Mark Harmon once floated killing off Leroy Jethro Gibbs, and after a quick thumbs-down, the 75-year-old is back full-time as the character on “NCIS: Origins.”
Nearly five years after he left the mothership drama, Harmon is stepping back into the boots of the stoic special agent. USA TODAY reported that Season 3 of the 2024 prequel puts the older Gibbs front and center again, airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS starting Oct. 6.
Harmon will appear in all 10 episodes. For fans who stuck with the franchise through two decades of cases, quiet exits, and spinoffs, that is the news that matters.
When Harmon prepared to leave “NCIS” after nearly two decades in the role, the writers did not treat the exit as a soft landing by default. They worked through the hard options first.
Harmon described the talks in plain terms.
"They approached all kinds of questions: Do we kill him? Do we not kill him? Those kinds of things,"
He did not fight the darker path.
"I was fine with it. It's the life of an actor."
The room did. Harmon said the kill-off met “a universal thumbs-down by many people” and called it “a quick discussion.”
Executive producer David J. North, who was showrunner on “NCIS” at the time and now runs “Origins,” put the idea squarely on Harmon and then shut the door on any myth that the network almost did it.
"That was [Harmon], I'll give you that exclusive. He had talked about it at different times, different ways. Mark is a creative and wanted to go through every possibility. I certainly heard him out on that. But I will say that there was never a point in the process that had Gibbs being killed off."
So Gibbs did not die in a blaze of final-episode gunfire. He took a work trip to Alaska and stayed. Retirement in the wilderness beat a funeral. That choice kept the character alive, and left the door open for what came next.
“NCIS: Origins” is the brainchild of Sean Harmon, Mark’s son and an executive producer on the series. Austin Stowell plays the younger Gibbs at Camp Pendleton in the early 1990s. Harmon has served as the present-day narrator looking back from that Alaskan quiet.
Season 3 expands the older man’s footprint. Present-day Gibbs gets pulled into a case he touched 34 years earlier. The trailer leans on the obvious pull quote from “The Godfather”: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Episode 1 does not ease him in gently. Older Gibbs gets shot. The reporting frames a fatal outcome as not likely: a wound, not a death.
Mariel Molino continues as Special Agent Lala Dominguez, the colleague and complicated love interest whose fate has hung over the prequel. North called Harmon’s fuller return “an enormous decision” and said it “opens up the whole thing.”
Episodes air live on CBS. Paramount+ Premium subscribers can stream them as they go; other Paramount+ subscribers get them on demand the next day. Seasons 1 and 2 are already there for anyone catching up.
Hollywood loves shock exits and disposable icons. Harmon and the “NCIS” brain trust chose the harder, quieter route, keep the man breathing, keep the audience’s investment intact, and earn the comeback the old-fashioned way.
