Following confirmation that Michael Weatherly will indeed return in the upcoming NCIS season as Special Agent Tony DiNozzo, CBS has now officially revealed Ziva David’s (Cote de Pablo) fate. As fans know, Tony has been a mainstay from the very beginning of the flagship procedural until the Season 13 finale, “Family First,” when he left after learning he had a daughter with Ziva. He later appeared briefly as a guest in Season 21 for Ducky’s funeral. Meanwhile, ex-Mossad agent Ziva, on the other hand, was presumed dead off-screen in Season 13, but it turned out that she had actually faked her death.
The duo eventually reunited for the first time since October 2013 in the Paramount+ spin-off NCIS: Tony & Ziva, which was prematurely cancelled last December after only a season, despite the positive reception. Premiering on September 4, 2025, the 10-episode military drama follows the titular duo as they raise their daughter, Tali (Isla Gie), together in Paris. But when Tony’s security company is attacked, they must go on the run across Europe, trying to figure out who is after them so that they can finally get their perfect ending.
Now, Weatherly is set to return in a season-long arc for NCIS Season 24, which premieres next month, leaving fans wondering about Ziva’s return. Fortunately, showrunner Steven D. Binder has provided an answer, confirming via TVLine that Ziva will not appear in Season 24. This, however, doesn’t imply that she has been totally scrapped from the franchise, as the new season will address her absence; the series will also explain their daughter Tali’s absence.
“They’re off a couple hours away. The way we address it is Ziva’s hanging out in the town where her daughter is, doing a little helicopter parenting, and Tony’s helicopter parenting in D.C.”
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
Why Is Tony Back on ‘NCIS’?
As for what brings Tony back to D.C., he wants to be closer to his daughter, who will also be absent this season. Binder explained that Weatherly’s character, who previously owned a private security firm in Tony & Ziva called Salus Mondiale, is now opening a satellite office in D.C. as his daughter has moved to the U.S. and is attending boarding school. That’s when he hears about something happening with the NCIS, sparking his interest and bringing both worlds into contact. Also, although Tony is technically his own boss, Binder hinted he doesn’t have a formal office in D.C. yet, following a mix-up. Instead of a nice, rented office, the character is in a quirky space called the Arnold T. Gustafson Commerce Suites, a fun set meant to resemble a 1970s-style WeWork.
NCIS Season 24 premieres on October 6, 2026. Stay tuned to Collider for more NCIS news.
