On September 25, 2023, actor David McCallum died at the age of 90. While the actor was once best known for playing Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., he became more recognizable over the last few decades for playing Donald “Ducky” Mallard on NCIS. With the Nick Torres-focused Season 21 premiere out of the way, the CBS show, which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription, will next air an episode paying tribute to Ducky, and Brian Dietzen, who co-wrote the episode, opened up about about it was important for the story to balance honoring McCallum and exploring the team’s grief, all the while not just turning this into a “series of flashbacks.”
Dietzen, of course, spent a lot of time with McCallum over the years, as his character, Jimmy Palmer, started out as Ducky’s assistant medical examiner and eventually succeeded the man as Chief Medical Examiner. Dietzen also has previous experience writing NCIS episodes, though as he told TV Insider, since Season 21 is comprised of just 10 episodes, he initially wasn’t going to request a script this time around. However, after McCallum passed away, he got the go-ahead from show runners David North and Steven Binder to team back up with writing partner Scott Williams and pen a farewell episode for Ducky. On the subject of his approach to writing “The Stories We Leave Behind,” Dietzen said:
Yeah, I think it’s really important that this remains an NCIS episode. It cannot just be some series of flashbacks to prior Ducky Mallard scenes. It was really important for us that we still have a case to solve. You’re living in a legacy of this person that you’ve lost, being Ducky, so we decided to craft a case where there would be something that would thematically link the case to the team’s loss, and those two don’t necessarily have to go hand in glove. They don’t have to be related. It’s not as though the case has to be related to Ducky in any way, but thematically speaking, it really should be.
David McCallum was part of NCIS since the beginning, so naturally time has to be carved out to honor the actor and say goodbye to his character, but Brian Dietzen and Scott Williams also wanted this to feel like a normal NCIS episode where a case needs to be solved, as opposed to simply assembling a clip show. As such, “The Stories We Leave Behind” will see McGee, Parker and the rest of the gang taking on one of the cases that Ducky wasn’t able to finish before his passing.
Dietzen also mentioned that “The Stories We Leave Behind” is meant to honor the “greater team” Ducky worked with, meaning not just the current cast of NCIS, but also departed folks like Mark Harmon’s Gibbs, Michael Weatherly’s Tony, Cote de Pablo’s Ziva and Pauley Perrette’s Abby, among many others. He continued:
And so when we wrote this thing, while it’s certainly not a show that’s just all about clips or anything like that, there are these remembrances of Ducky and we wanted to see him interacting with people that are on our current team and also people that are on our iterations of our team, too. I think we did a pretty good job with that, and I think that people like to see that they’re getting to see their Ducky many years past as well as the more recent.
Although David McCallum was a series regular on NCIS during its first 20 seasons, Ducky took a sabbatical from his work as Chief Medical Examiner during Season 15 into early Season 16, which was then followed by him going on a book tour. By the episode “Bears and Cubs,” he retired from the job, but in “Silent Service,” he agreed to become NCIS’ part-time historian. His final appearance was in the Season 20 finale, “Black Sky.”
New episodes of NCIS air Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on CBS, and NCIS: Hawai’i follows immediately after it on the 2024 TV schedule. Season 21 will also see McGee learning he has more family than he realized, and NCIS: Los Angeles vet Daniela Ruah stopped by to direct an episode.
