[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS: Tony & Ziva Season 1 Episode 5 “To Be Determined.”]
NCIS: Tony & Ziva answers two major questions in the Thursday, September 18, episode: Can Tony’s (Michael Weatherly) friend with Interpol, Henry (James D’Arcy), who’s part of the hunt for him and Ziva, be trusted, and who will be the first major death of the Paramount+ spinoff?
Tony and Ziva (Cote de Pablo) think they’re breaking into a technologically advanced prison to free Interpol’s Secretary General Jonah (Julian Ovenden), put there by Martine (Nassima Benchicou) and as they suspect Henry, but they discover how wrong they are after the first part of the plan is a success. Once Jonah is out of his cell, he reveals he’s been working with Martine all along. That means, they deduce, that maybe they can trust Henry, and so they make a gamble and call him. He is a good guy, and he helps them escape, but then Tony and Ziva learn that their daughter Tali (Isla Gie) is in trouble. On the road, they stop the car in which Jonah, Martine, and coder Lazar (Velibor Topic) are fleeing, and Henry sends Tony and Ziva ahead to save their daughter.
However, Jonah takes advantage of Henry being distracted by a drone dropping a missile on the prison and gets the jump on him, stabbing him, then, as Tony and Ziva can only watch from down the road in the car, killing him. But why did NCIS: Tony & Ziva kill Henry off?
“It was a hard choice. I love Henry and, more to the point, love James D’Arcy —we’ve been friends for 18 years — but a thriller like this needs real stakes and that sometimes means terrible things have to happen to good people,” showrunner John McNamara tells TV Insider. “As in life, how our characters deal with this kind of awful tragedy will define and change them.”
Marcell Piti / Paramount+
As for how Tony will be dealing with his friend’s death right after learning he could have trusted him all along, “A lot of that will play out in Episode 6 and beyond,” says McNamara. “Tony’s grief will be deep and not something we’ll lightly brush off.”
James D’Arcy knew before he accepted the role that Henry was going to be killed off, but he didn’t know all the details — and one was a bit special. “What I didn’t know was that my real life best friend was going to be the person that killed me twice first by stabbing me and then by shooting me in the head,” he tells us. “But Julian Ovenden, who plays Jonah, is my best friend, and I cannot tell you what joy he took the day that we had to film the scene where he killed me twice. That part was not clear when I accepted the job and had I known it, I possibly could not have done the job because it was humiliating.”
He adds, of filming the episode, “My main memory of it was that my best friend in the world killed me. It dominated most of the filming that episode because he never let me forget it.”
While Henry doesn’t have much time to process what’s happening, D’Arcy says that he wouldn’t regret his actions — sending Tony and Ziva ahead, eliminating any backup for himself with the three bad guys — because “he would do anything for his goddaughter, including apparently getting killed twice.”
The actor enjoyed having those Henry and Tali scenes. “It added a nice layer of humanity, extra depth to what is a pretty fun, twisty, spy thing,” he explains. “You need heart in all of that stuff, and I sort of hoped that Henry could be a grounding figure in all of it.”
D’Arcy knew all along that Henry was a good guy and that they’d be making the audience question his motives. “We played around with various different takes from mustache twirling to pretty strait-laced, and I assumed that they would make the choices in post-production that they needed to make in order to keep the audience on its toes,” he says.
Henry was a bit too busy to think about what Tony thought of him, but D’Arcy says his character didn’t want to believe his friend was guilty, though he did have to follow the evidence like any Interpol agent. That’s why he’s so quick to get on board when Tony tells him about Martine and Jonah working together. “He was hoping that there would be another version of it, and then when he was given some evidence to prove that Tony may not be guilty, why would he stay with that narrative?” says the star.
But while Henry and Tony were close friends, the Interpol agent and Ziva never quite warmed up to one another. “His friendship was with Tony and wanting to make sure that he was happy. And obviously the very first episode, we know what he thinks of Ziva,” according to D’Arcy. “But look, I think nothing would make him happier than knowing that his goddaughter was part of a safe family unit again — not that they are a particularly safe family unit, but you know what I mean. Loved by both parents and able to be part of that.”
What did you think of NCIS: Tony & Ziva killing off Henry and the Martine and Jonah reveal? Let us know in the comments section below.
