The NCIS Season 23 finale ended with a gunshot ringing out in an alley, and the show left viewers without a clear answer on who fired it. In the final scene, Torres confronted Mateo after Palmer noted that Mateo apparently used a workstation to fill out an application, and Mateo made plain that he was carrying a weapon before warning, “They could be watching.”
That last beat mattered because the shot landed after a season-long chain of violence that began one year earlier with a bombing in a café tied to a bombing in an alley. In the present-day finale, the team was already working with Kayla Vance after that alley bombing pointed back to the earlier café attack, while the episode also brought back LaRoche, played by Seamus Dever, to investigate Kayla for money used to fund her side project. LaRoche accused Vance of possibly being dirty, and he looked as if he were angling for the director’s chair while the team was still carrying lingering grief over the loss of Director Vance, played by Rocky Carroll.
Steven D. Binder said after the finale that someone was hit in the shooting and that he could rule out a death, which means the ncis season 23 finale cliffhanger is not a mystery about a fatality so much as a setup for the next round of fallout. He also said the series would return in the fall, and he said the story will make it clearer why Torres became suspicious of Mateo in the first place. Binder added that Torres is one of the three people McGee works directly with who could be watching Mateo more closely, and that is the part the finale really wanted to leave hanging: not whether the shot killed someone, but who is now injured, who pulled the trigger, and whether Torres was right to suspect Mateo all along.
Binder said he had grown tired of killing characters and preferred the kind of ending that leaves someone alive but shot, calling it more interesting than another death. On that point, the finale delivered exactly what he described. The gunshot closed the episode with no body on the ground and no confirmed shooter, but with enough bloodless damage to make the fall return feel less like a reset than the opening move in a larger reckoning.
