what we were going to do. There was a whole thing we did where that scene was never published. It only existed on one piece of paper, and we would literally show it to the dozen people that had to be involved, and that was it. It was never, never released to agents or anyone. The dailies were all kept separate. Everything was separate. This happened when Kate was shot on the rooftop, that's where it started. And we came up with what I called Fight Club Rules. ‘We're invoking Fight Club rules, we're just not going to talk about it. And I mean you're not going to talk to your wife, your husband, your kids, your friends at the bar, nobody.’ And we were able to pull this off.
Following Cote de Pablo’s exit as a series regular, it was thought that Ziva had died offscreen towards the end of Season 13, though Tony didn’t believe this. After resigning from NCIS, he went to Israel to look for answers with their daughter Tali, who he’d only just learned about, and then Paris to honor Ziva’s love for the French city. Then in Season 16, Ellie Bishop learned that Ziva was still alive, and at the end of that season’s finale, de Pablo’s character showed up in Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ basement to warn him he was in danger.
You can see how the rest of this story unfolded by watching NCIS Season 17 with your Paramount+ subscription, but I like how Mark Horowitz and the show’s team channeled the first rule from the Fight Club novel and film adaptation, “Don’t talk about Fight Club,” in order to ensure the secrecy of Ziva’s return. Horowitz also described what it was like on the night that Cote de Pablo arrived to shoot her cameo. As he explained:
Your return was one of those, where we sent the whole crew off except for a very small group of people. You got caught up in traffic or something. There was some kind of accident or something. So we were waiting, it was late, it was the last night of the last day of the season. I forbid anyone to take any pictures, but I was there at my camera, and there's this moment where suddenly a hush came over the stage, and echoing from the distance are footsteps, very distinct boots coming closer and closer, closer. And everyone turned and looked and waited. And then from around this corner becomes Cote de Pablo. It was a wonderful, wonderful moment.
When we left off with Ziva in Season 17, she was going to reunite with Tony and Tali in Paris, marking the first time the three would finally be together. Ziva hasn’t been seen on NCIS since then, though Tony did make his own surprise return earlier this year for the tribute episode honoring David McCallum and his character, Donald “Ducky” Mallard. We’ll finally get to see Ziva and Tony reunited on screen in their aforementioned spinoff, which will be a Paramount+ exclusive and follow them going on the run across Europe after Tony’s security company is attacked.
NCIS: Tony & Ziva doesn’t have a release date set yet, but count on it premiering sometime on the 2025 TV schedule. New episodes of NCIS air Mondays at 9 pm ET on CBS, followed by the prequel series NCIS: Origins.
