The season finale of NCIS, TV’s most watched series, drew massive viewership, attracting three and half times the ratings of Megyn Kelly’s much-hyped prime time interview with Donald Trump on the Fox Network, with which it competed in its time slot. The show, about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, capped its thirteenth season with a return of sorts to popular character Ziva David.  Ziva was a Mossad (Israel secret service) operative, who worked at NCIS for a while in order to put distance between herself and her father, Eli David, who happened to be the chief of Mossad. He was depicted in the series as a ruthless man who purposely built a dysfunctional family by exploiting Palestinians in order to ensure the security of the Jewish State.

Ziva became very close to her American partner, the dashing NCIS agent Anthony (Tony) DiNozzo, played by Michael Weatherly, who is exiting this series to star in a new one of his own. Tony was very protective of Ziva (though she could hold her own as a warrior) and very devoted to her. After she left America to return to Israel, she gave him her Star of David necklace.

In the final two episodes, scripted by writers/producers Steven D. Binder, Gary Glasberg, and Scott Williams, it is discovered that a double agent is killing colleagues to cover his tracks after selling nuclear secrets to the Russians. He has almost killed a trusted friend of the NCIS team. The NCIS staff learns that an agent with some association with the villain is trying to find Ziva. Then news comes of an explosion near Tel Aviv at the David family home to which Ziva has retired. The NCIS staff suspects rogue agents once connected with the CIA, even though several Middle East terror groups enthusiastically claim responsibility.

Tony is beside himself with worry. Then he hears with his colleagues, from the Israeli government, that Ziva has been killed. He had been prepared to board a plane to Tel Aviv, but recognizes that such a trip would now be futile.

The writers make a point of saying that the bomber was a mercenary Palestinian who was paid to destroy the David home. But we are told that it was Mossad files in the home, and not Ziva, that were the intended targets. Those files, acquired and saved by Ziva’s father, are copies of CIA evidence against the double agents, which the latter managed to expunge from American records. The point is strongly made that both the Mossad (that is, Ziva’s father) and American sources could have exposed the double agents, or at least cleared an operative whom they framed.

The new chief of Mossad, a pleasant middle-aged woman, quickly comes to visit Tony. Viewers will recall that Tony has never had anything nice to say about Israeli officials, especially Ziva’s father and an erstwhile lover of Ziva’s whom Tony had to kill. To say that he is ambivalent toward Israel is an understatement. As soon as the Mossad chief offers her condolences (very graciously and elegantly, by the way), Tony excoriates her for “running off” at one point with Ziva’s father. (Must all Mossad chiefs on this show, male or female, be homewreckers of one kind or another?) But the woman responds pleasantly and with dignity that she and Ziva made their peace a while back.

Then the Mossad chief personally trots out a surprise for Tony, a two-year-old daughter, Tali, named after Ziva’s sister who, as Tony well recalls, was killed by a terrorist years back. The child miraculously survived the attack on the David home.

Tony is, of course, instantly smitten by Tali, and brings her home with some help from his father (also a dysfunctional relationship).  Now that he is Tali’s sole parent, Tony decides to quit his job at NCIS and to raise her. He plans, first, to bring her back to Israel so he can “look for some answers” (because he doesn’t trust Israel?) and then take her to Paris because Ziva loved that city (more than Israel?).

So ends a rather strange two-part finale that is, I suppose “historic” in its two major suggestions.

NCIS is, as far as I know, the first TV drama to suggest that someone in Israel is killed as “collateral damage” for Western espionage about which Mossad had files (which become, as it were, back-up information).  Whether the head of Mossad could keep such files at home as private property is, of course, another question.

It is also the first TV drama to suggest that Israel would instantly turn over one of its orphaned children to the presumed father with the personal blessing and escort of the head of Mossad. Would any country do this before there was even genetic testing -- or before determining whether the father, who is in a dangerous profession with possible reprisals, could keep the child safe? (Tony had not made his big decision when Talia was brought to him.)  And these concerns do not even raise questions of religious and cultural identity which, while perhaps not the responsibility of Tony (who has never hidden his ambivalences from Israeli officials), should have occurred to Ziva, if indeed the Israeli Jewish branding of her character was taken seriously by the show’s producers.

Now I appreciate that the writers respect the virtue of their Ziva character enough, as does their character Tony, not to question her declaration of paternity. But then again, they paint Israeli women as deceptive. Ziva did, after all, keep news of the pregnancy and then of Tali’s birth from Tony. And the current Mossad chief is accused of having snuck around with Ziva’s late father.

Obviously, the writers created this scenario to allow for a pleasing plot mechanism for Weatherly’s departure from the show. But why should the State of Israel be exploited and depicted in such a strange light for the sake of an end-season and cast-transition shut down? One could ask the same question about the Ziva character itself. To create a superhero Israeli woman, the producers and writers of NCIS concocted a rather monstrous Jewish State.