Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Origins episode “Sick as Our Secrets” are ahead!
Currently four individuals comprise the main team on NCIS: Origins: Austin Stowell’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Kyle Schmid’s Mike Franks, Mariel Molino’s Lala Dominguez and Caleb Martin Foote’s Bernard “Randy” Randolph. So far during Origins’ run on the 2024 TV schedule, we haven’t really gotten to know Randy that well other than learning he has a wife and infant son, and he’s been trying to quit smoking.
However, the newest episode revealed that Foote’s character has an unexpected connection to Stowell’s leading protagonist that’s heartbreaking and I imagine will surely fe followed up on later in Season 1. Additionally, “Sick as Our Secrets” delivered an ominous callback to Origins’ debut episodes involving Diany Rodriguez’s Vera Strickland that seems to be setting the stage for something bigger.
Randy Was Supposed To Protect Gibbs’ Wife And Daughter
Whether you followed along with Mark Harmon’s Gibbs for years on NCIS or have only gotten to know the character through NCIS: Origins, you know about the tragedy that changed the course of his life. While Gibbs was serving in Operation Desert Storm, his first wife, Shannon, witnessed a drug dealer named Pedro Hernandez kill a Marine outside of a gas station. She and Kelly, the couple’s daughter, were put into protective custody by NIS, but on the way to the safe house, Hernandez shot the agent driving them, and Shannon and Kelly died in the crash.
As it turns out, Mitchell, the deceased agent, wasn’t originally assigned to this protective detail; it was Randy. This week’s NCIS: Origins episode followed the team investigating the murder of Father John Larkin, a Navy reserve chaplain who was mistakenly killed because he was substituting during confession for the real target, Father Bobby. While Randy was keeping an eye on Bobby at the hotel where they were laying low, he confessed that he had been tapped to protect Shannon and Kelly, but he asked to be taken off the assignment because his newborn son had colic. Because he was so exhausted from the sleepless nights, he was worried he would make a mistake on the detail and didn’t want to risk it.
So had things gone according to the original plan, Pedro Hernandez would have killed Randy instead of Mitchell, and that’s been haunting Randy for months. That’s why he’d been volunteering for so many protective details lately, as a way of atoning for missing the one that cost a fellow agent’s life. It’s also played into why he’s secretly still been smoking, as he’d told his wife he stopped a month ago.
Father Bobby attempted to alleviate the guilt Randy was feeling, reminding him that not only were the deaths of Mitchell, Shannon and Kelly not his fault, but if he had done the detail, then it would be his son growing up without a father rather than Mitchell’s. Randy seemed to be in a better mental headspace by the time “Sick as Our Secrets” was over, but I find it hard to believe this won’t be revisited later on in NCIS: Origins Season 1. That’s because he still hasn’t told Leroy Jethro Gibbs this secret.
Aside from finally dropping off the letter to Mitchell’s family that he’d written months earlier to express his condolences, Gibbs didn’t have a personal arc this week, which is fine. I understand why Randy sharing his unexpected connection to his teammate wasn’t squeezed into the episode given everything else that was happening. Still, to channel Gibbs, I have a gut feeling that this will come to light for him before the expanded Season 1 is over, and while I don’t think Gibbs will ultimately hold a grudge against Randy, it’s easy to envision him being upset at first.
Vera’s Interviewing The Villain From the NCIS: Origins Premiere
NCIS: Origins takes place in 1991, six years after Vera Strickland severed her partnership her partnership with Mike Franks. As such, although she’s one of the show’s main characters, she’s largely been doing her own thing this season, only occasionally helping out the main team with cases. Instead, she’s been focusing on getting her psych profiling program off the ground, something that wasn’t going to happen until Franks spoke with Cliff Wheeler, the head of NIS’ Pendleton office.
As explained in “Last Rites”, Vera’s program involves NIS taking data on criminal offenses and using that information to pinpoint likely suspects. It requires her to interview incarcerated offenders, and the first person on her list was Jamison “Bugs” Boyd. If you’d just tuned into Origins for the first time on missed the two-part premiere (which you can stream with a Paramount+ subscription), then this was just some random criminal in front of her camera, but those who’ve been watching Origins since the beginning will recognize him as the man behind the killings in “Enter Sandman”, which was Gibbs’ first NIS case.
Now it’s possible that this was just supposed to be a subtle nod to “Enter Sandman”, which “Sick as Our Secrets” also did by having the team find the man who killed Father John Larkin in the tunnels where they’d previously found Bugs. But to once again channel Gibbs, remember Rule 39: there’s no such thing as a coincidence. Ok, so I don’t really believe this is as a blanket statement on life, but I do think the Origins writers chose Bugs for a deeper reason.
What is this reason? I have no idea. Maybe Bugs somehow breaks free or maybe he’s connected to another crime the team will investigate. But take him being Vera’s first psych profile and combine it with the older Gibbs’ ominous words from the end of “Enter Sandman” that seemingly teased that this story could be revisited, and I’m thinking that the conclusion of “Sick as Our Secrets” planted the narrative seed for something that will bloom later this season.
If that ends up happening, count on CinemaBlend to recap what goes down. Until then, continue catching watching NCIS: Origins Mondays at 10 pm ET on CBS, following right after new episodes of NCIS Season 22.