Although Mark Harmon briefly reprised Leroy Jethro Gibbs during NCIS: Origins’ two-part premiere a few months back, it’s been over three years since the actor made his last appearance in the procedural franchise’s flagship show. In NCIS Season 19’s fourth episode, which you can stream with a Paramount+ subscription, Gibbs bid farewell to Sean Murray’s Timothy McGee in Naktok Bay, Alaska after the two had enjoyed some lake fishing together. Now current NCIS main cast member Gary Cole, who’d debuted as Alden Parker just a couple episodes earlier, revealed how Harmon’s final scene on the show ended up looking better than expected during the shoot.
Cole stopped by Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch to chat with its hosts, Michael Weatherly and Cote de Pablo, who’d both long since departed from NCIS when Cole came aboard, and will be respectively reprising Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David in the aptly-named spinoff NCIS: Tony & Ziva. While he was going over the “smart” way Mark Harmon’s exit from NCIS led to Alden Parker’s creation, Cole shared the following about how there was an unexpected occurrence of good weather when the cast and crew were filming in Alaska:
There's a great shot once they have their final scene, they just leave Mark in the water. You see the seaplane going behind him… Not everybody went. We had probably half of the people that really worked on the show, maybe more than that. But it was it was a skeleton crew compared to what we have back here. They were also real lucky because they told us… we stayed in a big fishing lodge that normally closes down on Labor Day for the winter. They seal it up and everybody goes away, but they kept it open for an extra 10 days. We only shot, I think it was three days, but we had to get there, they had to scout quickly, shoot and then wrap up and leave. But they were lucky because they'd normally said at that time of year, it's basically just kind of foggy and damp, and all of this beautiful landscape, you don't really see it. It might burn off for like an hour. But those three days were crystal clear, sunshine… They really lucked out.
I don’t doubt that the NCIS team would have found a way to make the Gibbs and McGee scene in “Great Wide Open” look good had the weather in that Alaskan environment had they not bee able to capitalize on that one hour of good weather and instead had to deal with fogginess and dampness. But fortunately, the fates smiled upon them with that three days of sunniness, resulting in Mark Harmon and Sean Murray being excellently lit as the episode was winding down. After the case they’d been working on wrapped up, Gibbs informed McGee that he’d decided to stay in the Alaskan wilderness, and as his plane was taking off, the latter got one last look at the former as he continued to fish in the lake.
Though it doesn’t look like Mark Harmon will be returning to NCIS anytime soon, if at all, he remains involved in the franchise by executive producing and narrating NCIS: Origins, while Austin Stowell plays the younger Leroy Jethro Gibbs on camera. Meanwhile, Gary Cole and Sean Murray remain series regulars on NCIS alongside Wilmer Valderrama, Katrina Law, Brian Dietzen, Diona Reasonover and Rocky Carroll. There’s no official word yet on if either show will return for the 2025-2026 TV seasons, though the former getting a Season 23 renewal seems pretty strong.
Both NCIS and NCIS: Origins resume airing Monday, January 27 on the 2025 TV schedule, as the debut of NCIS: Sydney Season 2 will follow on Friday, January 31. Mark Harmon can next be seen in Freakier Friday, which opens in theaters on August 8, 2025.
