Just before the NCIS: Hawai’i Season 3 finale, it was announced that the CBS drama, part of a long-running, successful franchise, would not be returning. (It’s one of the cancellations of 2024 that hurt us the most.) And so fans were left with one major cliffhanger and a few loose threads that were never to be answered.
Co-showrunners Jan Nash and Christopher Silber have now given TVLine a few details about plans for a fourth season, if they had gotten one. In fact, the reason the series ended like it did is because they didn’t know that they wouldn’t be back. “If we’d known it was coming, we probably wouldn’t have ended the series on a cliffhanger,” they said.
After the Season 3 finale wrapped up the case and everyone was healed, Jane Tennant (Vanessa Lachey) arrived home to find not her daughter but former mentor-turned-fugitive Maggie Shaw (Julie White) waiting for her. “You’re probably going to need a drink for what’s coming next,” Maggie warned. But what exactly was that referring to? Was it related to Jane’s mom, as teased earlier in the season after the agent hallucinated her? Was it something to do with Jane and Maggie’s shared CIA past?
“While not fully fleshed out, we had a general idea of where the Maggie story was going. It would have eventually intersected with Jane Tennant’s mother, but it was also going to move back into the dark world of Tennant’s spy past, using those stories to increase our understanding of who Jane was, but also to learn more about her team in the process,” Nash and Silber told TVLine.
It was in Episode 7, “The Next Thousand,” of Season 3 that Jane saw her mother while injured. Her mother looked the same way she did the day she abandoned her, and for Jane, it was a sign “our story’s not over yet.” NCIS: LA star Daniela Ruah directed the episode, and she told TV Insider those scenes “were heavily discussed.
“It’s really, really important, the sense of, maybe her mother saw her as a bother, and so that’s how she perceived this woman who opens the door and she’s like, ‘I don’t want you here. I want you to leave,’” Ruah explained. “Because maybe that’s the sensation she feels of why maybe her mother left, ‘Was I a bother to my mother?’ Whether those things are true or not for that character, those are the things that we had to discuss. The showrunners are still exploring this journey for Jane Tennant, so there aren’t a whole lot of concrete answers. So I just had to figure out what made sense for this episode and leave enough open that they can keep building on it.” It sounds like there was potential to build on that in Season 4.
Also on the table for Season 4, the co-showrunners told TVLine, was “some movement” for Kate (Tori Anderson) and Lucy (Yasmine Al-Bustami) after the couple briefly touched on a wedding while undercover as newlyweds. “Whether it would have been a wedding, meeting families, or some other thing, we didn’t know,” they admitted.
Karen Neal / CBS
After that episode, Al-Bustami told TV Insider she hoped that would lead to future conversations for the couple about a wedding. “What I would love to see—I haven’t discussed it with our writers—is that because this is the first time that you’re seeing them kind of talk about that and they didn’t really go into too much detail, but you see their individual viewpoints on it because they have their own viewpoints on it, I feel like if they were to discuss it some more, it seems like Kate is a little more open to and her family is very accepting to the fact that she would have a wedding, but I feel like Kate could possibly have Lucy see a different or open her up more to the idea of possibly having a wedding with Kate, with the right person,” she shared. “And right now, I hope it’s Kate.” She was also hoping to meet members of Lucy’s family.
Season 3 also brought in LL COOL J, reprising his role as Sam Hanna from NCIS: LA, as a special guest star, and it sounds like the plan had been for him to stick around. “The chemistry he shared with our amazing lead, Vanessa Lachey, was so compelling, we had hoped to keep it going for many seasons to come,” Nash and Silber told TVLine.
Sam initially came to Hawai’i as part of Jane’s evaluation to get back to work at the beginning of Season 3, following the traumatic events of the Season 2 finale. He then stuck around, working cases with the team and building his ELITE team.
What would you have liked to see in a fourth season of NCIS: Hawai’i? Let us know in the comments section, below.