NCIS: Origins Season 1 concluded at the end of April, leaving viewers to mull over things like that tragic twist for Lala Dominguez, Leroy Jethro Gibbs meeting his future second wife, and Mike Franks’ brother coming back into his life. One character who was absent from the finale, however, was Patrick Fischler’s Cliff Wheeler, who had been the Special Agent in Charge of the NIS Pendleton office until the events of the episode “Darlin’, Don’t Refrain.” We still have several months to go until Origins Season 2 premieres on the 2025 TV schedule, but not to worry, as the showrunners told me they have “big plans” for Wheeler coming up.
Because of the circumstances that led to Wheeler’s indefinite suspension in NCIS: Origins Season 1’s penultimate episode, during my last conversation with showunners David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal, I asked the duo about if we’ll see him resuming his duties in Season 2 or if there was a replacement on the way. North answered:
We won't get into whether or not we'll be seeing Wheeler resume his duties, but we certainly have not seen the last of Wheeler. He's going to continue to be a presence and Patrick Fischler, who plays Wheeler, is just phenomenal. So we have not seen the last of Wheeler.
Cliff Wheeler’s suspension came in the midst of discovering the identity of the true Sandman killer. At the start of the “Darlin’, Don’t Refrain,” Wheeler was catching heat for fumbling the Sandman case after Bugs Floyd, who originally confessed to being the killer, was gunned down while he was in prison. Luke Fletcher, the man who ran Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ veterans support group, ended up being the real culprit, and Gibbs was forced to kill him when they fought. Afterwards, Wheeler confessed to his superior that he was the one who shredded the document mentioning Bugs’ parter and Operation Sundown, feeling at the time that it was best to keep the case closed.
As if all that, plus his son acting out at home, wasn’t enough for Cliff Wheeler to deal with, “Darlin’, Don’t Refrain” also indirectly revealed that he had more than just a professional relationship with FBI detective Noah Oakley. The two of them have a romantic past together, and Gina Lucita Monreal told me that this aspect of the character had been planned since “close to the beginning.” Furthermore, if fans went back and rewatched NCIS: Origins (which is easy to do with a Paramount+ subscription), they’d see “tidbits of their relationship” that they might not have seen the first time around. She continued:
The first time we meet Oakley, they have a reference to something that happened years before. And then when Franks goes behind Wheeler's back and contacts Oakley, Wheeler has a very big reaction to this. ‘He's my guy,’ he says. So you'll see little instances where we did where we were planting the seeds of what was really going on between them. So it was something that we had been planning and revealing all along, and that we are excited to delve further into next season.
With NCIS: Origins taking place in the early 1990s, it’s definitely a much more difficult time for someone like Cliff Wheeler to be open with his queerness, not to mention how his family factors in. But as David J. North and Lucita Monreal assured me, we’ll be following up with Wheeler in Origins Season 2, so I’m curious to see how this aspect of the character will be further explored. This leads me to think that he’ll resume running the Camp Pendleton office, otherwise it becomes harder for him to be involved in the lives of Gibbs, Franks and the rest.
NCIS: Origins is moving to Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET for CBS 2025-2026 fall TV lineup, sandwiched between NCIS Season 23 and NCIS: Sydney Season 3. Gina Lucia Monreal has also indicated that the prequel will eventually tie into NCIS: New Orleans by showing the formation of the Fed 5.
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