NCIS: Origins Showed How Gibbs And Mike Franks Met, And I’m Glad A Mystery From The Series Premiere Was Also Solved

Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Origins episode “One Flew Over” are ahead!

The newest episode of NCIS: Origins delivered a pretty cut-and-dry case of the week tonight on the 2024 TV schedule. An elderly woman with dementia was found dead on the side of the road near Camp Pendleton, where she’d been living with her son, who’s a Naval officer, and his wife. Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Mike Franks, Lala Dominguez and Randy Randolf eventually learned that the daughter-in-law accidentally killed her during an argument, and then dropped the body off at the embankment and made it look like she’d been the victim of a robbery gone bad. This was also the first case where Gibbs got to directly take part in an interrogation, a skill that’ll one day become an invaluable part of his law enforcement repertoire.

Where “One Flew Over” really shined was by showing how Gibbs and Franks met, and through these flashbacks, we learned that Austin Stowell and Kyle Schmid’s characters clashed during their first encounters. Additionally, a mystery that was set up in Origins’ series premiere was finally solved, although I won’t be surprised if it will be revisited sometime later this season.

Gibbs And Mike Franks Did Not Get Off To A Good Start

The circumstances behind how Gibbs and Mike Franks met each other were explored years ago in NCIS, when Mark Harmon and Muse Watson were playing those characters. Still, for those who needed a refresher or are watching Origins, but never watched the flagship show, “One Flew Over” had them covered.

Last month in “All’s Not Lost,” viewers saw Gibbs deliberately walk into enemy fire after learning his wife and daughter had been killed, and then the end of “Last Rites” showed him waking up from his coma. The flashbacks in “One Flew Over” showed Gibbs finally returning to the United States, although because it was too painful to live in the home he once shared with Shannon and Kelly, he instead rented the apartment where he’s living during Origins’ present day events. Mike Franks, the lead investigator into Shannon and Kelly’s deaths, found Gibbs at the apartment and took him to the lot where the car in which they died was being kept.

Franks shared that Shannon witnessed Pedro Hernandez, a drug dealer working for the Reynosa drug cartel, killing a Marine at a gas station in Oceanside. An NIS agent was assigned to take Shannon and Kelly to a safe house so they’d be safe until Shannon could testify, but Hernandez shot the agent while they were on route, and Gibbs’ first wife and daughter died in the crash. Hernandez was then able to flee to somewhere Mexico, making it way more difficult for U.S, authorities to apprehend him.

Not content with Mike Franks telling him that he had no idea where Pedro Hernandez was, Gibbs wouldn’t stop pestering him on the phone or showing up at the NIS office in Camp Pendleton. It got bad enough that Franks returned to Gibbs’ apartment and ripped the phone out of his hands, leading to yet another argument that ended with Gibbs punching Franks and the latter placing the former in a headlock.

Seeing how much Gibbs was suffering, Mike Franks decided to bend the rules by taking Gibbs to NIS, leaving the case file for Shannon and Kelly’s murder on his desk, and then saying he had to “take a leak” while Gibbs stood next to said desk unattended. In just a few minutes, Gibbs was able to scribble down some notes about the murder and Pedro Hernandez, finishing just as Franks returned. Here’s how Mark Harmon’s older Gibbs described what Franks had done for him in the episode’s closing narration:

We learned NCIS that Leroy Jethro Gibbs eventually tracks down Pedro Hernandez and kills him, and thanks to NCIS: Origins, we now know how he got started on his mission of revenge. Assuming these Gibbs-centric Origins flashbacks continue, it seems like all that’s left to show is Gibbs killing Hernandez and then him being recruited by Franks into NIS.

We Finally Know The Subject Of Mike Franks’ Secret Psych Profile

During the two-part NCIS: Origins premiere, titled “Enter Sandman”, we met Mike Franks’ girlfriend Tish, played by Tonantzin Carmelo. At the end of Part 1, Franks came home to find Trish crying in the shower, and it was clear she was dealing with some kind of trauma. Then at the end of Part 2, Diany Rodriguez’s Vera Strickland delivered Franks, her former partner, an off-the-books psych profile he requested. Well, it turns out the two were connected.

During “One Flew Over”, Lala Dominguez stopped by Franks and Tish’s home one evening to have Tish cut her hair. After that was done, Tish showed Lala the psych profile, which she found while doing some cleaning around the house, and Lala deduced it was one of Vera’s, but figured it was an example she came up with when she was pitching her psych profiling program to NIS Special Agent in Charge Cliff Wheeler. Lala’s response only confirmed Tish’s suspicions that the profile was about her, as it detailed a woman who was raped in a parking garage.

Tish confronted Franks about this when he got home, reminding him that she told him to drop this because she didn’t want to give her rapist any more mental energy. Franks explained that he came up with the profile because he was annoyed the FBI hadn’t made any progress finding the man who sexually assaulted her, but Tish gave him an ultimatum: drop it for good this time, and he agreed. Still, knowing how these kinds of TV shows work, I’ll be surprised if this traumatic event isn’t revisited later on in NCIS: Origins, either because Franks goes back on his words or this assailant is somehow connected to a future case. Perhaps that will kick off a series of events that explain why Tish is no longer in Franks’ life when Muse Watson’s older version of the character enters the NCIS picture.

New episodes of NCIS: Origins air Mondays at 10 pm ET on CBS, right after episodes of NCIS Season 22. You can also stream the prequel and all the procedural franchise’s others shows with a Paramount+ subscription.