NCIS: Origins season 3 premiere drags Mark Harmon's Gibbs out of Alaska — and he's in every episode
The prequel finally put its narrator on camera for a whole season, and wasted zero time getting him into trouble.
For two seasons, Mark Harmon has mostly been a voice on NCIS: Origins, narrating the '90s adventures of young Gibbs (Austin Stowell), with on-screen cameos in the 2024 series premiere and the November 2025 crossover with NCIS. Season 3, which premiered on CBS on October 6, 2026, puts him in all 10 episodes, as TVLine reported when the network dropped the trailer.
Refresher for the lapsed: Harmon played Gibbs for more than 18 seasons on the mothership before signing off in 2021, when Gibbs chose to stay in Alaska instead of returning to work. He's also an executive producer on Origins, alongside his son Sean Harmon, who played young Gibbs in flashbacks on the original series.
What happens in the premiere
Spoilers for "Don't You Forget About Me," obviously.
- Present day: Gibbs is at his Alaska cabin with his dog when he's shot in the chest. Two men walk up, one checks his pulse and says, "One down, one to go," and they leave.
- How he survives: a Marine breathing technique that let him fake being dead, an idea that came from writer Daniel Egbert, a former Marine, according to showrunner David J. North.
- The '90s: Lala (Mariel Molino) leaves Gibbs a goodbye letter after their season 2 finale kiss, saying she trusts him with her life but not with her heart, and the show finally reveals what happened to Randy (Caleb Foote) after his kidnapping.
- The exit: by the end of the hour, Gibbs leaves Alaska.
In the first scene of his first full season back, Gibbs gets shot.
North told TV Insider that he and Harmon always agreed Alaska was where Gibbs wanted to be, so pulling him out required something on this scale:
"[F]or him to leave, something really big must have happened."
— David J. North, showrunner
Who's the "one to go"?
That's the season's central question. Harmon's storyline runs through all 10 episodes, and North has said it ties directly into the serialized '90s case. The obvious candidates are the characters we've never seen in the present day: Lala and Randy.
Episode 2 sends Gibbs to visit Woody, with Bobby Moynihan in aged-up makeup. And before anyone gets too comfortable about Gibbs' odds, the franchise has been in a killing mood lately: NCIS took out Vance in its 500th episode.
NCIS: Origins airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on CBS and streams the next day on Paramount+.
