and its filming: "Ziva had been keeping a lot of secrets, and in the finale she was struggling. Her NCIS family perceived her to be icy and cold, which she is not. She denied many things to wake up every day and do this job. She denied she killed her brother, and denied she left Israel, her country. And when she revealed it in the final breakdown scene with Gibbs (Mark Harmon), it was like a confrontation with herself, almost like a punch in the belly...I walked on the set, they had re-created a hospital and Gibbs was all dressed up in hospital clothing. I had a regression in which I found myself at 21 walking into a hospital room where my grandmother, Maru, was lying on her deathbed--and it just hit me like a ton of bricks." Mark Harmon commented on the choice to rewrite Gibbs' backstory in the third season, saying, "I kid about it, but for a number of years here, I was playing that Gibbs was married three times, and then all of a sudden I found out that he’d been married four. I mean, that was okay, so you adjust. But I think one of the nice things they do here is challenge the characters. Because a lot of times, individually and as a group, we'll pick up a script and realize that we have read something that we didn't know. It's highly probable that I don't know all the secrets of this character, and that makes him fun to play." Much of the filming took place in Santa Clarita, California. Melodie Burns, a Santa Clarita resident, later described the site during production of the finale: "Distracted and rushed, I pulled into my usual parking spot at work. Admittedly, I was annoyed to see a man in a bathrobe walking toward me--in Valencia? As he approached, I noticed his face was badly scraped. 'You don't look so good,' I said. 'I'm not having a very good day,' he replied. Running into the building to clock in, I realized there were an unusually greater number of people in the parking lot, and I was taken aback by the new sign, 'HOSPITAL,' that hung over the door. It was only when I reached my co-workers and they excitedly explained Mark Harmon was on-site and bandaged did I realize it was him with whom I had just exchanged