Warning! Spoilers are ahead for the Season 2 premiere of CIA on the 2026 TV schedule! If you haven't caught the episode yet, I really suggest you read one of our other excellent articles.
Following a successful first season, the second season of CIA is officially here. The FBI offshoot kicked off Season 2 with action, twists, and even a cliffhanger that kept fans hanging on the entire hour. This includes killing off someone at the start of the episode, and again I cannot express more vociferously that I'm about to get into spoilers for the Season 2 premiere.
The good news? While Nick Gehlfuss' Bill is central to the episode, he's very much around. It was his dad who died, though that actually wasn’t even the most shocking part. The showrunner shared his take on the whole situation with CinemaBlend.
Less than a year after the show officially kicked off, CIA is back with “The Deep." A few months have passed since the Season 1 finale, and a lot has changed. Unfortunately, one of those things involved Bill, as we learned early on his dad had passed.
This wasn't a massive surprise. Season 1 saw Bill struggling with news of his father’s declining health, and he just got worse in the premiere. His father’s death was really hitting him, and he didn't really open up about his feelings. It even started affecting his job and relationships, including his partnership with Colin (Tom Ellis).
This grief won’t be going away so easily, as showrunner Mike Weiss shared with CinemaBlend this is the start of a storyline and not the end.
We wanted to fully embrace the grief that he was feeling. His dad was his hero. He's not ready to admit just how much it's affecting him. But then ... by the end of the episode, we will discover that his father was not the man that he appeared to be. And so we're going to really be able to shake Bill up, and he's kind of going to grieve a second time. He's going to have to figure out who his dad really was so that he can figure out how to grieve for the man that he didn't fully understand.
Losing a parent is hard both in fictional worlds and real life. For Bill, no matter how many times he said hew as OK, he was definitely not, and even Colin saw it. Which brings me to my next point. Bill dealing with grief is NOT the most shocking part. At one point in the episode, Bill found out his dad went to Georgia for something not even his mom knew about.
Here's Where CIA Got Really Interesting
With Colin’s help, Bill discovered his dad, an honest Army veteran, was actually in the CIA. No one saw it coming, especially the fact that an assassin who had already killed three CIA operatives might be connected to him.
Moving forward, this realization will lead Bill to question much related to "this huge secret." He told me he knows the audience is paying attention and there WILL be payoff. I can't wait.
He found out this huge secret, and, you know, it's a TV show. So I think the audience is pretty perceptive. Like, when that assassin gets away at the end of the season premiere, I think people expect that he's gonna come back at some point. And the way that he's gonna come back is his past and Bill's dad's CIA past intersect. And Bill is desperate to figure out who his dad really was. What did he do for the CIA?
Bill looked up to his dad. Now he knows this CIA secret, he'll start coloring every interaction he had with his father in a different way. Digging deeper into his father while still grieving will not be easy. Plus, there's an assassin involved. In short, he's going to be asking himself a lot of questions.
I mean, on a simple, deep level, ‘Was my dad a good person? What does it mean for me if my dad was not such a great person? Who am I? What latent behaviors might pop out that I wasn't aware that I was capable of?’ The only way for him to figure out exactly who his dad was and exactly what he did is to apprehend this assassin who is the only person on earth who knows really who Bill's dad was.
It’s obvious this storyline will be sticking around for a while, and there’s no telling what else Bill will be uncovering about his dad, but if CIA wanted to start with a bang, I think the show's achieved it.
Find out in new episodes of CIA airing on Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on CBS, streaming the next day with a Paramount+ subscription.
