The latest episode of NCIS: Origins, titled “Funny How Time Slips Away,” delivered a major event for the franchise. The episode, which aired on Tuesday, November 11, 2025, was the first part of a special crossover with the original NCIS series. It featured the highly anticipated on-screen return of Mark Harmon as the present-day Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who reflected on a haunting case from his early years that he could never forget.
The Case in Serenity
The episode transports viewers to the 1990s, where a young Gibbs, played by Austin Stowell, and his NIS team are called to the small, dusty town of Serenity, California. They are there to investigate the death of a retired naval officer, Louis Burke, whose car was hit by a train. The entire town claims Burke committed suicide, insisting he remained in his vehicle despite their warnings.
Gibbs, however, is immediately suspicious. His instincts tell him the story does not add up. The investigation takes a turn when he discovers a severed arm with Burke’s watch on it, and later, a car door with a bloody handprint. This evidence proves that Burke’s car was pushed onto the tracks. The case becomes a murder investigation when the medical examiner determines Burke died from a gunshot wound to the heart before the train ever hit him.
A Town United by Silence
Gibbs and his mentor, Mike Franks, find themselves facing a wall of silence. The residents of Serenity, all harboring secrets, refuse to talk. Their stories are too similar, as if rehearsed. The team learns that Louis Burke was a known bully who terrorized the town. He had recently put a beloved elderly man into a coma with a baseball bat, and the community lived in fear of him. As one character stated, whoever killed Burke did the whole town a favor. The local sheriff, Tommy Mulligan, is also uncooperative, seemingly caught in the same web of fear.
The team’s plan to fingerprint the entire town is suddenly interrupted when Sheriff Mulligan unexpectedly confesses to the murder. He even produces the murder weapon. While the case appears closed, Gibbs does not believe the confession. The sheriff’s behavior and story are inconsistent, and Gibbs senses he is covering for someone else.
The Real Killer and a Sacrifice for Love
Gibbs decides to stay in Serenity after the rest of the team leaves, trusting his gut feeling. He notices that a broken window at a store called “Birdie’s” has been recently repaired. He connects this with a comment from a local about the sheriff’s lost love, a woman nicknamed “Birdie.” Gibbs pieces together the truth: the store’s owner, Lainey “Birdie” Sims, who was pregnant and likely in fear of Burke, shot him through her store window in self-defense or to protect herself.
Sheriff Mulligan, in love with Birdie, confessed to the crime to protect her and her unborn child. Despite knowing the truth, Gibbs and Franks cannot break Mulligan’s story. They are forced to close the case with the false confession in place. The episode reveals that Mike Franks visited Mulligan in prison every year until the day Franks died, never getting the sheriff to change his story.
A Crossover Masterpiece
This episode was praised as a masterclass in storytelling, seamlessly connecting the past and present. The episode begins with Mark Harmon’s Gibbs in Alaska, where he is no longer living in complete solitude—he now has a dog as a companion. As he reminisces about the past, the show transitions from the older Gibbs to Austin Stowell’s younger version in the 1990s.
The crossover also featured the return of Muse Watson, the actor who originally played Mike Franks on the mothership series. In a powerful visual moment, the younger Franks, played by Kyle Schmid, morphs into Watson, showing Franks’s yearly visits to Mulligan over the decades. Additionally, Roma Maffia reprised her role as Vera Strickland in the present-day segment of the crossover on the accompanying NCIS episode.
The Birth of a Rule
The difficult Serenity case was a defining moment for the young Gibbs. It was here that he learned a crucial lesson from Mike Franks that would become a core part of his philosophy: Rule #11: “When the job is done, walk away.” This rule came after the team had to accept that they could not get true justice and had to walk away from the case, even though they knew the real story. The episode showed Gibbs beginning to carry a notebook with photos of people he couldn’t help, a habit that Franks warned would eventually become “too heavy to lift.”
The episode balanced this heavy emotion with moments of humor, showing the early chemistry of the NIS team. From Vera starting a gossip mill by mistakenly thinking Mike Franks was asking her on a date to Lala dealing with troublemakers in a jail cell, the show demonstrated how the team’s unique dynamic was forming. The case in Serenity, though officially solved, left a lasting mark on Gibbs, shaping the legendary agent he would become.
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