NCIS Season Nine

NCIS: NO CURBING ITS SUCCESS!

- CHRIS WILLMAN

One of Southern California's peculiar mid-winter heatwaves is keeping things toasty on this early January afternoon, so the setting isn't particularly conducive to sudden chills. But you might get one down the spine anyway if you're visiting the NCIS set, since the whole damn soundstage is spook-infested.

Darby Stanchfield is making one of her rare appearances on the series rare because her character, Shannon Gibbs, got killed 20 years ago. Which, if you're doing the math, is more than a decade before NCIS even began. Nonetheless, she's a critical specter in the show's folklore, as the first wife Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) has never gotten over. Facing him now on a diner set, with their equally deceased daughter beside her, this angelic redhead is trying to convince TV's most haunted hero that his life hasn't been so tragic. "If we hadn't died, you never would have become an agent," she says, tearfully going on to mention the lives he's saved as a direct result of his family being murdered.

This "Life Before His Eyes” episode is inspired by the classic Christmas movie It's a Wonderful Life. Gibbs has a moment of mortal terror and imagines a series of alternate-reality scenarios that reveal what all the characters' lives might be like if he'd made a few different decisions along the way. That's the kind of out-there gambit that, in the wrong hands, might be as much cause for shark-jumping as tear-jerking.

But this risk would only have been attempted on an occasion as special as NCIS's 200th episode. It's ironic that the show would harp so repeatedly and poignantly on the theme of roads not taken, when this exceedingly rare numerical milestone points to just how few wrong turns NCIS has taken on the way to becoming TV's No. 1 scripted show.