Which NCIS episode do Ziva and Tony get together?

Across twelve seasons of shared screen time, NCIS never once let Tony and Ziva officially be a couple. And yet there's one specific episode fans point to as the moment it happened — plus a long, complicated epilogue that stretched into a whole other show.

The episode is season 11, episode 2, "Past, Present, and Future, " which aired October 1, 2013. It's Ziva's farewell: after Cote de Pablo decided to leave the series, the writers sent Tony to Israel to track her down, and the hour ends with the pair's first real kiss on an airport tarmac before Ziva stays behind to leave her violent life behind. It is the closest thing to a get-together the mothership ever aired — and the last time the two characters appeared on screen together in NCIS proper.

The episodes around it

If you're building a watchlist, the relationship actually resolves across four points on the timeline:

• "Under Covers" (season 3, episode 8, 2005) — Tony and Ziva pose as married assassins and share a hotel room for the case. The starting gun for a decade of shipping.
• "Truth or Consequences" (season 7, episode 1, 2009) — the team rescues Ziva from Somalia. Her journals, revealed years later in "She" (season 16, episode 13), suggest this is when she understood her own feelings.
• "Past, Present, and Future" (season 11, episode 2, 2013) — the kiss. Also, by strong implication, the conception of their daughter.
• "Family First" (season 13, episode 24, 2016) — believing Ziva dead, Tony learns they have a daughter, Tali, and quits NCIS to raise her in Paris.

Read more: Who does Ziva end up with in NCIS? The Tony & Ziva finale settled it — and a darker ending was shot too

The season 16–17 arc then reveals Ziva faked her death, and "In the Wind" (season 17, episode 11) closes her story by sending her to Paris to reunite with Tony and Tali. The couple becomes official entirely off-screen, somewhere between that flight and the next chapter.

The kiss aired October 1, 2013. The actual relationship began around 2019 — without a single frame of it broadcast.

Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo have since had fun with the gaps themselves; in a 2025 TVLine interview, the two speculated on camera about exactly when Tali was conceived, landing where most fans already had: the Israel goodbye.

The spinoff that finished the job

The payoff finally arrived on Paramount+ with NCIS: Tony & Ziva, a 10-episode series that ran from September 4 through October 23, 2025. It opens with the pair co-parenting in Paris as exes — flashbacks reveal they got engaged in June 2020 and fell apart afterward — before an attack on Tony's security company sends the family on the run across Europe. The finale rescues kidnapped Tali, puts villain Jonah Markham behind bars, and ends with Tony and Ziva telling their daughter they want to start dating again. She approves.

Paramount+ canceled the show on December 19, 2025, after one season, amid the post-merger reshuffle of the streamer's slate. Weatherly and de Pablo's joint farewell statement framed the single season as mission accomplished, thanking fans who

"finally got to see Tony and Ziva find their happily ever after," as the statement put it.

So the full answer: watch "Past, Present, and Future" for the moment, "Family First" for the consequences, and the spinoff for the ending CBS spent a decade refusing to film. Twenty years from first flirt to first date — a franchise record nobody's rushing to break.

Earlier we wrote: Why did McGee lose weight on NCIS? Sean Murray addressed the health rumours himself