Tony’s been away from the NCIS team for a decade now, and some of his old pals are still there… along with some new faces. So how does he fit in with the team as currently constructed? “That’s the fun of having him back,” showrunner Steven D. Binder says. “What is his relationship with each of these people? I think he regards Torres maybe as the new him. Is he cooler than him? Is he the new ‘cooler than me’ guy?”
Parker, meanwhile, “had a really good, deep relationship with Vance,” and “suddenly there’s this older member of the team here from Vance’s world, and he’s like, ‘I don’t know what I think about you, but I want to be on my best behavior because you’re a legend, and you were one of Vance’s guys.’ So their relationship is sort of like two people on a first date, feeling each other out and maybe laughing a little too much. Like, it’s a little awkward.”
Tony’s dynamic with Jess Knight is “interesting,” Binder hints: “That may be our most fun relationship. You know, Tony was a playboy back in the day. Now he’s in a relationship, and she’s obviously a very attractive woman. Tony DiNozzo of Season 8 would have related to her very differently than Tony DiNozzo relates to her now. But the way we’ve defined it, there’s none of that at all, and that’ll become clear when you see it.”
Tony and McGee go all the way back to Season 1, and “just because Michael [Weatherly] left the show doesn’t mean Tony and McGee stopped communicating to each other,” Binder points out. “But their relationship before was senior agent to probie, and now they’ve both grown up. They’re both parents. They’re going to relate to each other as mature adults, and yet also: If you’re friends with anyone when you were five years old still, you hang out and you’re way different, but also sometimes five years old again.”
Tony and Jimmy Palmer also go way back, and when Tony can’t find a place to stay, he ends up “crashing at Palmer’s place,” Binder reveals — and it might not go well. (“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen ‘The Odd Couple.'”) As for Kasie, she’s “an enigma to him” as the new occupant of Abby’s old lab, where Tony is used to seeing plenty of quirky eccentricities: “Tony, I think, he assumes: ‘Is there a farting hippo? What’s the thing there?’ Kasie’s like, ‘There’s no thing.’ But then he starts making her paranoid. ‘Do I have a thing? What is my thing?’ So then that will develop, too, throughout the season.”
Alright, “NCIS” fans: What are you hoping to see in Tony’s return to the show? Let us know in a comment below!