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As fans await the return of a fan-favorite couple in NCIS: Tony & Ziva, one star notes that the duo won’t have the easiest time reconnecting. More intriguingly, the cause isn’t what most long-time NCIS watchers might expect.
Even though NCIS: Tony & Ziva revisits the past to fill viewers in on what’s happened to the two main stars since their last onscreen appearances, quite a bit of time will still have passed since their last in-universe meeting. As Michael Weatherly tells ScreenRant’s Rachel Foertsch at San Diego Comic-Con, that could complicate their reunion quite a bit, particularly because of Tali:
ScreenRant: Michael, what’s it been like to play Tony as a dad? Because, I mean, that obviously wasn’t something you got to really do in the original.
Michael Weatherly: “No, and I think even more importantly, there were [NCIS] episodes, one episode, in particular, where we showed that Tony is afraid of two things in life. In one episode named “Chimera,” which was around episode 100, wow, yeah. We know that Tony’s afraid of rats. He’s afraid of rats and he’s afraid of children.
And we learned that… because of his own childhood, he just won’t relate to children on the mothership [show] in those episodes, because we know his father, and we see that there was not a great modeling that went on for him.
So when we meet with this child and we see the journey that he’s gone on, it actually affects and speaks directly to his relationship with Ziva because she didn’t watch the four years that she wasn’t there. And so he’s kind of gone on this journey and learned all these things about himself, but she still sees him as the [same] person.
It’s like going back to a college reunion or something, and you still think that that’s your roommate from 1995. So the imbalances of growth that each of the characters is going through are part of the joy of the show because we’re catching up with them as they catch up with each other.”
