Is Bishop Leaving ‘NCIS’? The Fall Finale Put Her on a New Career Path

Meredith Jacobs December 18, 2019, 3:30 pm

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 17, Episode 10 of NCIS, “The North Pole.”]

Bishop (Emily Wickersham) has come quite a long way from when we first met her, sitting on the floor, an analyst at the NSA. And there may be another career path change in her future after the NCIS fall finale.

Ziva’s (Cote de Pablo) return also brought back Odette (Elayn J. Taylor), who enlisted Bishop’s help to pick up a drive. But rather than hand it over to the woman who paid $100,000(!) for it, Bishop wanted answers. “Did you really think that I was just going to blindly keep another one of Ziva’s secrets? The only reason I agreed to this was to find out what’s going on with her and report back to my team,” she explained and left with the drive.

But later in the episode, Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) warned Bishop she had to make it “right” with Odette. He discovered that Odette is ex-CIA, an instructor at a “hardcore ranger school for spies.” She was fired for classified reasons. That could spell trouble for Bishop.

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But when Bishop meets with Odette near the end of the episode, she learns that Odette knew Ziva was too proud to call Gibbs (Mark Harmon), so she used Bishop to bring him into the fold. “Two birds with one stone,” Odette explained. “I had a performance to evaluate. It took a lot of guts to walk away from me with that drive. I see a certain promise in you, Agent Bishop. I’d like to offer you some specialized training, if you’d be interested.”

“Odette sees a lot in Bishop that she saw in Ziva, this bright young human who has great potential,” executive producer Frank Cardea tells TV Insider. “She’s hoping to become a mentor to her just like she was with Ziva.”

(CBS)

“Ziva had the benefit of growing up in a family whose father was Israeli military veteran and Mossad agent, so the skills she had were dug out at an early age,” executive producer Steven D. Binder adds. “Bishop grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and her career took her as an analyst to the NSA. She’s come a little late to this superhero crime fighting world, but better late than never.”

And this is just another step in Bishop’s evolution. “We discuss some of [how much she’s grown] explicitly in some episodes coming up,” Binder teases.