- - Austin Stowell, Wilmer Valderrama, more preview 'intense' “NCIS” crossover with “NCIS: Origins”: 'There will be tears'

Ryan ColemanNovember 11, 2025 at 9:30 PM

0

Greg Gayne/CBS

Austin Stowell and Kyle Schmid on 'NCIS: Origins'Key Points -

The first-ever NCIS and NCIS: Origins crossover bridges a 30-year gap with an unresolved case so haunting it compels the characters played by original NCIS star Mark Harmon and guest star Roma Maffia to return.

Origins co-creators David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal share that the crossover hinged on Harmon's participation, with his Origins counterpart Austin Stowell musing that Gibbs is still stuck on the case because "justice wasn't served."

Wilmer Valderrama promises "there will be tears" over the mothership's tribute to the Navy's 250th birthday, while Brian Dietzen teases that his medical examiner Jimmy Palmer proposes a "really inappropriate" addition to a celebratory time capsule.

A train collision, a small town full of murder suspects, a foiled political assassination, a wrongful conviction, a prison break — enough drama to last a full season of any other procedural. But it's just another two hours in the NCIS universe.

The flagship series in the sprawling franchise and its first prequel spinoff, NCIS: Origins, make history on Tuesday by crossing over for the very first time. Now on its sixth spinoff since NCIS: Los Angeles launched in 2009, NCIS has orchestrated many crossovers before — swapping cast members, interlacing sensational plots, and amping up the blowback on both sides. But with 30 years spanning the gap between NCIS and Origins, this crossover is a different beast.

"Seeing as how I couldn't figure out a way in, you know, a reality in which that could possibly happen, I did not see this coming," long-serving NCIS star Sean Murray tells Entertainment Weekly on the set of the crossover, which sees the returns of both season 11 guest star Roma Maffia, and the NCIS godfather himself, Mark Harmon.

Murray, who has played Special Agent Timothy McGee since the very first season of NCIS, hands all the credit for answering the tricky problem of how to cross two series separated by time, not geography, to Origins co-creators and showrunners David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal. "With the timeline differences, we've done crossovers with some of the others in the franchise before, but Origins being 30 years prior, I couldn't imagine it would happen. But they really figured it out."

Sonja Flemming/CBS

Wilmer Valderrama and Jessica Knight on 'NCIS'

"When Gina and I first were talking about this idea - it's loosely based on a documentary called No One Saw a Thing, about a town bully," North says. "When we reached out to NCIS and talked to the writer of [the NCIS half of the crossover], Marco Schnabel, he told me that he and I had talked about doing an episode of that on original NCIS and I had just completely forgot. It felt like a perfect story to get into both worlds."

NCIS: Origins will make the rare move of preceding its parent show on CBS' "All-NCIS Tuesdays" to give fans the opportunity to see this generation-spanning mystery unfold chronologically. The origin on Origins, "Funny How Time Slips Away," sees the younger versions of special agents Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Austin Stowell on Origins; Harmon on NCIS), Mike Franks (Kyle Schmid on Origins, Muse Watson on NCIS), and Cecilia "Lala" Dominguez (Mariel Molino) dispatched to the fictional California hamlet of Serenity to investigate an unusual death.

An oncoming train has obliterated a car parked on its tracks — and the driver along with it. The deeper Gibbs, Franks, and Dominguez dig into the town dynamic doesn't produce its usual result of narrowing to a single suspect, however. Everyone comes up with blood on their hands. As in No One Saw a Thing, which investigated the 1981 murder of Ken Rex McElroy in front of over 50 people — all of whom swore they never saw a thing — no one is particularly happy to see this town bully gone, but no one's fessing up either.

The Origins team ultimately discover the proper course justice needs to take, but are prevented from ushering it forth. This deeply disturbs Gibbs' unwavering sense of justice, and proves compelling enough to lure Maffia's Special Agent Vera Strickland out of retirement on the NCIS episode "Now and Then" — especially after a shocking prison break throws the case back into the spotlight.

To the man who took over the heavy mantle of portraying Mr. NCIS, the reason this case still haunts him after all this years is clear. "Justice wasn't served. Gibbs hates a liar. I'd imagine that while he was able to move on, [that] doesn't mean he doesn’t think about it. Moving on from something doesn't mean you've forgotten. You've just learned how to live with it," Stowell says.

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.

Sonja Flemming/CBS

Brian Dietzen as Jimmy Palmer on 'NCIS'

North says that the proposal to bring the O.G. Gibbs back for the crossover special changed everything. Its very viability as an idea suddenly hinged on Harmon's cosign. "In the end, Gina and I just went him and said how important we think this episode is, how cool it is, how different it is that the network's never done anything like it, doing a crossover using time. And Mark said, 'Okay, let's roll,'" North remembers.

"And the fact that he said yes and wanted to do that, it was just so meaningful and special," Monreal adds. "Having worked with him on the mothership, and then to have him come up here and say David's words. It just meant the world."

Though the NCIS and Origins cast members are diligently mum on the subject of just how Harmon appears, his successor shares a funny story about watching the veteran star shoot his scenes. "You better believe I wasn't going to miss Mark stepping onto set as Gibbs for what might be the last time. He knew we had been working all day with more coming at us in the morning, so in typical Mark fashion he told me to 'go home and get some sleep.' I reminded him that a very wise man once told me, 'Sleep is overrated.' He laughed and said, 'Alright... now get the hell outta here.'"

Mark Harmon on 'NCIS: Origins'

As for Agent Strickland, newish NCIS recruit Katrina Law points out that while Maffia's time on the series was limited to only one episode, the fact that her character was tapped out of hundreds to appear across the mothership's 23 seasons to become a prequel regular (portrayed by Diany Rodriguez) isn't incidental.

"I think Vera is just fascinating. You hear these stories," Law says. "Rumors, bits and pieces, of what a legend she was. And to hear one of the legends coming back and being in your face, and then to see just how ballsy Vera is, how confidently she takes over the room and shuts the men down. I think [Law's character Jessica Knight] is just like, 'Yes, I love her.'"

Knowingly or not, Maffia channels Strickland in joking, "You know, I'm so confused by so much, so much of the time. I was like, 'A younger version? So is that the future? Is that the past?' I couldn't even figure it out." Once the pieces fell into place, the Nip/Tuck star fell right back into character, recalling that she sailed past a wardrobe offer to outfit Strickland with the latest model of Apple Watch. "I saw it and of course said, 'Oh, I'd love it.' But then I thought, 'No, Vera would not have an Apple Watch. She'd have no idea what that was.'"

Sonja Flemming/CBS

Roma Maffia on 'NCIS'

Wilmer Valderrama has a similarly tough time imagining a younger version of his Special Agent Nick Torres on Origins. But that doesn't mean he hasn't tried to figure it out.

"I've told David and Gina over at Origins. I was like, 'Hey, dude, I'm just putting it out there. I could do a really young Torres. They're laughing because they're like, 'We don't even know how we would make that work." Valderrama reasons that if his brave yet flip former undercover operative is "in his 30s now or something, back in the '90s, I guess he'd be, what, a teenager? Or younger?"

Like Maffia, Valderrama takes playful and circuitous approach to the conversation that makes you feel like you're actually speaking with Torres. But he sobers up when discussing the other big element of the NCIS half of the crossover: the team deliberating what to put in a time capsule to celebrate the Navy's 250th birthday.

"The show has always made a beautiful home and space for veteran stories, to pay tribute to our military, out brothers and sisters in uniform. That's a big backbone of this show," he explains. Though hi-jinx ensue when Brian Dietzen's medical examiner Jimmy Palmer proposes a truly outlandish addition to the capsule, Valderrama promises, "We're trying to have something that feels really heartfelt. We always like to make people cry with these episodes, so there will be tears."

"Jimmy really wants to find the absolute perfect item to put into that time capsule that the Navy's putting together," Dietzen explains, "and the first thing he comes up with is really inappropriate." Laughing, Dietzen continues, "I'm not gonna spoil it, but everyone says, 'You cannot put that in a time capsule.' By the end, he comes up with the perfect thing that I think not only represents NCIS, but also represents NCIS in all of its different stages, including the early days of Gibbs."

The crossover also holds space for a recently departed, universally beloved NCIS vet: David McCallum, who played Chief Medical Examiner Donald "Ducky" Mallard for 20 seasons, and died in 2023. "I spent the better part of 19 years of my life with David, as my mentor on screen and sometimes off. I love him," Dietzen says, adding that seeing the younger version of him, portrayed by Adam Campbell first on NCIS and now on Origins, "has been really cool."

This is the NCIS-verse, however, where every moment, even the most heartfelt or humorous, are spring-trapped for maximum thrills. If Gibbs has his rules, so does his show, and No. 1 is to always expect a twist.

"There's gonna be some major surprises. There's gonna be some nostalgic surprises, and we have a lot of big episodes," Valderrama teases. "From the Navy anniversary, to the crossover with the Origins... and then towards the last half of the season — we're gonna start lighting stuff on fire."

NCIS and NCIS: Origins air on Tuesdays as part of CBS' "All-NCIS Tuesdays," and stream the following day on Paramount+.

-- With reporting by Maureen Lee Lenker

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”