How NCIS Said Goodbye to Ducky and David McCallum

Jimmy Palmer walks into Ducky’s house with two coffees.

He greets the corgi waiting in the foyer, Solo, and keeps talking as he opens the curtains and lets the morning in. Classical music is already playing. “Dr. Mallard,” he calls to the man in the bed. Then the smile falls away. “Ducky?”

Ducky does not wake up.

That is how NCIS began “The Stories We Leave Behind,” the Season 21 episode that aired on February 19, 2024. It was the show’s goodbye to Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard, and to David McCallum, who had played him from the start.

Quick answer: NCIS said goodbye to Ducky in Season 21, Episode 2, “The Stories We Leave Behind,” which aired nearly five months after McCallum died. Palmer found him at home. The team finished one last case Ducky had left unfinished, and Michael Weatherly’s Tony DiNozzo walked into autopsy with a bow tie.

McCallum died on September 25, 2023, six days after his 90th birthday, of natural causes, surrounded by family at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was the show’s last remaining original cast member. We have already written about the legacy he left, and what his family said that night. This is the story of how the show said goodbye.

The Hollywood strikes had delayed the new season, so the tribute did not air until February. Brian Dietzen, who played Palmer opposite McCallum for 20 years, co-wrote the episode with executive producer Scott Williams. “We wanted to honor a life well-lived, 60 years in this business and 20 years on our show,” Dietzen told USA Today. “This allows fans to grieve with us.”

Mark Harmon had already said his piece the night McCallum died. “David lived a great, full, long life,” he told TVLine. “I was in awe when I first met him and all of us on the show were honored to have toed a mark opposite him.” Dietzen, posting that same week, called him “a mentor, a great scene partner, a wonderful father and husband, and he was my dear friend.”

He Still Had One Last Case

The hour is Palmer’s, from the first minute. He had come by with those coffees the way you check on family. Ducky is in bed in monogrammed pajamas, the letters DM on the sleeve. Dietzen later said that was “a difficult scene to shoot, that is for certain.” An extra played Ducky, mostly out of frame. “DM stands for Ducky Mallard and also stands for David McCallum, so there are parallels,” he said. “There are takes of that scene where I was just a wreck.”

Back at the office, an envelope arrives from Alaska. Inside is a Polaroid of McGee, Ducky, and Gibbs. Harmon does not walk into the funeral, but he is there in that picture, and in the old flashbacks. The flowers keep coming too, from every corner of the NCIS map.

Ducky, it turns out, had been working on a case nobody knew about. A Marine’s daughter had asked him to clear her father’s name after a Senate candidate started smearing the dead man in public. The team goes through Ducky’s journals. His last entry is a riddle: “Our answer lies with the team, however cluttered it might be.” McGee finally understands it. The answer is behind the team, literally. A framed photo swings open, and Ducky’s hidden files are waiting. The evidence takes the candidate down. The Marine’s name is restored.

“The best way of honoring Ducky was to have him solve one last case with the team,” Dietzen said. “Even posthumously, he’s the one that cracks the case.” He told Variety it also gave the team a way to move through the grief. They get “to go into action, and not just sit in their distress but actually affect change in someone else’s life, and by proxy fulfill a wish of Ducky’s.”

A Bow Tie and a Familiar Voice

The surprise the show kept quiet was Michael Weatherly. After the team gives Palmer a moment alone in autopsy, a familiar voice cuts the silence. “Autopsy gremlin!”

Tony DiNozzo walks in with a bow tie he picked up at Heathrow for Palmer. He ties it himself, slipping into his best Ducky voice as he does it. Then he tells him it is not only the stories we leave behind. It is also the lives we touch while we are here. “He had a good friend in you,” Tony says.

“We wanted that to be a good surprise,” Sean Murray later told TV Insider. He and Weatherly and Dietzen had known it was coming. Almost nobody else did. “It was a hard episode to get through, just having worked with David for 20 years, and it was kind of a mixture of saying goodbye in real life and saying goodbye on camera.”

Palmer’s Goodbye

Palmer carries more than the case. He does not want to be in autopsy. “Why do we do that?” he asks. “Why do we hold back on telling people every day how much they mean to us?” Kasie tells him Ducky already knew. Then she tells Palmer she loves him.

The hardest turn is a flashback from after Gibbs left. Ducky looks at Palmer, who has already lost too many people, and tells him change is the essence of life. “I don’t mourn his departure. I’m grateful for it. Our pain is a small price to pay for his peace.”

Dietzen told Variety that was among the last scenes he and McCallum filmed together in person. “That was him at 88 years old, and just tremendous.”

The episode ends with Palmer turning off the lights in autopsy. Then a card: “In memory of our dear friend and colleague David McCallum. We will miss you.”

The Stories He Left Behind

Fans caught the small things, too. Solo the corgi, who ends up going home with Palmer and his daughter, was widely taken as a nod to Napoleon Solo, Robert Vaughn’s character opposite McCallum in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Dietzen later told TVLine the episode was seeded with Easter eggs from that series and from The Great Escape. Ducky’s historian office is full of books, mugs, and team photos, including one of the Season 1 group with Kate.

Ducky had been there from the beginning, starting in 2003. McCallum took the role seriously enough to spend time in the Los Angeles coroner’s office, learning how autopsies are done. In the Season 16 episode “Silent Service,” which aired on March 26, 2019, he stepped down as chief medical examiner, became the NCIS historian, and Palmer took over the lab.

Long before that goodbye, the friendship with Gibbs was already the quiet center of the show. NCIS: Origins has since gone back to the early 1990s to show how that bond first took shape.

Dietzen has admitted that when he booked his first one-day job on the series, “I’ll be honest, I didn’t know who David McCallum was.” Twenty years later, he wrote Ducky’s goodbye. He told Variety he hoped fans would feel “not just sadness that he’s gone, but also, boy, what a blessing that he was here.”

It is a quieter goodbye than some of the NCIS losses fans still carry. Palmer found him at home, with coffee in his hands and a dog in the hall. The team finished his last case. An old friend tied a bow tie and walked him toward the memorial. That was the story they left behind.