Just how much has Ellie Bishop (Emily Wickersham) changed in the time she’s been gone? That’s the question for the Tuesday, March 3, midseason premiere of NCIS.
Bishop is the target of NCIS Elite, led by Jessica Knight (Katrina Law), who has a choice to make: follow orders and not tell Ellie’s former teammates what’s going on, or clue them in. Meanwhile, Bishop turns to her former partner, Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), because she feels she can still trust him. But what’s really going on? TV Insider spoke with Wickersham and Valderrama about where the episode leaves them, what the future could hold, and much more. Warning: Spoilers for NCIS Season 23 Episode 10 ahead!
First, let’s get the matter of Bishop’s innocence or guilt out of the way. Bishop is accused of being a cyberterrorist and, after going deep cover as part of a U.S. black ops unit, turning traitor. The Department of Defense tries to lure her in with decoy files to trace her location, and along the way, most of her team is killed — except for her and her teammate, who, surprise, is her husband?! Timothy McGee (Sean Murray), Torres, Knight, Dr. Jimmy Palmer (Brian Dietzen), and Kasie Hines (Diona Reasonover) help Bishop, going so far as to sneak her into NCIS in a body bag, and in turn, sherries to protect them by going off on her own to confront the person really responsible and holding her teammate captive to force her to turn over files. But that person turns out to be a teammate Bishop thought had been killed months ago in an ambush, and Bishop’s just married on paper for cover.
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Once the case is over, Bishop is once again leaving, to find who her former teammate had been working for and warn other teams that could be targeted. But this time, she says goodbye to everyone, not just Torres. And this time, she asks Torres to come with her. But he tells her, “For now, my place is here,” and she replies, “And mine’s out there.” They part with a kiss. But could that mean that one day he could see himself joining her more than she can see herself returning to NCIS in the same capacity she used to work in?
“Bishop had to throw it out there,” Emily Wickersham tells TV Insider in the video interview above with her and Wilmer Valderrama. “There is this all-knowing thing that Bishop and Torres will have a moment together. Their paths will for sure cross. I think Bishop is in a moment in time in her life where her path is moving in this different direction professionally [than returning to NCIS].”
Valderrama thinks Torres “made the right choice” in that moment, and he knows that Bishop understands that he has to stay with the team. “I think she knows that that was a question that needed to be asked,” he adds. “He seriously considered it.”
Neither think this is the last time these two will cross paths, but what the future could hold for them romantically is very much up in the air.
“I know, and we’ve all seen that they have this soul connection,” says Wickersham. “I think that they have just that underlying strong current between them, regardless of where they are in life. I could see a world in which they end up romantically together, and I could see a world in which they might miss because they’re both doing their thing, but that doesn’t mean the connection is lost. So I could see it both ways.”
Valderrama also notes Gibbs’ rule 12 (Never date a coworker) and that they “definitely broke” it. Flashbacks reveal that Bishop and Torres were together before she left. When that happened, however, remains up in the air.
“They were very ambiguous pretty much the whole time. There were moments of great danger where it could have cost each other’s lives where all of a sudden it felt like, oh, there’s a different connection there,” admits Valderrama. “We’ll leave it up to the audience for context. Sometimes these questions are better for their interpretation.”
Wickersham agrees. “I think that there’s such professionals at what they do, and I think both of them take their jobs so seriously and would never want to put anything at risk, nor would they want to put their team at risk,” she tells us. “But it’s like when you have a thing with someone, it’s undeniable. And I feel like I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it definitely happened.”
Just like the door hasn’t been closed on Bishop’s story, Wickersham sees her and Valderrama’s characters’ goodbye this time as “more open-ended. Even though Torres says, ‘I’m going to stay here, my place is here,’ I think that so much has changed in both of their lives, and this one felt just more kind of ambiguous to me.” Valderrama also sees this farewell as giving the “closure” that the last one did not.
Watch the full video interview above with Emily Wickersham and Wilmer Valderrama about Bishop and Torres, what’s next for both, if we’ll see Bishop again, and much more.
NCIS, Tuesdays, 8/7c, CBS
