NCIS Introduced The Kansas City Mob In Season 22, And The Showrunner Told Us He Has A ‘Flight Plan’ For These Baddies

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As far as personal storylines go for Alden Parker go, the biggest one so far in NCIS Season 22 has been the mystery of Lily, the little girl he first hallucinated in the Season 21 finale and who will remain a “long term thing for him” as the show resumes on the 2025 TV schedule. However, the episode “Knight and Day” also revealed that Gary Cole’s character had a past with Rebecca DeMornay’s Carla Morino, head of the Kansas City mob. While it was left ambiguous at the end of that episode whether or not we’d see more of Carla or this criminal organization, NCIS showrunner Steven B. Binder assured CinemaBlend that there is a “flight plan” for these bad guys.

Remembering how Parker put up a picture of Carla in his bullpen at the end of “Knight and Day,” I asked Binder in a recent interview, which also included talk about what’s ahead for Deputy Director Gabriel LaRoche and Nick Torres’ secret girlfriend, for clarification about if this was a trade that we’ll see more of DeMornay’s character or if she was just a one-off villain. Here’s what he told me:

This is another longer term thing that we’re playing with. The Kansas City mafia is gonna reappear, not necessarily in person by the end of the season. We’ll see exactly. Maybe. But as has been remarked to me often, we work on a slightly longer time frame with our subplots and things because we’ve been on the air for so long, so we have the runway. There’s a flight plan with Carla and Rebecca De Mornay and the Kansas City mob, for sure.

Carla Morino came into the picture in “Knight and Day” when the team was tasked with protecting Melissa Radmore, the wife of defense contractor Freddy Radmore and a major Washington D.C. powerhouse in her own right. It turned out that Melissa was previously April Day, who ran off after graduating high school with Jason Morino, Carla’s son. Jason wanted nothing to do with his mother’s criminal activities, but he died in a motorcycle accident when he was 20 years old, and April was three months pregnant when this happened. She gave her daughter, Lauren, up for adoption and deliberately chose not to learn where she was being taken, but 20 years later, Carla showed up in D.C. and tried to find Lauren, going to far as to kidnap Melinda/April to obtain a genetic sample

In the midst of all this, viewers learned that Alden Parker had crossed paths with Carla Morino in Kansas City during his FBI years. That history combined with the events of “Knight and Day” was enough for Parker to make apprehending Carla a long-term goal, and now we know from Steven D. Binder that this will indeed be revisited at a later date. Unlike the Lily mystery though, it doesn’t sound like Carla and/or the Kansas City mob are guaranteed to return before Season 22 is over, and may instead be saved for Season 23, assuming that is greenlit. I also wouldn’t be surprised if another tease for these baddies is seeded into the Season 22 finale to set the stage for what would come in the 2025-2026 TV season.

As soon as any new details concerning NCIS’ use of the Kansas City mob come to light, we’ll pass them along. For now, the series will return with new episodes on Monday, January 27, but you can stream any of its released episodes with a Paramount+ subscription now.