- Entertainment Weekly is unveiling an exclusive preview of Emily Wickersham’s long-awaited return to NCIS, after her Ellie Bishop left the team under a veil of intrigue in 2021.
- Bishop’s long-simmering will-they-won’t-they relationship with Wilmer Valderrama’s Nick Torres is front and center as she enlists his help to evade capture in the March midseason premiere.
- “I’m so excited to return to an old family that I love so much,” Wickersham tells EW. “Excited to return as Bishop, as the new Bishop, who’s gone off and lived a new life. Who’s come back with a bit more baggage and added complexity.”
Characters killed off, disappeared, or otherwise departed from NCIS don’t always stay gone. But few have generated the level of excitement that Emily Wickersham achieved when her Special Agent Ellie Bishop popped up in season 23’s midseason finale back in December.
It’d been nearly five years since Bishop was last seen on the long-running police procedural, and no one has felt her absence more than Wilmer Valderrama‘s Special Agent Nick Torres. The charming bad boy and the quirky yet conflicted analyst parted under extreme circumstances in season 18. Though Torres doesn’t like to show it, and has in fact waded back out into the dating pool, he still carries a torch for his old partner.
Just over a month out from the midseason premiere, Entertainment Weekly can now share an exclusive preview of Wickersham’s return, and the (literal) bind it puts Valderrama in.
Robert Voets/CBS
Directed by series star Rocky Carroll, the episode “Her” follows directly from the midseason finale’s cliffhanger.
In that episode, Special Agent Jessica Knight, the feisty new NCIS recruit whom Katrina Law was cast to play in the wake of Wickersham’s exit, finally received her first NCIS: Elite mission directive. That exclusive task force, first introduced on NCIS: Hawai’i and headed up there by LL Cool J’s Sam Hanna, put Knight on the trail of a dangerous cyber-criminal.
It was shocking enough when the target turned out to be Bishop, but the episode, helmed by longtime NCIS franchise director James Whitmore Jr., pushed things to the limit by pulling back to reveal Bishop herself surveilling Knight from the shadows. The exclusive preview of “Her” leaves the impact Bishop’s shocking return to the fold makes on her former teammates a mystery, as she can be seen hugging Diona Reasonover’s Kasie Hines, and alternately standing by Torres and standing over Torres as he’s tied to a chair.
The logline for “Her” reads: “On her first NCIS: Elite mission, Knight is given orders to hunt down and arrest Eleanor Bishop after the former member of the NCIS team is designated a wanted cyber-terrorist. In need of someone to trust, Bishop turns to Torres (Wilmer Valderrama), and the two come face to face for the first time since she abruptly left nearly five years ago.”
Wickersham tells EW, “I’m so excited to return to an old family that I love so much. Excited to return as Bishop, as the new Bishop, who’s gone off and lived a new life. Who’s come back with a bit more baggage and added complexity. It was really fun to be in a very familiar environment with very new dynamics. The episode is a bit of a love letter, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it!”
Valderrama concurs with Wickersham’s enthusiasm, adding, “Being on set with Emily has always felt like a great collaboration that makes it easy to create grounded and exciting opportunities for our characters. I’m grateful we get to revisit the energy that is this duo. And without giving anything away about this awesome episode, Torres would say… ‘Bishop, you’ve got some explaining to do.'”
Robert Voets/CBS
Wickersham explained her decision to leave on a 2024 episode of the Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch podcast hosted Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, series alums and Wickersham and Valderrama’s fan-favorite-couple forerunners.
“I left the show, I found out I was pregnant a month later,” the actress reflected. “I don’t know if I was necessarily ready, but it happened and it was amazing. I was ready to leave the show. It was time and I was ready to move on to something else, and I guess this was the something else I was meant to move on to.”
Bishop abruptly quit the team in what at first appeared to be disgrace. She was shunted from NCIS after leaking NSA documents, but later confessed to Torres that it was all a covert strategy to join Odette Malone (Elayn J. Taylor), a former confidante of de Pablo’s Ziva David, on a top-secret CIA mission. Bishop also confessed her feelings to Torres in the form of a passionate, long-awaited first kiss before leaving.
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Torres took a long time to get Bishop out of his system, and as of season 22 it seemed to be working. He began dating Robin Knight (Lilan Bowden), his teammate Jessica’s sister, but the same problems that plagued his situationship with Bishop began to haunt him.
Now with Bishop back in the flesh, the future of NCIS is as unpredictable as ever.
NCIS returns with Wickersham in tow on March 3 at 8p.m. ET/PT on CBS, and streaming on Paramount+.