Although longtime NCIS fans know how Mike Franks’ story ends (and if you don’t, I recommend using your Paramount+ subscription to rectify that), NCIS: Origins is providing a platform to explore parts of his past that were touched on in the flagship show and, more importantly, are brand-new. Kyle Schmid plays the younger version of the mustachioed man in the prequel that premiered on the 2024 TV schedule in October, and among the Franks-related highlights we’ve gotten so far include seeing him delve back into one of his toughest cases and learning how he and Leroy Jethro Gibbs met. Now with the Origins midseason finale behind us, CinemaBlend learned from co-showrunner and executive producer David J. North what’s coming up next for Franks, and it has me both excited and concerned.
Ahead of the airing of “Blue Bayou”, which, in addition to teasing the next big Season 1 villain, showed the series of events that led to Mike Franks recruiting Gibbs onto his NIS team, I had the privilege of speaking with North about his work on NCIS: Origins. During our conversation, I asked him if there would be flashbacks focused on other characters later this season now that the Gibbs-focused flashbacks had caught up to when Origins began, and he answered:
We're moving on to other characters. In the second half of the season, we're about to learn a whole lot more about how Mike Franks became Mike Franks. And I'll just say we're really excited about it because the audience isn't going to believe where we take this. As much as we think we know about Franks, we stay true to that, but we’re really coloring in how Franks became Franks.
Mike Franks has been part of NCIS lore since Muse Watson first played the older version of the character in NCIS Season 3’s final two episodes. We learned a fair amount about Franks during Watson’s 20 appearances on the flagship show (a sizable amount being the character in ghost form), but barely any details were shared about his life from before he met Gibbs. Well, I was definitely excited to learn from David J. North that one, if not several NCIS: Origins episodes will delve into how Franks became the colorful character we know and love. At the bare minimum, I’d like to learn how he joined NIS following his time in the United States Marine Corps.
NCIS: Origins has also shed on light on Mike Franks’ personal life through his romantic partner in 1991: Tish Kwa’la, played by Tonantzin Carmelo. Unfortunately, it was revealed in “One Flew Over” that Tish was sexually assaulted in a parking lot prior to the start of the series, though in that episode, she demanded Franks stop trying to look for her rapist. Between that traumatic event and Tish never being mentioned on NCIS, I shared my concern with North that the couple’s story will end in tragedy. Here’s what he had to say about that:
This season coming up, we're going to delve much further into their relationship, and Franks is going to deal with some things personally that really affect him totally. When she asked him to give up looking for the man that assaulted her, that's not an easy thing for Franks to do and maybe something he just can't do.
Mike Franks is determined to track down the man who attacked the love of his life, even going to far as to ask Vera Strickland, his former NIS partner, to discreetly create a psych profile of Tish. Although Franks did agree to drop this, as North informed me, something is coming up that will either make it challenging for him to honor her wish or see him outright breaking the promise. Perhaps that will lead to them breaking up due to trust issues, which would be sad, though it’d be preferable to Tish being killed off, which I worry is still a possibility.
NCIS: Origins resumes airing on CBS Monday, January 27, but David J. North didn’t share any details on when these Mike Franks-centric plot points will air on the 2025 TV schedule. The good news is that now that Season 1 has been expanded to 18 episodes, we’ll be spending even more time with him than originally expected.
