Who Is Lily on ‘NCIS’? Parker’s Visions, Clues Explained

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS Season 22 Episode 8 “Out of Control.”]

Who is Lily? That’s the question NCIS fans have had since the Season 21 finale, and well, it turns out we’re not the only ones wondering about that young girl Parker (Gary Cole) saw while he was bleeding out on the ship: He is, too!

First, Parker’s late to the crime scene; he blew right through his alarm, he says. Then he zones out after seeing Lily walking through the hall of a hospital during the investigation. He blames it on not sleeping and not being a fan of hospitals since he almost bled to death in one when Knight (Katrina Law) checks on him. He sees Lily again, here, waving.

Parker next zones out while the team goes over the case in the bullpen, and Knight follows him into the elevator and stops it to check if he’s okay. (One day, those buttons are going to break, he remarks.) She knows he saw something at the hospital and says he needs to talk to someone, especially if he’s seeing ghosts. “Let’s not overstate things,” he brushes it off, blaming the heebie-jeebies hospitals give him for seeing something out of the corner of his eye. “That’s also how post-traumatic stress works,” she argues. He insists it’s not a problem … but then while driving with Torres (Wilmer Valderrama) and Knight in the car, he sees Lily on the side of the road and blows through a stop sign. “Still think it’s not a problem?” Knight asks.

And so Parker calls up Grace (Laura San Giacomo), and the therapist admits she’d been expecting to hear from him since his mandatory psych eval after his near-death experience on the ship. She got the sense that there was more than he was willing to talk about or even conscious of; it can take months and sometimes years to process a traumatic event. Parker says he didn’t mean to leave it out, but he didn’t know how to explain it at the time. He tells her about Lily. “Just thought she was a mirage, part of this fever dream I was having on the ship because of the blood loss, pain… But now, lately, she’s showing up everywhere without the trauma.” Who is she to Parker? “That’s the problem. I have no idea,” he says.

Sonja Flemming / CBS

Parker’s reached out to his father, but he doesn’t recall anyone with that name from the past. “I’d never seen her before, but the name Lily just came blurting out of me like it was buried deep in my frontal lobe,” he says. Hippocampus, she corrects him. “I don’t care where she’s stored, I just want her out,” he tells Grace.

Grace then gets Parker talking about his mother—since she showed up in the fever dream, too—and we get insight into why he brings in pastries. Parker says he saw his mother holding bakery boxes and telling him to mind the rope, the one Knight had tied around her ankle before she went underwater. “It was her o some inner voice, I don’t know,” he says. “Either way, it woke me up.” There’s not much to tell about his mother, he says. She died when he was young, a few years after she moved out. Why did she move out? “They fought a lot,” he says. His father told him that one day she went out for pastries and never came back.

Grace warns him they have to be careful about digging for repressed memories; there’s the risk of creating false ones. But everything else is for their next session, she adds, and she wants him to plan to talk about what really happened with his mother.

Well, Parker doesn’t make it to that next session (work keeps him busy), so Grace tracks him down. He admits that her comment about his mother threw him, especially since he told her everything there is to tell. She wonders if there’s any connection to his belief in angels—which he didn’t tell her about, but Knight may have during her own session after the ship—and she thinks his mom is a kind of angel to him. He refuses to talk about his mother after that—who was no angel, he stresses—and walks away.

A conversation with Kasie (Diona Reasonover) and Palmer (Brian Dietzen) about how helpful Grace is does, however, get him to apologize to her and agree to continue meeting, but just to talk about Lily, for now. He will deal with his mother eventually. Grace suggests that he keep track of the conditions that accompany Lily’s appearances: his mood, stress level, and what’s happening around him. Now that he’s seeing her again, she recommends he not be alarmed and instead welcome her. Maybe that will provide him with some answers. Then comes the awkward moment as they part ways: He kisses the top of her head as he thanks her, and both freeze right after. What’s that about?

After the case is closed, Parker thanks Knight for giving him the push. Then, as he’s leaving the building, he sees Lily sitting at a table. She runs off as he approaches and calls out to her, but she’s left a note behind: “You can’t tell anyone.” Parker’s left, alone, holding nothing. What does that mean?!

Elsewhere, this episode had mentions of both Abby (Pauley Perrette, who exited in Season 15) and Ducky (David McCallum, who died in 2023). At the crime scene, after Torres remarked that no one likes blood spatter, McGee (Sean Murray) corrected him: “Abby liked blood spatter.” Then, Palmer revealed he hung up a darts board in the morgue after finding one in Ducky’s old boxes; he was a dartist back in the day so he thought he’d hang it up in his honor.

What’s your theory about Lily? Let us know in the comments section below.

NCIS, Mondays, 9/8c, CBS