Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Sydney Season 2 premiere are ahead!
A little over a year ago, NCIS: Sydney concluded its first season, but it wasn’t until the following March that the series scored its Season 2 renewal. Fast-forward to tonight, Sydney, which airs on CBS in the United States and can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription, kicked off its second season on the 2025 TV schedule with “Heart Starter.” Ahead of the episode, showrunner Morgan O’Neill told CinemaBlend how it would deliver a “revelatory” reveal for Olivia Swann’s Michelle Mackey. Sure enough, Mackey shared with Jim “JD” Dempsey in the Season 2 premiere that she has a son, and O’Neill also informed us how this will “put an extra layer of pressure on her” for the rest of Sydney’s sophomore outing.
During the events of “Heart Starter,” which saw the team looking into Colonel Rankin after NCIS: Sydney Season 1 ended with the twist that he was connected to the assassin who kidnapped JD’s son, Mackey let JD know her nearly-18-year-old son is living in the United States, with Mackey having given birth to him when she was still in high school. Now that this key piece of personal information is out in the open, here’s what O’Neill told me when I asked if we’ll meet Mackey’s son and/or flash back to the teenaged period of her life:
Will we meet him? Yes. Will we flash back? Not necessarily, but I would say that her past comes crashing into her present in a kind of explosive way… As the season progresses, we'll put an extra layer of pressure on her, and it's a point of real vulnerability. It's something that she's obviously kept very close to her chest for a reason. What it also does on an emotional level, not so much on a plot machinations level, but on an emotional level, is she's pulling down the fence between she and JD in a really significant way. That's something that she hasn't told a lot of people and she's telling him. It's information that he has about her and, and it probably encourages him to respond in kind. What that does is it really brings out our two leads into each other's orbits in an emotional way that perhaps they hadn't really dared go in the first season.
Mackey mentioned her son to JD after she got a call from him, but the only reason she was willing to be open about this part of her life with Todd Lasance’s character was because it looked like their partnership was coming to an end. As a result of Ana Niemus, the other assassin who was involved with the plot to kidnap JD’s son and paved the way for the main characters to learn about Rankin’s involvement, being let go, Mackey was suspended from duty and JD was placed on leave. It didn’t look like these two would be working together again, so Mackey felt comfortable sharing this part of herself before they went their separate ways.
But that obviously didn’t happen. Niemus was re-apprehended, and both Mackey and JD’s superiors placed them back on duty, keeping the team intact. But like Morgan O’Neill said, the revelation of her son has resulted in her becoming more vulnerable on an emotional level. That’s not a bad thing since it sounds it will lead to her and JD becoming closer, but it’s also not something Mackey is used to doing like this. O’Neill continued:
The end result of that is much greater jeopardy for our people because the more emotionally vulnerable you are, the more vulnerable you are, period. So across the season, we've chosen a couple of key moments and you'll see them. But as the season progresses all the way through to episode 10, we really do peel back the lid on these characters that we've already started to fall in love with and realize even more why we love them. Also, in a couple of instances, we're shocked at what we discover, and hopefully that's as exciting for the audience as the first [season].
By the end of “Heart Starter,” the team was unfortunately no closer to learning who was the real mastermind behind this diabolical plot. The only person who could identify this individual was Rankin, who had been blackmailed and was stuck in a coma. The team can only hope he’ll awake from it while the rest of the world thinks he’s dead. Meanwhile, we can also look forward to meeting Mackey’s son at some point, presumably from him coming to Australia to visit her.
But as Morgan O’Neill said, in addition to Mackey and JD knowing each other a little better, viewers will learn more about the other NCIS: Sydney main characters and grow to appreciate them even more. I’m looking forward to seeing what this specifically entails as Sydney releases new episodes Fridays at 8 p.m. on CBS stateside.
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