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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS: Origins Season 1 Episode 5 “Last Rites.”]
Mike Franks (Kyle Schmid) makes good on a promise to a victim’s sister in the latest NCIS: Origins episode.
Before he had his current team—and after Vera (Diany Rodriguez) left him as his partner—Franks worked a double homicide, a woman and her lover killed by her husband. The woman’s body was never found. With his execution date approaching, time is running out, so Franks makes a deal with him (but tricks him) and eventually figures out where she’s buried, which he’d promised her sister he would do. And during that, Franks had two important conversations, one with Tish (Tonantzin Carmelo) about just why he made that promise to the victim’s wife (no, it wasn’t an affair) and Mary Jo (Tyla Abercrumbie) about the case—and how she sees everything, including a certain file.
Below, Schmid breaks down those key moments in this episode and teases what’s next.
I have to say how much I enjoyed the Franks and Mary Jo scene in this episode. It feels like she’s one of the few people who can get through to him at times like this, right?
Kyle Schmid: Absolutely. I think everybody needs their angel on their shoulder. And for Franks, I think that’s Mary Jo, and I think Mary Jo actually plays that character, is that angel on the shoulder for a lot of people. And I think she mirrors Franks for Franks. Franks shoulders the weight of other people in their lives. He wants to protect Lala [Mariel Molino], he wants to protect Randy [Caleb Foote], he wants to protect Gibbs [Austin Stowell]. He’s maybe perhaps as gruff as he is the angel on those characters’ shoulders. And for Franks, the angel on his shoulder is Mary Jo, and I think she’s also the angel on everybody else’s shoulder as well. Tyla plays it so well.
Sonja Flemming / CBS
Yeah. And she has that line about how she thinks that the file is about Pedro Hernandez and his reaction—he would only react that way to her. I feel like if anyone else brought that up to him, he’d react differently.
[Smiles, careful] I think he would react differently. I think you have some surprises ahead of you, too.
Turning to Franks and Tish’s relationship, there’s the moment when she’s questioning if anything happened between him and Julie and the way he responds comes across as honest. It’s also the first time he really stops and calms down a bit. He takes a moment to assure her, no, nothing happened there. How would you describe their relationship and what’s coming up there?
I think Tish is the only person in Franks’ life that can ground him and kind of force him to see through the fog. At this point, we see Franks with blinders on. Franks is going 100 miles an hour with one thing he’s focusing on. This says a lot about their relationship—I think there’s nobody in the world that Franks could love more than Tish and vice versa. Tish has had Mike’s back for a long time. She pulled him out of the ashes, and I think we’ll get to see some really cool stuff there. I don’t think Mike had ever stopped to think that his obsession with the case was ever taking a toll outside of what it was taking on him because he was never able to open his eyes to see the whole picture.
And when Tish expresses her perhaps suspicion that it may have been perhaps an affair, perhaps the overall why, it’s the only thing that snaps Franks back to the reality of like, oh my God, this tumbling boulder who is Mike Franks is actually creating destruction beyond itself. And Tish, the fact that Mike would ever stray from the woman that he absolutely adores more than anything in the world is bewildering to him. The fact that he’s led her to a place where she might even think that is heartbreaking to him. And so I think that says a lot about their relationship.
Greg Gayne / CBS
We’re learning a lot about who Mike is and his loyalties. Mike is this hippie cowboy. As gruff as he is on the outside in his s**t-kicking boots, he’s got the biggest heart in the world and he takes on everybody else’s crap, and he feels and empathizes for everybody. He pulls everybody into his world and tries to protect them. And he might say the wrong thing and be too blunt once in a while. But at the end of the day, I think Mike loves so hard that that gruff exterior is his armor. It’s his armor for how much he loves everybody so much, I guess, in a way.
Because he wants to protect people, there’s the matter of Gibbs’ psych eval. Lala tells him what was in it. How would Franks feel about that?
I think Franks would be disappointed that Lala has given Gibbs this information behind his back. But at the same time, Mike has always believed in Gibbs. He has always believed that Gibbs had the strength to get through the trauma, otherwise you would never pull somebody into your world unless you would think that they actually had a second shot at living a life. And so as disappointed as I think Franks is, I think the timing of Gibbs getting the information would coincide with the fact that at this point, Gibbs has—you see it in Episode 4 with the little girl and Gibbs saving the little girl and how he’s able to hold together the emotional mirror of losing his little girl and his wife. He holds it together. He saves the day. I mean, if that’s not an opportunity for us and our audience to go, he’s turning a page. I think he’s getting better. We’re starting to see glimpses of the Gibbs that we see in the mothership, right? I think the timing of Gibbs understanding what’s on his psych eval is just fine.
What else is coming up for Franks after this episode? Any more with him and Gibbs’ dad (Robert Taylor)? That was a surprise.
It was good, wasn’t it? I love working with Robert. Robert’s a talented man, Robert, in the stuff that he does in Episode 5 with the flashback and in the hospital, just heartbreaking. I’m very much looking forward to more scenes with him.
We’re shooting Episode 10 going into 11 and we’re talking 5. … We are always going to develop the relationship between probie and Franks. I mean, that is going to be a big catalyst for our storyline moving forward. And I think it’s because Mike has such a big hand in helping Gibbs become the man that he is, that the world knows in NCIS.
You’re going to see really great stuff with Franks and Lala and their relationship. I think it’s important for the audience to remember that Lala was my Gibbs before Gibbs came into my life. And how that relationship gets put on the back burner when Gibbs joins NIS, and to see that dynamic shift, because for me, I look at it as a parent, you bring in a new person into the family and all of a sudden the rest of the family doesn’t get the attention that they used to get anymore. And how that affects the dynamic. You guys get to see really, really great work by Caleb Foote, Randy Randolph. Oh my God. There’s an episode coming up that is going to knock your socks off and see, Kyle Schmid is now saying lines like, knock your socks off because it’s hard to put Franks away.
But besides the Lala stuff, there’s a phenomenal episode with Caleb. You’re going to get an episode that is essentially a flashback episode, and it is all Mike and it is all probie. You guys are going to die when you see it because it is so good. And then we got the Christmas episode that is phenomenal. And you get it more into why and how Gibbs is where he is and why—this show is really good. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything and been as excited as I am to watch this.
NCIS: Origins, Mondays, 10/9c, CBS