What happened to Jimmy's wife on NCIS? It took another season for the show to finish telling you

Then, a full season later, it circled back and gave Jimmy (and the audience) the goodbye the first time around didn't provide.

How the death was revealed

In the season 18 episode "The First Day" — which fast-forwarded the show's timeline into the pandemic — Jimmy arrives in the bullpen with his usual upbeat energy, armed with disinfectant wipes and chat about homeschooling his daughter Victoria. Then Bishop asks whether his mum moving in is permanent. Jimmy's face shifts.

"You guys were so great, when, you know… I lost Breena."

That's it. No flashback. No hospital scene. Breena had been on a ventilator, comatose. Jimmy wasn't allowed to see her before she died because of lockdown restrictions. He couldn't hold a memorial. The show delivered all of this through a few lines of dialogue — and Brian Dietzen, who plays Jimmy, made every one of them land.

Why the show did it that way

Dietzen explained in a 2021 Entertainment Weekly interview that the producers wanted the pandemic to affect the team without killing off a main cast member. Breena — who'd appeared in only seven episodes across 13 seasons, played by Michelle Pierce — was the choice. The idea was to mirror the specific cruelty of COVID-era grief: the isolation, the inability to say goodbye, the solitary mourning.

"The producers let me know that we want the advent of COVID to hit our team," Dietzen told ET. "And yet, we don't want to lose a team member."

The real goodbye came in season 19

In the season 19 episode "The Helpers" — co-written by Dietzen himself — Jimmy is exposed to a deadly biotoxin and begins hallucinating as he fights for his life. Breena appears to him. The two sit together in a field. Jimmy tells her how much he misses her. Breena tells him to open his eyes.

It's the farewell the show skipped the first time. Dietzen later told TVLine that he'd pushed for the scene specifically because Jimmy never got to say goodbye on camera — and the audience never got to see it either.

For a character who appeared in only seven episodes, she left a long shadow:

• Season 7 — Breena is introduced as Jimmy's date.
• Season 9 — They marry.
• Season 12 — Their daughter Victoria is born.
• Season 18 — Breena's off-screen death from COVID-19 is revealed.
• Season 19 — Jimmy finally gets to say goodbye, in a hallucination scene co-written by Dietzen himself.