'NCIS' Season Finale: My Mom Reacts to Tony's Farewell

Mark Harmon and Michael Weatherly in ‘NCIS’

Warning: This recap for the “Family First” episode of NCIS contains spoilers.

After 13 seasons, NCIS said goodbye to Michael Weatherly in Tuesday’s finale, but it gave fans — and Tony — a parting gift: the child he never knew he had with Ziva.

According to a Yahoo TV Twitter poll during the East Coast airing, 77 percent of fans didn’t believe the news when Abby and McGee came to Tony’s place to tell him that Vance had received a call confirming Ziva had, in fact, been killed at her father’s farm house. But their minds may have changed when the show dropped another bombshell: Ziva had a daughter, Tali, who survived the blaze — and she was Tony’s.

In the end, Tony decided to leave NCIS (after he and the team riddled Trent Kort with bullets) because his priority was no longer being a “very special agent’; it was being everything to Tali, because that’s what she’d lost.

Was that exit enough to satisfy those NCIS fans who were heartbroken when they first heard that Weatherly was leaving the show? Here’s one diehard’s take — my mother’s.

How are you feeling, mom?
I’m not happy he’s gone, but I’m happy with the way that they developed his character, that he got what he’s always wanted — a family. They always talked about him being so carefree and so glib, and he had no one to answer to but himself. But yet, deep down, you saw his relationship with his dad grow throughout the times that [Robert Wagner] was on, and you knew actually how important that relationship was to him. So I’m glad they let him grow up, finally. And I’m glad that he actually has a part of Ziva — a visual, touchable, tangible, lovable part of Ziva — with him.

Weatherly and Robert Wagner

So you believe Ziva is dead, and you’re not upset that they killed her off?
I believe it now. [Laughs] I didn’t, but I accepted it when they brought the little girl in. I’ve been following it on the Internet, and from what Michael was saying, I kinda gathered maybe something like that. I think the way it turned out, with them knowing that he was leaving the show, they had an opportunity to build the maturity into his character. And that was the most positive way they could end his time on the show, was to give him something of Ziva back and show how much the relationship was between them.

I think they wanted to conclude the Ziva strain of the show as well as the DiNozzo strain. I think the best way they could have done it was to join them again, and technically they’re joined — they’re together, but they’re together in the little child. And it was very much Ziva to have that baby and not tell him, not interfere with his life anymore than she had with her leaving. ‘Cause it took them so long to build up to the rapport that they had, and she knew how his life was. I think she knew he loved her, but when she left, she knew he would resort to that same glib way again, and she didn’t want to force him, at that particular time, to make any kind of decisions because he wasn’t ready for them yet.

I think he was ready now. They’d say to him, “Oh, why don’t you get a life. All you do is work.” They kept comparing him to Gibbs, that someday he’d be head of the department like Gibbs. And even though he admires Gibbs, and would like to be like him, Gibbs had his family taken from him and that’s why Gibbs is the way he is. Tony never really had a family. So now that he has a family, he wants to be like Gibbs was before his family was taken from him.

“Can we see her?”

When we were watching the episode, you said you kinda thought there might be a child involved because of Tony’s goldfish Ziva.
Abby came to deliver something [in a recent episode], I forget what it was, and she got to see his apartment. He made the comment that Ziva the goldfish had gotten chubby. Just because he mentioned her name, I figured something would happen involving her that would prompt him to take more charge of his life, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. It crossed my mind about a child, but when [Cote de Pablo] left the show, it wasn’t obvious that [Ziva and Tony] had been intimate. It was a fleeting hope and I just dismissed it right away. So it was a pleasant surprise. That was cool. And she was the cutest little girl.

Do you think we’ll see Tony again?
I would hope they’d bring him back, periodically, for just updates on what he’s doing. I can see that happening. I think they’ll talk about him a lot. I would hope.

Any final thoughts?
I hope Abby gets with that British agent. I think he’s cool.

(Photos: Sonja Flemming/CBS)