Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Origins episode “Monsoon” are ahead!
The latter half of NCIS: Origins Season 1 kicked off a few weeks back with “Flight of Icarus,” which flashed back to a 21-year-old Mike Franks being drafted into the Vietnam War (stream it now with a Paramount+ subscription). Tonight’s episode, “Monsoon,” saw series regular Kyle Schmid playing Mike in 1982 and, as you can see above, he looked a lot more disheveled compared to where we find him in 1991. Ahead of the premiere of “Monsoon” on the 2025 TV schedule, I had the pleasure of speaking with Schmid about his experience playing his character nearly a decade before the events of Origins, which included him sharing how he channeled The Doors’ Jim Morrison during this time.
The “present day” story in “Monsoon” showed the team investigating the murder of Marine Lance Corporal Peter Rice, a homeless Vietnam War veteran whose death was passed along by his friend, Tom Molina, who was also homeless and met Mike Franks outside of a laundromat. Meanwhile, the flashbacks showed that in 1982, Franks was drifting aimlessly in Texas, drowning in alcohol and drugs and willing to transport the latter for several hundred bucks. Unfortunately, Franks’ motorcycle was stolen while he was stopped at a gas station, but the bright side is it led to him meeting Tish, the love of his life. Kyle Schmid starting off recounting what it was like working on “Monsoon” with the following:
It was a very cool experience to step back into yet another era, another decade, but also to be able to explore who Mike was post-Vietnam and to explore the politics of what that world looked like for servicemen who had served. I think one of the big takeaways of this episode, and I hope viewers can draw the parallel, is that Tom Molina and Mike Franks are not so different whatsoever. The biggest factor in their lives is the fact that Mike met Tish at a moment when he could have very much become who Tom Molina was. And if Tom Molina had met Tish in that same moment, Tom Molina could have been Mike Franks. We are only as powerful as the people around us, and in that time period when vets were coming home from a war that was just brutalized in the media. A lot of that negativity was all filtered down to the people who served, who were only serving for the person next to them to save their lives and save the lives of their brothers.
The only reason Mike Franks and Tish crossed paths was because her tire blew out as she was driving past him while he was walking on the side of the road after his motorcycle was stolen. Tish paid Franks for his help, but as they continued talking, he learned she was a hairdresser and asked how much she charged for a cut. The rest, as they say, is history, but like Kyle Schmid pointed out to me, had Tish not been driving past Franks that fateful day, he might have turned out like Tom Molina, who, as it turned out, was the one who actually killed Peter Rice while he was suffering through a PTSD flashback.
Kyle Schmid certainly welcomed getting the chance to play a Mike Franks without any kind of structure in his life, particularly because it gave him the opportunity to behave like Jim Morrison, who was The Doors’ lead singer, while on set. As he told me:
So being able to shift into that place where we get to see a little bit of the hippie come out in Mike, we get to see a little bit of him being a little looser as opposed to this very well-put together structured man that we know that runs NIS. It was so much fun. I mean, you’re looking in the mirror and feeling like Jim Morrison. I was walking around going, I was walking around set going like, ‘Hey there, sweetheart, how you doing? You wanna smoke a little dope later and hang out?’ It was fun, it was a blast. And then, of course, we got to see how Mike meets, Tish, which was, I think, so sweet, and innocent and beautiful in a way. We get to see kind of the origin story of how they met, so it was great.
When I later asked how Schmid envisioned Mike ending up the way he did in 1982, he told me it wasn’t “farfetched” for his character to come back the way he did given how many Vietnam War veterans came back from service with PTSD and weren’t being properly taken care of by the government. Without the “purpose” and “community” he’d gotten while he was in the Marines, and with his brother no longer in his life, Schmid mused that Franks experienced a “severe sense of loss,” with that void being filled by alcohol and drugs. However, Tish helped give his life direction again, and and now I’m interested to see if NCIS: Origins will show how Franks became an NIS agent next.
Sadly, by the end of “Monsoon,” Tish broke up with Franks after he confessed to her that he hadn’t stopped looking for the man who sexually assaulted her. While we know from the original NCIS that her and Franks don’t ultimately stay together, is it possible they could patch things up for a time as NCIS: Origins continue? We’ll find out as new episodes keep airing Mondays at 10 pm ET on CBS.