Longtime NCIS fans may have noticed a familiar name on the character list for NCIS: Origins. Diany Rodriguez will play Special Agent Vera Strickland. The character was featured in a one-off Season 11 episode of the flagship NCIS series (played by Roma Maffia) as a former and first partner of Muse Watson’s Special Agent Mike Franks. Thanks to the timeline in which Origins is set, it occurred to the showrunners that Strickland would be around one way or another.
“It is a deep pull,” co-showrunner Gina Lucita Monreal says in an interview with TVLine, “but we looked at the timeline, and she would have been there [at Camp Pendleton].” The show takes place in the early ’90s, showing a fresh from combat Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Austin Stowell) originally played for nearly two decades straight by Mark Harmon. “Vera has some mysterious elements as well,” Monreal teases, “so being able to flesh out a character that was so clearly defined in that one episode has been really fun, for sure.”
How Far Will ‘NCIS: Origins’ Take Us Into the Past?
We know that the show is set in the early 1990s. We’ve seen this time period before, in the form of flashbacks on the flagship NCIS show with either Mark Harmon or his son, Sean Harmon playing a younger Leroy Jethro Gibbs. The 90s seemed to be a turning point in Gibbs’ life across what we did know about his backstory on NCIS. Now we have a clearer picture of just why that is. NCIS: Origins will show us Gibbs himself as a Probie (probationary agent) on Mike Franks’ team. Franks will be played by Kyle Schmid. Schmid is even donning the iconic Franks mustache in Season 1 images released last month.
While NCIS will give us a glimpse at Gibbs in the ’90s, it’s possible that we might even see further back than that. Robert Taylor was cast as Gibb’s father, Jackson Gibbs. When we last saw Gibbs’s father in NCIS, it was stated the two had not really had a relationship since the deaths of Gibbs’ wife and daughter Shannon and Kelly. Show execs promise they’re going to address what could potentially be a plothole. Would that likely result in a series of flashbacks featuring Stowell and Taylor as father and son? Could we also then be seeing Shannon and Kelly?
NCIS: Origins will have a two-hour-long premiere Octoebr 14 on CBS. You can catch up on NCIS now on Paramount+.