On September 25, 2023, David McCallum died at the age of 90. While there was a time when the actor was best known for playing Ilya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., over the last two decades, he’d built another sizable following for playing Donald “Ducky” Mallard on NCIS. So earlier this year, the Season 21 episode “The Stories We Leave Behind” paid tribute to both the real life man and the character, and it even squeezed in a cameo appearance from Michael Weatherly’s Tony DiNozzo. But now NCIS has ensured that Ducky’s memory will be kept alive in another way, as the newest episode of the CBS show to premiere on the 2024 TV schedule has bequeathed a new honor to the late character.
“The Trouble with Hal” followed the team investigating the murder of an ex-convict named Felix Pitts, who’d rented a house renting app to set himself up in the residence of a Bryce Prescott, deployed Navy SEAL who had no idea his house had been put up for tent (in this case, the butler actually did it). Long story short, Felix was hunting for what he thought might be priceless treasure buried by Bryce’s eccentric grandfather on either this properties or one of the others, and he was murdered by a package deliveryman who caught wind of what Felix was doing and got greedy. The case provided an amusing way of highlighting Nick Torres and Jessica Knight’s fear of ghosts, as they feared that a different property called Prescott’s Folly was haunted, and the collection of taxidermied animals and creepy dolls didn’t help.
During all this, the main characters were trying to figure out what to do with the office Ducky once occupied when he was serving as NCIS Historian. Torres hoped to turn it into the building’s new gym (he’s been working out more as he prepares to give dating another shot), and while Kasie Hines initially argued for the office to be preserved in Ducky’s memory, she later shared that she frequently goes into the office to meditate, and then decided to start her own petition to turn it into an official meditation room. Alden Parker expressed interest in having the office become a new dining area, and Jimmy Palmer, who worked with Dr. Mallard for years, was fine with all of these ideas so long as the file cabinets containing Ducky’s documents stayed where they were.
In the end, Director Vance decided to give everyone what they wanted by creating the Dr. Donald Mallard Memorial Multi-Purpose Room, nicknamed Ducky’s. Essentially, this looks like this will be the new hangout spot for when everyone’s not busy in the bullpen, lab or autopsy room. Nick can lift his weights, Kasie can continue getting her meditation time, Alden and the others can go there for a snack, and Ducky’s file cabinets remain for Jimmy to look back at his mentor’s old notes. While this office set has been around for years on NCIS, it now has increased importance on the show as a memorial of sorts to one of this show’s original series regulars.
The only person who wasn’t around for the official unveiling of Ducky’s was Timothy McGee, who was busy looking into Gabriel LaRoche, the new NCIS assistant director, which was the job McGee was looking to score at the start of Season 22. As Katrina Law told CinemaBlend, this guy has “kicked McGee’s Spidey senses off real hard,” though there’s nothing concrete yet to point to him being a new big bad. I trust McGee will eventually be able to find something, but he needs to keep this task out of Ducky’s, as that’s a place of leisure and relaxation.
New episodes of NCIS air Mondays at 9 PM ET on CBS, and episodes can be streamed afterwards with a Paramount+ subscription. NCIS: Origins follows at 10 pm ET the same night, and NCIS: Sydney Season 2 and the Paramount+-exclusive NCIS: Tony & Ziva will arrive at yet-to-be-determined dates.
