One year after a deadly coffee shop bombing that nearly took the life of Kayla Vance (Naomi Grace), a new explosion proves the attack wasn’t the work of a lone wolf as was determined by the FBI, but now the new case has been assigned to NCIS and it forces the team to confront legacy and loyalty, on the NCIS 23rd season cliffhanger finale.
We haven’t seen Kayla Vance since the death of her father Leon (Rocky Carroll). But this episode deals with how the young NCIS agent is dealing with her very personal loss – and shows her back in DC after previously transferring to San Diego.
“These guys, they move around all the time, so I would chalk it off to that,” showrunner Steven D. Binder exclusively tells Parade. “You can be assigned some place for six months and then you’re sent back, especially if you don’t have a family. When we introduced her, and then we made the move to San Diego, we didn’t want to invest time in that character, and it seemed like she also needed to go off into the world a little bit and not just be here under her dad, and she did. DC’s where the NCIS HQ is, and I think she just came home. It hasn’t been established, but she could have been all over in this time period. She could have been in Rota, Spain for all we know.”
In dealing with legacy, the “Brothers and Sisters” episode explores the idea of whether our fathers overshadow us or if, in following in their footsteps, we are preserving family legacy. It does so in two ways: through Kayla and the decisions she has to make following her father’s death, and also through Mateo Garcia (Patrick Keleher), Special Agent Timothy McGee’s (Sean Murray) recently revealed adult son.
When McGee first met Mateo, Mateo told him he didn’t need a father. He had been without one all of his life, but now, in the finale, it seems, he’s done a 180 and wants to establish a relationship. Maybe he’s taken into consideration the fact that McGee never knew he existed as Mateo’s mother never informed him she was pregnant.
“You have to have all sorts of feelings about your father that’s not there for the first 20 years of your life, and I think even in the best case circumstance, you don’t know what you didn’t have, and so you’d say, ‘I did fine, I don’t need a father,’” Binder explains. “Or if you’re a little angry about it, you’re like, ‘I don’t need a father!’ I think those are the feelings that are going to be natural to anyone. But once the person’s there and you see it’s a special relationship, even if you’ve just met them, it’s still something special. I don’t know necessarily that it’s whether he needs a father, but he’s got one now and I think he’s starting to appreciate it.”
As for Kayla, “Brothers and Sisters” gives her the opportunity to investigate what it is she really wants from life. Does she want to follow in her dad’s footsteps and aim to be a future director of NCIS? Or is there perhaps another direction in life she wants to explore?
“I think she’s very much her father’s daughter but also doesn’t want to be defined as her father’s daughter,” Binder says. “She wants to be her own person, and I think she’s still figuring out exactly what she wants to do. I don’t know that we can say that at her age Vance was like, ‘I want to be the director of NCIS.’ He was just an agent going about the world, but I’d say she probably has a stronger sense for justice, at least at this point in her life.
“Her father was a political animal, he certainly would bend the rules and look the other way and tell the team, ‘That file on my desk that you tried to get, I’m not letting you have it. You should never have done that and gone around my back. Now I’m leaving it on my desk because I have to go to the bathroom.’ He would do that, but he bristled at it. I don’t know that Kayla would bristle right now at any of that at all, I think she’d be like, ‘Oh, you want that file? Take the file, let’s look at it together.’ That could just be age.”
In the Season 23 finale, both Kayla and Mateo get caught up in events bigger than they ever realized. But we won’t spoil it other than to say, it leaves us with a cliffhanger must-see moment.
NCIS airs Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Streams next day on Paramount+.