- - 'NCIS' Boss Reveals the Truth About Alden Parker's Lily Fantasy and the Cliffhanger Return of a Fan Favorite (Exclusive)

Paulette CohnDecember 16, 2025 at 11:42 PM

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NCIS wrapped up its 23rd mid-season finale with the answer to the burning question of who Lily is and what really happened to Parker’s mother Eleanor, but it also introduced a brand-new cliffhanger: Why is Eleanor Bishop (Emily Wickersham) the target of an NCIS Elite operation because NCIS Elite is a special unit for major threats? But more on that later.

It is a convoluted story to get to Lily’s identity but well worth the wait since it brings in so many different elements, including whose lipstick was on the wine glass in Alden Parker’s (Gary Cole) father’s apartment the night Roman (Francis X. McCarthy) was murdered – and it’s not crime boss Carla Marino’s (Rebecca De Mornay).

“Lily turns out to be somebody that I knew and had contact with,” Cole told Parade at the recent NCIS 500th episode celebration. "She was roughly the same age as me. She was the daughter of a friend of my mother.”

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The “Heaven and Nature” episode also brings Parker some closure by revealing that the only reason his mother ran out on him and his sister Harriet (Nancy Travis) was because she had been murdered and her body was lying undiscovered in a 1969 Dodge submerged at the bottom of a small lake outside of Toledo, Ohio.

“Obviously, it's a shock when I meet Lily because she has no idea that she's going to see me,” Cole continued. “We meet as the door opens and I recognize her, and she recognizes me and then she tells me all the details of what happened.”

Sean Murray as Special Agent Timothy McGee, Gary Cole as FBI Special Agent Alden Parker, and Diona Reasonover as Forensic Scientist Kasie HinesPhoto: Sonja Flemming/CBS

The story really took off when Kasie (Diona Reasonover) discovered that the body in Eleanor Parker’s grave wasn’t his mother. This was just after Jimmy (Brian Dietzen) shared the news that the person exhumed from the grave had been murdered, not died in a car crash. And then it got even crazier when it turned out that whoever had wine with Parker’s father and left the lipstick print the night he was murdered was closely related to the body in Eleanor Parker’s grave.

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“Parker's mother helped another mother, Judy, and her daughter Lily escape from an abusive person, who catches up to them. Judy gets killed and passed off as Eleanor,” Steven D. Binder told Parade.

That abusive person is Illinois State Trooper Lester Burm (Bruce Davison), Judy’s husband, who was pictured in the photo that Parker has from the newspaper clipping. Burm is retired but driving around the country in an RV and just happens to be in Maryland, close to the NCIS DC offices, and he tries to insinuate himself into NCIS investigation because the reason he’s driving around the country is he’s still trying to find his daughter Lily.

When Parker and Knight (Katrina Law) confront Burm, he admits that Lily is his daughter, but she no longer goes by that name. The last name he could find for her was Nellie. When Kasie adds the name Nellie to her DNA search, she comes up with a schoolteacher living in Maryland.

When Parker and Lily finally meet at her apartment, she tells him the story. It turned out that Burm was responsible for both women’s deaths. He faked Judy’s identity and started a fire to help disguise the fact that it wasn’t really Eleanor who died in the car crash.

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Then later, he caught up with Eleanor and Lily at a motel in Toledo, where Eleanor had taken Lily on the way to her cousin Connie's house in Pittsburgh, where she planned to leave the girl for safety’s sake. Burm killed Eleanor, but Lily was hiding in a closet and was rescued the next day by Connie.

During their conversation, Lily-now-Eleanor Johnson (Barbara Niven) tells Parker that his father had been trying to help him track down Lily, so he had called Connie, who called her. It made her realize it was time she visited him and filled him in on the truth. That’s how the lipstick got on the rim of the glass. She had visited him that night and told him everything. Fear of her father kept her from doing so earlier.

Lily/Eleanor also reassured Parker that his mom couldn’t wait to get back to him. She was afraid her family would think she was dead, and she didn’t want them to worry, but that’s what ended up happening.

Interestingly, Binder admitted when asked what about this story made Parker flash to Lily when he was drowning, the showrunner admitted that originally, they had had a different story. This conclusion of the Lily storyline wasn’t as initially planned, but the original version would have wrapped more quickly.

“The idea being that when you're facing trauma and your death experience, you think back and connect to other intense experiences that you have had,” he said. “This memory came out as he was dying. It's flashing before his eyes. The original made a little more sense with the water theme, but we started with a backstory that could have been solved in just one episode, and we didn't want to do that.”

Then, later in the episode at Eleanor Parker’s funeral, Knight gets a call from Director Vance (Rocky Carroll), who tells her that she has her first assignment as a member of NCIS Elite, and it is top secret because it involves a former member of the team: Eleanor Bishop. And we cut to Bishop watching the team at the funeral from the safety of a vehicle.

Emily WickershamPhoto: Cliff Lipson/CBS

In the Season 18 finale, Bishop left NCIS for a long-term undercover mission with CIA agent Odette Malone (Elayn J. Taylor), who had been Ziva David’s (Cote de Pablo) former mentor. But she couldn’t just leave. Bishop had to tarnish her reputation, and she did so by fake confessing to leaking NSA documents. The team didn’t believe her, especially Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), with whom she had had a budding relationship, so Vance was careful to caution Knight that she couldn’t tell anyone about her assignment.

NCIS will return with new episodes and a continuation of the Bishop storyline on Feb. 24, 2026, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Streams next day on Paramount+.

Next, CBS Announces Its 2026 Midseason Premiere Dates, Including Survivor 50, CIA and The Grammys

This story was originally published by Parade on Dec 17, 2025, where it first appeared in the TV section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”