Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Sydney Season 2 premiere are ahead!
NCIS: Sydney Season 2 is officially underway on the 2025 TV schedule, whether you’re watching it live in the United States on CBS or streaming it with your Paramount+ subscription. In addition to dropping the bombshell reveal that Michelle Mackey has a son about to graduate high school, the Season 2 premiere, titled “Heart Starter,” pulled back the curtain a little bit on the mystery that began in the Season 1 finale with the kidnapping of JD’s son. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn who the big bad is pulling the strings by the end of the episode, but Sydney showrunner Morgan O’Neill not only let CinemaBlend know that when we’ll meet this individual, but also informed us that their “emergence” will be tied to Mackey’s court martial from prior to the series starting.
When NCIS: Sydney Season 2 Will Reveal This Big Bad
Although Colonel Richard Rankin was revealed to be connected to villains Ana Niemus and Yaroslav Utkin in the NCIS: Sydney Season 1 finale, “Heart Starter” clarified that he wasn’t a willing participant in the sinister events that played out, but rather a blackmailed party. This became evident when his heart started bleeding when he tried to write something down for Mackey and the team. It was later revealed that Rankin had been outfitted with a pace maker that contained a listening device, meaning someone from afar triggered what happened to him. When I asked Morgan O’Neill during my interview if this storyline would wrap up by the end of Season 2 or stretch into a potential Season 3, he answered:
As you point out, there's a huge revelation in Minute 3 of the first episode of this season which puts the NCIS train on a completely different set of tracks, and we start rocketing in a really intense way in a direction that we didn't probably foresee. What we learn across the season is that everything that's happened up to this point, so the entirety of Season 1, starts to become a mystery that we are unraveling at greater and greater speed. What I can say is by the end of Season 2, the portrait of the antagonist becomes a lot clearer, and we actually come face to face in Episodes 9 and 10. All of the mystery and conspiracy of the first season comes to a resolution at the end of the second season. So there's resolution in sight, and I'm really excited for everyone to get there. I don't think it's what anyone would have thought.
The good news is that Colonel Rankin was still alive by the end of “Heart Starter.” The bad news is that he fell into a coma, and while he was publicly announced to have died, he’s now being held at an undisclosed medical facility. So all the NCIS: Sydney characters can do now is hope that Rankin will wake up to give them some answers. Going off what O’Neill said, it sounds like that’ll happen when Season 2 is winding down, which will pave the way for this villain in question stepping out of the shadows.
How Michelle Mackey’s Court Martial Ties Into This NCIS: Sydney Storyline
When NCIS: Sydney viewers met Michelle Mackey, they learned that she’d been courtmartialed back when she was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot, but she was found not guilty. It wasn’t until the episode “Ghosted” that it was revealed that when she was serving in Khost, Afghanistan, she, a gunner and a corpsman took a chopper to go rescue three soldiers who’d wandered off base and ended up on the wrong side of the brother. Those soldiers made it out alive, but the two who accompanied Mackie did not. Remembering how “Ghosted” didn’t explain why Mackey wasn’t found not guilty, I brought this up to Morgan O’Neill, and here’s what he had to say about if more answers are forthcoming:
You've really picked the eyes out of that one because that is fermenting in the back corners of Season 2 big time, and I don't know that we get answers. I think we get a whole lot more questions. Because, as you'll remember, at the very beginning of the first episode of the first season, when Mackey meets Colonel Rankin for the first time, and he says, ‘I’ve been doing my digging about you too, Agent Mackey, and there are some things in your past that aren't quite what they seem, and there are some people out there who would prefer to do what they started, which is to bury you.’ Those people haven't gone away, and their presence across the season is starting to be gently felt, and I'd go so far as to say it’s one of the fundamental underpinnings of the emergence of the big bad.
This almost makes it sound like the villain is somehow connected to Mackey’s court martial, and in turn could mean they’re someone high up in the United States government. It’ll be a while until we learn if that’s the case or not, but for Olivia Swann’s character, she’s not done gripping with this rough period of her life. The people who wanted her to be punished for actions will resurface, and from the way Morgan O’Neill said how we’d get more questions, I wouldn’t be surprised if this storyline continues into Sydney Season 3 if that gets ordered.
NCIS: Sydney airs new episodes Fridays at 8 pm ET on CBS. Keep checking back with CinemaBlend for more coverage on the series, as well as NCIS, NCIS: Origins and the forthcoming Paramount+ exclusive series NCIS: Tony & Ziva.
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