The following contains major spoilers from the April 28 Season 1 finale of CBS‘ NCIS: Origins.
“I loved her all along. I still do,” NCIS: Origins‘ Narrator Gibbs told us at the close of Monday night’s Season 1 finale, as the camera zoomed on on Special Agent Lala Dominguez’s seemingly lifeless form, after a harrowing car crash. “This is a story I don’t tell. I can’t find the words. But it never stops running through my head — the story of her.”
But as one door closes… another opens?
“Good lord, you’ve got some gorgeous eyes on you,” a redhead real estate agent named Diane told Gibbs in a scene prior, upon arriving to survey the house he is finally putting on the market. “Those babies are bright.”
After you dab your eyes dry, see what NCIS: Origins co-showrunners Gina Lucita Monreal (who wrote the finale) and David J. North shared with TVLine about choosing this tragic love story to launch the prequel series, the manner of Lala’s (apparent) death, and the big question raised by a future Mrs. Gibbs’ debut.
TVLINE | How much of this season finale was locked down a while ago, and how much did you come up with as you were sitting down to write it?
GINA LUCITA MONREAL | I’d say about half and half. We knew where we wanted to take most of the characters, and I think that a lot of it was dictated by canon, because we knew we were bringing in the [Military Police investigator Lara] Macy character [from NCIS: Los Angeles‘ two-part pilot] and we had to color within those lines. But in every episode we do leave some wiggle room to see where the characters want to go, and we did that in the finale as well.
TVLINE | So Lara Macy was always a part of it?
GINA | We were always going to bring back Macy. What we were deciding between was, do we want the Sandman to be the finale of the show, or do we want the Macy story to be the ultimate finale? We kind of went back and forth between those two ideas — which one should be the last episode? — and ultimately we felt like the Macy storyline mattered more to our characters. It evoked more emotions.
TVLINE | As soon as I reported on the Macy casting (The Midnight Club‘s Claire Berger), I went back and watched NCIS‘ “Legend” two-parter, and it wound up tracking pretty well.
DAVID J. NORTH | That wasn’t by accident. I’d go into Gina’s office, Matt, and I’d hear that episode, she kept watching it…. She had a lot to navigate with all that.
GINA | We worked so hard on making it track.
TVLINE | Was the specific manner of Lala’s death a tough nut to crack? It had to be a certain level of tragic, it had to be a certain level of involuntary….
DAVID | Going into this whole project, we knew we wanted to take big swings, we knew we wanted to do this more “streaming for broadcast” — Amy Reisenbach as president of [CBS] has been so supportive of that. I won’t officially say that Lala is dead, but certainly we went into this saying that we needed to give ourselves the wiggle room to take these big swings and do what we felt was right. And Mariel [Molino, who plays Lala] is just a powerhouse, I’m blown away by her performance in that finale and knowing what she was going to have to go through physically for that ending. She was a trouper. She said, “I’m here to do what you guys want to do, and let’s just see where things go.”
GINA | It was not easy for her to hang upside down in that car.
TVLINE | Was it always a flipped Jeep, or did Lala ever steer off a cliff or get T-boned by a semi?
DAVID | There was a T-bone conversation at one point, but once Niels Arden Oplev, our director, became involved and read what Gina wrote, we adjusted because he had a pretty detailed vision of what he was seeing.
GINA | He did. And then I said, “I’m worried,” because I loved the flipped Jeep idea but what if we don’t recognize her because she’s upside down and bleeding? Niels said, “I got you,” and did that that cool camera turn with our DP. I think it turned out beautifully.
TVLINE | Going back to the beginning, how did you arrive at an unspeakably tragic near-romance for Gibbs as your way into NCIS: Origins Season 1?
DAVID | When Gina and I were first breaking this show at her house, she said to me, “You know, I want to see a Gibbs love story,” which we’d kind of not seen in this way. That was so interesting to me, and I had seen a movie recently at that time, Past Lives, that I thought was so well done in that you don’t really know which guy to root for in the couple, and we started breaking it in that way. And when you sit with Gina and break stories, some of the things she comes up with, I’m just like blown away by. It’s pretty cool now to have it be a year later and see that it all was executed even better than we could have hoped.
TVLINE | Gina, what would the conversation have looked like if Lala had made it to Gibbs’ house? Mariel told me she thinks the L-word would have come pouring out of Lala.
GINA | I mean, these are the types of things that happen that completely changed the course of your life, and it’s something that I think about a lot. I think we all think about that. What if I had done this instead of that? What if this had happened? What if this hadn’t happened? It could have completely changed the trajectory of both of their lives. That’s the reason why we went with an accident instead of something happening to her in the line of duty, because ultimately it’s more relatable, it’s universal. And though we don’t know the fate of Lala yet, no matter what happens with her, there are going to be shock waves throughout the people in her life, just as there would be in our own.
Kathleen Kenny as Diane
TVLINE | As fun as it was to see Kathleen Kenny (The Sex Lives of College Girls) show up as Diane, I wonder: Will Gibbs have to go through a whole other mourning period? Or do you have a time jump planned when Season 2 opens?
DAVID | We are kicking around a lot of different ideas right now. If I were to tell you that the field is wide open in where we’re going, I would not be lying. That’s not to say we’re not discussing it, but we’ve been in post[-production] on this finale up until yesterday. There’s a lot of conversations that need to happen about Season 2, and it’s kind of scary but exciting that it can really go a lot of different directions, including who’s there, who we’re watching….
GINA | I think it has definitely served us well, though, to be open to where the characters want to go because we’re so tied to canon on one hand. So, if we’re open on the other hand, it allows us more opportunities to tell a story.
TVLINE | Let me rephrase the question. What do you say to people who after watching this finale are like, “Man, that put me through the wringer! My heart is a million pieces. I hope Season 2 is a little lighter”?
DAVID | I would say that I understand. We told this story in the most truthful way up until this point that we thought we could, and ultimately Gina and I subscribed to philosophy that we want to make the audience feel something. We do think there are the light moments in there, and we really enjoy those. Speaking to that, there is going to be no shortage of Randy in Season 2, so there will be humor.
GINA | There will be humor in Season 2, for sure. It’s in the DNA of the show.
TVLINE | Diane seemed quite taken by Gibbs and his “bright eyes.” Will she be the pursuer in this eventual relationship?
GINA | On the original NCIS, fans have come to know Diane as someone who has no problem making her opinions known — she’s never been afraid of going after what she wants. We’re looking forward to exploring these traits in her younger self as she becomes a part of Gibbs’ life.
Lucas Dixon as NCIS: Origins’ FBI Agent Tobias FornellParamount+ screenshot
TVLINE | Gibbs marries Diane before Fornell does, right?
GINA | Oh, that’s a good question. Yes, yes, he did marry her before Fornell, but there are many questions surrounding when Gibbs and Fornell met each other, because it’s handled two different ways on the NCIS mothership. One is that they didn’t know each other in the pilot—
TVLINE | And then it got retconned that they go back a ways.
GINA | Yes, so those are the sort of times where, when canon disagrees with itself, we have to pick a lane and go with it because we have no other choice.
DAVID | Take that, Reddit!
GINA | We’re trying, Reddit!
TVLINE | How “indefinitely” is Wheeler (Patrick Fischler) suspended for?
GINA | We love Wheeler. We left him in a place where there are a lot of questions surrounding his story, and we’re super excited to dig deeper into his story, so we will be seeing Wheeler in Season 2 for sure.
TVLINE | Are we going to be getting some Vietnam flashbacks, now that Frank’s brother has gotten back in touch with him?
GINA | There’s a lot of story there that we haven’t yet explained. I think probably half of our audience thought that Mason had died in Vietnam based on Franks’ reaction and what he said about him since coming back. So the reveal that he is still alive and Franks knew he was alive, clearly there’s something that has come between them. Yes, it’s definitely a tease for a story that we’ll dig into in Season 2.
TVLINE | Do you think Season 2 might be a smidgen more of a traditional procedural? After the big swings you took in Season 1, with all of the deep dives into backstories…?
DAVID | There’s obviously going to be less of what happened to Gibbs and the loss of his family, and with Lala hanging in the balance, there’s going to be a lot to deal with…. But that said, Gina and I really enjoy the humor. I think that it will be a little lighter, but as far as more of a “standard procedural,” probably not.
GINA | We’ll still have cases every week — this year, we had a couple that didn’t, like “Blue Bayou” and sort of the finale, because we always want to take those sorts of swings, storytelling-wise. But it is a procedural and we love that about it. So there will be a Case of the Week and there will be an overarching bigger case throughout the season.
TVLINE | Anything else you’re prepared to tease for Season 2?
DAVID | I’ll I’ll tell you this: I’m excited for more of Special Agent Gary Callahan, the K-9 unit dog. I know that’s not a big give, but… Gary needs his own origin story. I know that much.
GINA | He really does.
TVLINE | Did you have to sweat getting the rights to “Cecilia” at all?
GINA | That’s always a source of stress because most of the times, we choose a song before we write the episode, and it’s so ingrained in the writing — and then if we end up not getting it, David has to literally pick me up off the floor.
DAVID | We have a wonderful guy, [music supervisor] Kevin Edelman, that pursues these things and gets us these rights and it almost always works out. But yeah, I mean…. I think I told you, Matt, how we were shooting “Blue Bayou” and didn’t have the rights from Linda Ronstadt. That was a messy one, so yeah, we always sweat it.
GINA | But “Cecilia,” we knew fairly early that we had gotten that one.
DAVID | We always want to get them, but we always want to make sure we use them right, too, because they don’t come for free, that’s for sure!
Want scoop on NCIS: Origins Season 2, or for any other TV show? Shoot an email to [email protected], and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
