NCIS Season 17 Episode 1 kicked off with Ziva making her full, wildly-anticipated return.
And it concluded with Ziva holding a gun to the face of her former boss and good friend.
What transpired in between? And where will the long-running show from here? On to a recap!
We learned on Tuesday night that Cote de Pablo’s beloved former agent was on undercover mission to track down a woman named Sahar, who was seeking revenge.
Both against Ziva and, even more worrisome, against those Ziva loves.
A former POW in Syria, Sahar escaped a month prior to the farmhouse explosion — and Ziva was intent to find her. Just how intense?
At one point in the premiere, she placed two severed fingers on the dashboard of a car. They belonged to a source who allegedly could have told Ziva about Sahar’s whereabouts.
But this source was shot dead before revealing this key piece of information to Ziva.
This same source had been holding a necklace given to Ziva by Tali, which she had to cut out of his hand after rigor mortis set in. Hence the severed fingers.
Before he died, the informant also revealed that Sahar had something to do with Ari Haswari (Rudolf Martin), Ziva’s half-brother who she was forced to kill way back in her second episode of the CBS drama.
Seriously, this series does its homework.
In a flashback, meanwhile, we discover that Mossad member Adam Eschel (Damon Dayoub) helped Ziva fake her death by faking an explosion at her Israeli compound.
So that answers that question.
At the close of the premiere, Ziva and Gibbs head to a diner, where Sahar (who is also using the alias Mira Sahar Azam) warns that if she is killed, a U.S. senator will die.
Heeding her warning, Gibbs knocks her gun out of her hand… only for Ziva to draw another and aim it at both Gibbs and her nemesis, angry at Gibbs for only wanting to arrest Sahar, and…
…. cut to black, of course.
We’ll need to tune in next week to find out what happens next, with Ziva on board for the subsequent three installments.
"She’s a great agent, but she is not operating at peak capacity, which was what made me interested in coming back. I didn’t want to play the hero version of this. I wanted people to see that these five years have not been easy," Cote de Pablo has said about her return.
Will Ziva actually shoot Gibbs? It seems very unlikely.
HOWEVER:
"Would you want to get between a baby bear and Mama Grizzly?" executive producer Steven Binder asks. "Right there, Ziva is Mama Grizzly and Gibbs makes the mistake of stepping between her and her cub."
