[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the NCIS: Sydney Season 3 premiere “Gut Instinct.”]
NCIS: Sydney is making us wait a bit longer to find out who that mystery woman was waiting for Blue (Mavournee Hazel) at the end of the Season 2 finale. In fact, the Season 3 premiere introduces a new mystery about the forensic scientist.
When the new season begins, Blue has resigned, having sent in a video. Doc (William McInnes) doesn’t buy that’s all there is to it. Meanwhile, JD (Todd Lasance) has signed up for a dating site, giving DeShawn (Sean Sagar) and Evie (Tuuli Narkle) plenty to mock him for (especially with those photos), and making things a bit awkward with Mackey (Olivia Swann).
Below, showrunner Morgan O’Neill breaks down the premiere and teases what’s ahead for Blue, Mackey and JD, and more.
How long is it going to take before Mackey realizes that the therapist in the psych eval was right and she can’t just ignore what happened?
Morgan O’Neill: You’ve hit on the overarching theme of the third season of NCIS: Sydney, and the reason I think it’s such a cool framing device for our entire season is that we all have to deal with that at some point, right? I mean, it’s a really human revelation that you have to deal with your past or your past is going to deal with you. And Mackey being stubborn, it’s going to take her longer than it takes most people. But one of the things that she has in her corner is her team, and in particular JD, because JD is that kind of sounding board for her. And you’ll see at the end of the first episode, they have a moment where they kind of acknowledge each other’s failings and strengths all at once. And so I feel like with the benefit of the team and a little bit of time, Mackey will eventually come to realize that you can’t outrun your past, but it’s going to take a few bumps along the way. That’s just the nature of Mackey. That’s how she rolls.
How is she going to deal with that?
She refuses to deal with it in an obvious way, and then she has to deal with the ramifications of not dealing with it. And so her past comes to her and in a really confronting way. Like a lot of us, she’s not going to deal with the problem until she has no option but to deal with the problem. And that’s when the problem has come to her and is sitting right on her doorstep. So, without spoiling what happens, suffice it to say that it becomes a pretty big deal for Mackey, and in not dealing with it, she drags the whole team into it.
There’s this mystery of what happened to Blue. What can you say about what’s going on with her and why she sent that resignation video?
Well, as we know, the end of the second season of NCIS: Sydney ends with Blue coming home after Darwin, and there is a strange lady sitting in her living room, and from the expression on Blue’s face, it’s pretty clear that she’s an unwelcome visitor. And then we open in Season 3, Blue’s no longer there, and we work out that she’s resigned and everyone’s a little bent out of shape by it because she’s such a beloved member of the team and they misconstrue the arrival of Trigger [Claude Jabbour] is somehow the replacement for Blue, which clearly he is not, but it feels especially to Doc that something’s hinky, that this is not the way Blue would’ve departed if she had departed of her own volition. And so he refuses to accept that she has simply decided to move on and send in a video resignation. And he’s probably, I dare say, right to think that that doesn’t all add up. And the team is doing their best, obviously, to be professional and to be grownups and to sort of put a happy face on the whole thing — she may have moved on to something that she’s more excited by — but I think deep down, all of them know that something is not as it should be. And when we get to Episode 2, we’ll realize why.
JD signed up for a dating site. The humor in that has already started. Are we going to see him going on dates, hear about them, and see him decide it’s not for him? How much comedy are you getting out of that?
A lot is the short answer. JD is such a beautiful character in my view. There’s a level of self-deprecation that makes him so appealing to me, I think, and to a larger audience. He has that ability to find humor in his own circumstances, which I find a very appealing quality. But what it also does in Australia is it puts an enormous target on your back because if you’re willing to acknowledge that life is strange, then the rest of the team is going to come down to you like a ton of bricks and they do.
The reality is, for JD, he’s found himself in a situation where he’s kind of been in denial for the first two seasons of the show about his emotional situation. Like a lot of people going through those really tricky life-altering events, he’s hoped against hope that somehow it gets itself back together again or the ship is set back on course or whatever, but it’s not. He’s living in his friend’s garage, and it’s been two years, and he’s got to get his s**t together. So I think the events of Darwin have probably shaken him out of that stasis, and he’s decided that whatever deeply buried, repressed feelings he may have for his friend and colleague, Michelle Mackey, he’s not going to succumb to them, and he’s going to do the exact opposite. He’s going to fill that void with whatever he can. And as it is in the 21st century, that’s kind of online dating. So he jumps in boots and all, but he’s really, let’s be honest, ill-equipped to be playing in that pond as his dating profile photographs will tell us.
Daniel Asher Smith/Paramount+
It’s a stopgap measure at best, and it obviously provides a huge amount of comedy for our team. But what it’s really telling me as an audience, I suppose, is here is the guy desperately trying to be professional. He’s trying to keep things tidy in the workplace because Darwin has probably brought out a whole bunch of emotions that he feels are unhelpful in a team environment. And so I guess he’s overreacting, and his overreaction is in the form of going on a dating site. And having been on dating sites myself, it’s the wild west out there, I can tell you.
How does Mackey feel about that? Because we already get the bit of awkwardness about it in the premiere, and it feels like they both know how the other one might feel, and it’s just like, let’s just not acknowledge it.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. You’ve got to remember, these are two charismatic, clever, empathetic, courageous, attractive, and single people working shoulder to shoulder for 70 hours a week. That’s a combustible situation, but they’re also super professional, and they’re the leaders of this team; they’re kind of notionally mom and dad for the rest of the squad, and acknowledging that they may have feelings for one another would be totally counterproductive to the team environment. So, they try and be as professional as they can, but they’re humans. And so it’s an imperfect way of wallpapering over what might be going on underneath.
NCIS: Sydney, Tuesdays, 10/9c, CBS