There have been a lot of cast changes over the years on NCIS and one of the hardest was losing Ziva after Season 11.
With Ziva David (Cote de Pablo), Anthony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) and Abby (Pauley Perrette) all gone, that leaves Gibbs (Mark Harmon), Timothy (Sean Murray) and Ducky (David McCallum) as the only holdovers from the show’s early years.
However, a Super Bowl commercial has given NCIS fans hope that one of those characters might come back.
Is Ziva coming back to NCIS in 2019?
To remind fans of what happened to Ziva, she died in Season 11 after a mortar attack. She had a baby named Tali, who also happened to be her child with Tony.
With Ziva dead, Tony decided he was going to leave NCIS and left for Isreal and Paris to look for answers to the death of his former lover.
That took out two of the most popular characters on NCIS and no one that has replaced them quite matches the level of comfort fans felt with them over the previous nine seasons.
With that said, an NCIS promo for the next episode (February 12) hit after the Super Bowl and it has fans excited.
The promo started out with images of Ziva and the narrator saying “you thought her story was over. Now the biggest NCIS secret of all.”
After that, Ellie (Emily Wickersham) said “it’s Ziva” which then cut to a scene where Gibbs yelled “don’t tell me about Ziva.”
Whether it is flashbacks or she is still alive, it looks like Ziva will be playing some kind of role in NCIS this month.
Will Ziva return to NCIS?
The big thing to remember is that Ziva’s body and remains were never found after the mortar attack.
Fans of shows like Criminal Minds known never to count a secret agent out. Remember when Emily Prentiss died on Criminal Minds? They even buried her, only for her to return later and reveal she faked her own death.
There is a chance Ziva is alive out there, and with Tony’s exit being him looking for evidence surrounding her death, that is a possibility.
Michael Weatherly moved on to his own show called Bull, which is currently in its third season on CBS. Cote de Pablo’s post-NCIS career has been much more lacklustre, however, with only three movies since leaving the show, so a return is certainly not an impossibility.