Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Origins episode “Last Rites” are ahead!
NCIS fans learned a lot about Leroy Jethro Gibbs when Mark Harmon played him for nearly two decades, but NCIS: Origins is providing a new platform to explore the character. Austin Stowell’s younger Gibbs is still early into his career at NIS (as it was called back then), but in between Origins’ premiere shedding light on several Gibbs-isms and teasing the future connection he and Lala Dominguez will have, it was mentioned that his psychological evaluation didn’t paint him as someone who should be working as a federal agent. Well, the prequel’s latest episode, “Last Rites,” just finished airing on the 2024 TV schedule, and it finally shared what was in that eval in the midst of delving into one of the toughest cases of Mike Franks’ career. Let’s talk that out first.
Mike Franks Got His Last Chance To Find A Victim’s Remains
In 1985, six years before NCIS: Origins begins, and just one week after Vera Strickland severed her professional partnership with Mike Franks, the mustachioed Texan, played in this series by Kyle Schmid, worked the Albert Hope case on his own. Hope, a former professor of theology, killed his wife, Anna Larson, and her lover, Captain Jonathan Rice, when he found them together at his home. While Franks found Rice’s body, he never found Anna’s, and he took it hard, as he promised her twin sister Julie that he would.
Cut to 1991, Hope was finally set to be executed, leaving Franks and his team just two days to try and get the location out of him. Hope agreed to tell Franks where Anna’s body was if he could meet with Julie to seek “absolution.” Despite hating the man with every fiber of his being, Franks agreed to the terms, so Hope led him, his team and an escort to an area of the desert near where Rice’s body had been found. Sure enough, a body was right where Hope said it would be, so this case was finally closed, right? Wrong.
Mike Franks reneged on his deal with Albert Hope when the body was found, but it wasn’t actually Anna’s, but a passerby’s who stumbled across Hope when he was burying Jonathan Rice. With no options left, Franks relented and let Julie see Hope so she could forgive him. As it turned out though, he didn’t want absolution from her, but to give Julie absolution, as he blamed for taking Anna out to fancy bars and driving her out on the night she met Jonathan Rice. In Hope’s twisted eyes, it was Julie who got Anna killed, but he “forgave” her, which sent Franks into a rage.
Fortunately, the team managed to come out victorious without the killer’s help. They realized that Hope had been burying his victims according to their religious beliefs. Rice was Catholic, so Hope buried him underneath a cactus that cast a cross-like shadow. The passerby was Muslim, so Hope buried him using rocks and a shroud-like covering. While Anna wasn’t religious, the final chapter of Hope’s book detailed how one can find “religion” and God from other sources, including money, sex, alcohol and power. That was just what Franks needed to crack the case.
Racing to reach Hope before he was executed by lethal injection, he shouted at the culprit that they knew he’d buried Anna at the nearby Viva Vineyard because he thought his wife saw wine as her god. Hope died knowing his final secret had been uncovered, and Anna was finally able to get a proper burial after all these years.
Lala Revealed To Gibbs What What In His Psych Eval
NCIS: Origins takes place just a few months after Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ first wife, Shannon, and their daughter, Kelly, were killed by drug dealer Pedro Hernandez. We also learned in last week’s episode that when Gibbs learned they were dead while he was serving overseas, he deliberately walked into the line of enemy fire during an attack. This left him in a coma, although as “Last Rites” showed, he finally woke up when his father Jackson was visiting him.
The point being, Gibbs isn’t in a great headspace as he’s working these early NIS cases, and Cliff Wheeler, head of the agency’s Pendleton branch, even informed Mike Franks to cut him loose if he started getting out of control. Lala Dominguez also got a look at Gibbs’ psych eval, and five episodes in, she let him know what was in it after an incident where Gibbs pulled a gun on some men who were driving near the site where Albert Hope (incorrectly) said Anna Larson was buried.
Lala confronted Gibbs about what happened afterwards, and Gibbs talked about how as a kid, he lashed out after his dog was hit by a car, so his dad taught him to fish to get his head straight. Gibbs hadn’t fished in a long time, and Lala must’ve been moved by that story because she didn’t report that incident to Mike Franks. Not only that, after Anna’s funeral, she let Gibbs know that his eval said he was “a depressive state because of trauma,” had “impulsive tendencies, unaddressed anger issues,” and that the “evaluator strongly recommended extensive therapy and concluded he wouldn’t succeed long tern at NIS.”
However, Lala told Gibbs not to worry about it, as there was some crazy stuff in her eval, and she didn’t even want to know what was in Mike Frank’s eval. Instead, she recommended that he go fishing once a week to get his head straight. It’s hard to say if Gibbs’ psych eval will continue to factor heavily into the story Origins is telling, but since we him fish plenty of times on NCIS, at least we know that he’ll eventually take Lala up on her suggestion.
New episodes of NCIS: Origins air Mondays at 10 pm ET on CBS, following immediately after the flagship show’s 22nd season. Stream the entirety of the NCIS franchise with a Paramount+ subscription.
