n May, NCIS ended its Season 20 finale, “Black Sky,” with quite the cliffhanger: Special Agent Nick Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) pulling his gun not in an official capacity and seemingly threatening to kill a man.
The episode saw him undercover in prison as part of an attempt to get more information about an impending terror attack, but the most intriguing part came when he recognized someone from his past: a man (Al Sapienza, who previously appeared in the Season 1 episode “UnSEALeD”) visiting an inmate. That man was the inmate’s mother’s boyfriend, supposedly helping him with his legal problems… but also responsible for making his and his mom’s lives hell since he showed up. It also seemed like Torres believed he framed the inmate. But why?
It was once Torres returned to NCIS and left his sister a voicemail that the pieces began to come together. “I found him,” he said. ‘You know who I’m talking about. The bastard’s still alive, and he’s still doing it.” In other words, he did something to Torres’ family in the past, and there’s no love lost there.
The season ended with Torres waiting for that man in his house, with his gun on the table. Once the man recognizes him, he claims he thought about Torres, his mom, and his sister — but “not as often as I have thought about you,” the agent told him. Torres didn’t want to listen to any claims that he’d changed. So what did he want? “What I always wanted,” Torres, standing and picking up his gun, said. “To watch you die.”
We can’t help but think back to what finale cowriter David J. North and executive producer Steven D. Binder told us last spring ahead of “Black Sky.” Binder noted that Torres “can be a little hotheaded and do things that aren’t necessarily appropriate for an agent that have consequences,” while North had teased that, in the finale, he’d be “put into a difficult position of deciding how to handle [a] demon [from his [past]: sweep it under the rug or take care of it.”
Added Binder, “We’re going to be wondering, is Torres about to break Torres? Is he going to destroy everything he’s worked for and done for putting to bed some old demons? He’s at an inflection point where he’s either going to go forward and continue to be a functioning agent, or he’s going to do something that maybe he can’t recover from.”
The EP likened it to one Torres’ ex-boss Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) did find himself in; he killed the man who was responsible for his first wife and daughter’s deaths. “Is [Torres] going to follow in Gibbs’s footsteps? Is he going to go even further than Gibbs did and wreck everything he’s built? Or is he going to find a way to manage this in a way that a professional would?” Binder asked.
North did say that Torres might make “a choice that will end his time with us,” and Binder warned that there are “real stakes.”
So what will happen when Season 21 begins? (A time frame on a premiere date is still unknown, due to the actors and writers strikes.) Assuming Valderrama isn’t going anywhere, it’s very unlikely that Torres is going to pull that trigger. Does he have anything on the man that could lead to legal actions? Or might we see Torres veering more towards the less-legal options? There’s also the matter of when the rest of the team might realize something’s up; they thought he’d headed home to rest.
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