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After months of speculation over whether she was really leaving D.C. for California, Special Agent Jessica Knight is officially back on NCIS. However, her return to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s Washington D.C. team hasn’t come without drama — especially for her relationship with her now-ex-boyfriend, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jimmy Palmer, and the rest of the squad’s agents who have had to adjust to life without her for the past six months.
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What happened to Jessica Knight on NCIS?
The NCIS Season 21 finale, “Reef Madness,” ended on a cliffhanger as NCIS Director Leon Vance offered Knight a job at Camp Pendleton, the NCIS’ west field office in California, as Chief React Training Officer. (Camp Pendleton is also the setting of CBS’ new NCIS prequel, NCIS: Origins.)
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Though tempted, Knight tells Vance that she isn’t sure she’s ready to leave the NCIS, so Vance gives her until the end of the day to give him her decision. At the end of the episode, Vance checks in on Knight at the hospital, where Supervisor Special Agent Alden Parker is recovering from a mission. When Vance asks Knight what she’s decided, she looks around the room to her team — including Parker, Nick Torres, Timothy McGee, Kasie Hines, and her boyfriend, Dr. Jimmy Parker — before telling Vance that she’s ready to leave Washington D.C. for California. “Hell yeah, sir,” she says. “Let’s do it.”
Despite speculation that Knight and the actress who plays her, Katrina Law, were leaving NCIS, Law confirmed to TV Insider ahead of Season 22’s premiere that she was returning to the series after hinting that Knight wasn’t completely happy with her new job at Pendleton Camp.“Overall, she’s pretty happy and she loves her new job,” she said “She loves the Pendleton team, she loves the REACT people that she’s working with, and she’s really had a great six months. That being said, I’m not sure that it’s quite as fulfilling as she thought and hoped it would be.”
She also revealed that Knight returns to the NCIS after the DC team travels to California to investigate an agent’s disappearance.“When an undercover agent goes missing and it ends up bringing the DC team out to California, it’s truly a happy reunion for Knight,” Law said. “She loves seeing Parker [Gary Cole] again, and the two of them end up having a heart-to-heart about if they’re happy, where they are, and how things are going.”
Law also explained how Knight’s six months away from the NCIS also affected the rest of the team.“Torres is now deep undercover going back to his roots so he’s on mission. McGee has interviewed for a new position, and we find Parker sitting alone at his desk in the DC bullpen looking at everybody else’s empty desks, which leads us to the title of our series opener. ‘Empty Nest,'” she said.
As for Knight and Palmer’s relationship, executive producer Steven D. Binder also hinted to TVInsider that Season 22 will see them get back together. “It’s months later. Knight’s on the West Coast [in her new job as chief REACT training officer],” he said of NCIS‘ Season 22 premiere. “They’ve settled into the new normal of not being together. Jimmy is dating. We’re going to learn a little bit about that. He’s been busy as a single man; that will make an appearance in the most inopportune time. [In the premiere] Knight encounters a very serious problem involving her skills as a hostage negotiator. There’s certain things you never do, and that’s what [she] does. As a result, her and Jimmy are going to get a chance to have part two of the conversation that we didn’t see in the finale. There’s a Part 3 to that conversation that we’ll see in Episode 4 when World War III is starting.”
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He also told the site that Law and Brian Dietzen, who plays Palmer, supported Knight and Palmer’s relationship twist. “With an actor’s character, if [actors] care about what they’re doing — and all of our people do — they’ll be protective. They’ll have stakes, they’ll have thoughts. I took both of their temperatures. What do you guys think? Where are you guys at? They both had very different takes on ways their characters would respond. I was like, this is gold. I’ll blame them if you don’t like it, is what I’m saying,” he said.
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He also confirmed that Palmer wasn’t the only agent affected by Knight leaving NCIS’ D.C. office. “Poor Torres. Every time he gets a family member, they leave. So he’s like, ‘I’m going solo Torres again,'” he said. “He goes undercover with some bad people and it doesn’t work out well. He gets into a lot of trouble. He’s on this road of undercover loner, not really having relationships. Where does that road lead? We pair him up with a grizzled, hard-boiled private detective who is at the end of that road and is about to leave humanity behind and retire to some beach and drink himself to death. Is this Torres’ future or is he able to bring this guy back from the brink?”
Other characters affected include McGee. “Knight [leaving] inspired a chain reaction of events. McGee applies for a deputy director position in Colorado to move up in the world. A lot of the fans have wondered why he hasn’t done so,” he said. “It’s an open position and it will be filled by the end of the [premiere] episode. Kasie’s smarting a little bit from Knight being gone. Papa Bird Parker has an empty nest in the squad room. He wants his team back but very quickly gets embroiled in something that Knight gets into trouble with. This case will bring our team back together on one level, not necessarily ‘yay, we’re all back here in NCIS,’ but paths will cross.”
NCIS is available to stream on Paramount Plus.
For more on NCIS, check out the cast’s salaries — including who makes the most — in the gallery below.
