Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Origins episode “Blue Bayou” are ahead!
NCIS: Origins has only been airing on the 2024 TV schedule for two months, and it’s already reached the end of an era. The show’s newest episode, “Blue Bayou”, showed the events that led to Leroy Jethro Gibbs joining NIS. In other words, the time period in Gibbs’ life from when he learned his wife and daughter were murdered to where we met him at the start of Origins’ two-part premiere is now covered.
While the story of how Gibbs went from a grieving man with no direction in his life to a Navy cop was certainly interesting to watch unfold, it was the ending tease of a new villain coming to Season 1, as well as where things left off with Gibbs and Lala Dominguez’s complicated relationship, that I found especially compelling. So naturally I had to ask Origins co-showrunner David J. North about these things when I had the opportunity to interview him, but before we get into his answers, let’s recap what happened in “Blue Bayou”.
What Happened In The Latest NCIS: Origins
Most of “Blue Bayou” was set a few months before the main events of NCIS: Origins, with Gibbs thinking about these memories as he was on the last shift and after getting an upsetting phone call. After Gibbs killed Pedro Hernandez, the man who murdered Shannon, Kelly and the agent assigned to protect them (which was originally supposed to be Randy’s job), he left the Marine Corps and flipped out in his apartment. This caught the attention of his building manager Ruth, who promptly kicked him out when she saw the damage he caused.
However, after later seeing Gibbs in his truck bed as the rain was pouring down with nowhere to go, she let him return to the apartment. Noticing he had a nice, flat table, she started bringing jigsaw puzzles to his place to solve, and Gibbs helped her out with them. Although Ruth was initially distant towards her tenant, they eventually became friends, to the point that Gibbs told her that he killed Pedro Hernandez. It was something he’d been trying to tell Mike Franks, even trying to broach the subject with him at the grocery store where Gibbs briefly worked, but Franks didn’t want to hear about it.
At Ruth’s urging, Gibbs enrolled at FLETC in Georgia and trained there for two months to become an NIS agent. But upon returning home, Ruth informed Gibbs she was dying of blood cancer, something she knew about even before he left. Upset by the news, Gibbs failed his psych eval and got into a bar fight that got him thrown in a jail cell. Ruth showed up to bail him out, but Mike Franks was also there, so she gave him a piece of her mind. She berated Franks for abandoning Gibbs when he needed him and informed the mustachioed agent that the only reason Gibbs failed the psych eval was because he was thinking about her terminal condition.
So deciding to cut Gibbs a break, Mike Franks scrapped the NIS job offer Gibbs originally had lined up and recruited him onto his team. From there, Gibbs was able to locate Ruth’s estranged son in New Orleans, and she traveled to New Orleans to spend her last days with him. The phone call was Gibbs learning that she died.
What Those Shredded Paper Teases Set Up
While this was a great story to shed light on the past, it was the final moments of “Blue Bayou” that set the stage for NCIS: Origins’ future. You’ll recall that Jamison “Bugs” Boyd was the sniper whom the team caught in “Enter Sandman” and whom Vera Strickland has been interviewing for her psych profile program. Well, as the new episode was ending, some shredded paper from the NIS basement was shown with two incomplete sentences: “They labeled Operation Sundown ‘a catastrophic mishandling of…’” and “That Boyd, a.k.a. Bugs, had worked closely with a second sniper.” When I asked David J. North to elaborate on that tease, he told me:
Well, stay tuned with Operation Sundown. I don’t want to give too much away there. But at the end of our two-part pilot, ‘Enter Sandman’, older Gibbs’ voiceover tells us that the worst monsters lie and wait and come back. Gibbs’ gut was telling him there was more to this story, and now the audience knows that Bugs was working with a partner and there is someone still out there, someone that has to be reckoned with in the back half of the season.
The word “closely” particularly caught my eye, as it led me to wonder if this second sniper helped Bugs out with killing the four people he did in “Enter Sandman”. While North wouldn’t clarify with me if that was the case or not, he did make it quite clear that this mystery baddie will have a more prominent role in the coming Origins episodes. In his words:
The second sniper, I will tell you, is the bigger bad. This is the someone that has to be found quickly.
It remains to be seen if Bugs will somehow escape from custody later on in NCIS: Origins, but it might be a moot point now. It sounds like his main purpose was to set up the second sniper, and this other baddie will cause way more mayhem than his partner did judging by the way older Gibbs was talking as “Enter Sandman” was concluding.
What’s Next For Gibbs and Lala’s Complicated Relationship
Lala Dominguez was initially upset with Leroy Jethro Gibbs not because he killed Pedro Hernandez, but because he and Mike Franks had kept it secret from her. It was so bad that Lala was originally to ask Cliff Wheeler that she be taken off the team. However, when Lala met back up with Gibbs at the NIS office later and she heard him tell the story about Ruth, she changed her mind. So these characters seem to be on much better standing with each other by the end of “Blue Bayou”, and here’s what David J. North told me when I asked whether Pedro Hernandez’s murder would still factor into their dynamic or if the show was moving on to other things:
Well, both. We are moving on to other things, but the fact is, it’s like older Gibbs/Mark’s voiceover says at the end, that she told him that she wanted to work on trusting him again. So it’s going to be a process, but I think like Lala says to Gibbs in the opening scene in that dark room: if someone killed her family, she doesn’t know what she would’ve done, maybe the exact same thing he did. She doesn’t know. So she understands why he did it, she just has to come to terms with the fact that he didn’t tell her even when she poured her heart out to him. They’ll continue to be a complicated relationship, a work in progress.
Lala is going to become someone important in Gibbs’ life, as evidenced by him saying in the series premiere that the story he’s telling is about “her.” Things aren’t as bad between them now compared to the end of “Vivo o Muerto”, but as North laid out, their relationship will continue being complicated going forward. The silver lining is that the truth about Pedro Hernandez won’t be as contentious a topic between them anymore.
NCIS: Origins will return with new episodes Monday, January 27 on the 2025 TV schedule. Use your Paramount+ subscription to revisit what’s aired in Season 1 so far.