NCIS: Tony And Ziva Revealed Its Villains’ Backstories, And Now I Think There’s A Big Shakeup Coming

Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Tony & Ziva episode “Dark Mirror” are ahead!

INTERPOL agent Martine Aranow has been causing trouble for NCIS: Tony & Ziva’s titular protagonists since the NCIS spinoff began airing on the 2025 TV schedule. Then two weeks ago, we learned that she’s been in cahoots with Jonah Markham, INTERPOL’s inspector general. Until “Dark Mirror,” all we really knew about their illegal schemes was that they were looking to put the hurt on Reigning Fire Peacekeeping Solutions CEO Aaron Graves.

However, now the latest Tony & Ziva episode, which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription, has revealed Martine and Jonah’s backstories and why they joined forces. That said, I believe that this information is setting the stage for a shakeup between the two, one that’s quite the opposite of what Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo’s characters went through in Episode 4.

How Martine And Jonah Met, And Why They’re Working Together

The “Dark Mirror” flashbacks revealed that Martine and Jonah met in November 2014 at Securecon in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Aaron Graves was speaking. Jonah was working for the NSA and she was working for France’s Directorate General for External Security. They hit it off and reunited for the next two conventions, and then their relationship changed when Jonah discovered Martine killed a man and helped her get rid of the body, no questions asked. He’d already figured out that she was really a spy.

After they slept together for the first time, Martine and Jonah shared their respective gripes about Aaron Graves with each other. Martine was the attache for a French ambassador in Gabon who was being escorted by a Reigning Fire unit. The group was ambushed by child soldiers, and while Martine urged them to just flee the scene, Graves’ men, including the one she killed, instead opened fire on their adolescent attackers with no remorse.

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As for Jonah, he was an American raised in Serbia alongside his brother by their diplomat parents. When war broke out in that region, Jonah’s brother hacked a charter plane’s manifest to put his family on the plane so they could escape the Balkans. However, their car was attacked by Reigning Fire mercenaries a kilometer away from the tarmac, and Jonah was the only survivor.

With these two sharing a common enemy, they tried for years to pursue legal ways to expose Aaron Graves and Reigning Fire’s crimes, but nothing worked. So by 2023, when they were both now working at INTERPOL, Martine and Jonah decided to initiate a not-so-legal plan to accomplish their goal, which is why they need hacker Dejan Lazar’s help, who has his own beef with Graves.

Why I Think Martine And Jonah’s Partnership Will Be Done Soon

In the present day, Tony, Ziva and their allies deduced that Martine Aranow and Jonah Markham had returned to Paris because they would be sneaking into the Reigning Fire weapons expo to carry out their plot to kill Aaron Graves and bring down the company. Luckily, Ziva was able to discreetly shoot a listening device into the place where Martine, Jonah and Lazar were staying, and this paved the way for what I think will lead to Martine and Jonah’s relationship dissolving.

To be fair, it was telegraphed in this whole episode that Jonah has his own agenda. Lazar had shared his suspicions to Martine that he was keeping things from her. Then Archie, the child psychologist boyfriend of Ziva’s therapist, suspected Jonah might be a “dark empath,” an extrovert with “high levels of cognitive empathy and narcissistic tendencies,” after his brief interaction with him. Finally, thanks to the bug, Tony and Ziva heard Jonah admitting in a conversation with Lazar that he was lying to Martine.

Our main protagonists used this information to their advantage. At the end of “Dark Mirror,” Ziva sent footage to Martine of Tali being targeted in last week’s episode, which Martine had expressly told Jonah not to do. A seed of mistrust has been planted, one I think will bloom into the flower that is Martine turning her back on Jonah in one of the last three NCIS: Tony & Ziva episodes this season.