Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Origins episode “Bugs” are ahead!
NCIS: Origins’ two-part series premiere, “Enter Sandman,” saw fresh NIS recruit Leroy Jethro Gibbs working with his new teammates to apprehend a sniper known as Sandman. The case seemed like it was open and shut once Jameson “Bugs” Boyd was captured and he confessed to killing his girlfriend Melanie, her lover Dustin Cruz, and two others. But then along came Origins Season 1’s midseason finale, where shredded pieces of paper showed that Bugs had “worked closely with a second sniper,” as well as how there’d been a “catastrophic mishandling” of an Operation Sundown.
This storyline was finally revisited in “Bugs,” the Origins episode that just finished airing on the 2025 TV schedule. We got some major bombshells regarding the Sandman killer, and I now find the Season 1 villain to be a lot more frightening. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about Mr. Boyd.
How Bugs Came Back Into The Picture On NCIS: Origins
Bugs was among the people who Vera Strickland had been interviewing for her psych profile program, but because funding washed up, she was never able to get him to fully open up to her. She finally seemed to catch a break when she got a call from Bugs weeks after she’d last seen him, asking her to come in. Vera was approved to go back and see Bugs at the prison, but when she arrived with her recording equipment, he suddenly no longer wanted to speak with her.
Upon further investigation, Vera and the other main NCIS: Origins characters learned that someone had called Bugs up at the prison after he talked to Vera. This mysterious individual who referred to Bugs as “family” (no, it’s not Bugs’ cousin Hershel) kept things cryptic during his brief phone call with Bugs, but it was enough to spook the latter and call off his conversation with Vera. So how did this individual know that Vera and Bugs were going to chat? It turns out three listening devices had been planted in the NIS Camp Pendleton office.
Mike Franks initially suspected that former NIS agent Roger Murphy was responsible, but he claimed he didn’t know anything about the devices when Franks and Gibbs spoke to him in prison. Then Vera revisited Bugs, and after she shut off her camera, that’s when the sniper revealed the truth about the events of “Enter Sandman” came to light. Well, most of it anyway.
What Really Happened In ‘Enter Sandman’ And More
Let’s get the big reveal out of the way first: Bugs didn’t kill Melanie. It was the aforementioned second sniper who did this when Melanie learned that Bugs was involved in the mysterious Operation Sundown, and that Dustin Cruz, whom she was not actually sleeping with, was being targeted. Before she was killed though, she tipped off Cruz, though that didn’t do him any good since he was sniped soon after by Bugs. The second sniper also instructed Bugs to burn Melanie’s house down to destroy any lingering evidence.
So why did Bugs take the fall for Melanie’s murder? All he told Vera was “to protect the mission,” and that he would tell her the second sniper’s name once said mission was over. Only, that’s not going to happen. You see, this episode also saw Gibbs and Franks looking into the theft of Navy reservist Wyatt Morton’s wallet from his house. Morton was desperate to get the wallet back because it had the only picture he had of his father in the uniform he wore in World War II.
The second sniper stole Morton’s wallet, as he needed the access card for the water supply facility where he worked. That facility was roughly half a mile from the prison where Bugs was being held, so upon getting in a prime position, the sniper shot his former partner in the head while he was out in the yard. Yeah, this guy does not mess around, so the Origins team will need to be on their guard when they cross paths with him.
So where does that leave us ahead of “Darlin', Don't Refrain” airing next Monday at 10 pm ET on CBS? The second sniper is on the loose and he’s determined to finish a mission that’s connected to Operation Sundown. Oh, and either he somehow planted those listening devices at the Camp Pendleton office or he had another partner do it, meaning this could have been a three-person conspiracy. I look forward to seeing next week how this storyline wraps up… unless it ends up stretching into the officially-greenlit NCIS: Origins Season 2.
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