While NCIS: Origins delved into one of Mike Franks' toughest cases, I'm glad what was inside Gibbs' Psych Eval was finally revealed

Warning: SPOILERS ahead NCIS: Origin episode “Last Rites” is just around the corner!

NCIS fans learned a lot about Leroy Jethro Gibbs back then Mark Harmon played him for almost twenty years, but NCIS: Origins provides a new platform to explore the character. Austin Stowell’s younger Gibbs is still early in his career at NIS (as it was then called), but in between Origin‘ premiere that sheds light on several Gibbs-isms and to tease the future connection he and Lala Dominguez will have, it was mentioned that his psychological evaluation did not portray him as someone who should be working as a federal agent. Well, the latest episode of the prequel, ‘Last Rites’, just aired on the TV program 2024and ultimately shared what was in that evaluation as we delved into one of the most difficult cases of Mike Franks’ career. Let’s discuss that first.

Kyle Schmid's Mike Franks in NCIS: Origins — (Image credit: CBS)

Mike Franks got his last chance to find the remains of a victim

In 1985, six years earlier NCIS: Origins begins, and just a week after Vera Strickland broke off her professional partnership with Mike Franks, the mustached Texan, played in this series by Kyle Schmid, was working alone on the Albert Hope case. Hope, a former theology professor, murdered his wife Anna Larson and her lover, Captain Jonathan Rice, when he found them together at his home. While Franks found Rice’s body, he never found Anna’s, and he had trouble doing so, as he promised her twin sister Julie that he would.

Hope was brought back to 1991 and would eventually be executed, leaving Franks and his team with just two days to try to get the location out of him. Hope agreed to tell Franks where Anna’s body was if he could meet with Julie to seek “absolution.” Despite hating the man with every fiber of his being, Franks agreed to the terms, so Hope led him, his team, and an escort to an area in the desert near where Rice’s body had been found. Sure enough, there was a body where Hope said it would be, so this case was finally closed, right? Wrong.

Mike Franks went back on his deal with Albert Hope when the body was found, but it wasn’t actually Anna’s, but a passerby Hope encountered while burying Jonathan Rice. With no options left, Franks gave in and showed Julie Hope so she could forgive him. However, it turned out that he didn’t want absolution from her, but wanted to give Julie absolution, blaming him for taking Anna to fancy bars and driving her away the night she met Jonathan Rice. In Hope’s twisted eyes, it was Julie who killed Anna, but he “forgave” her, which sent Franks into a rage.

Fortunately, the team managed to emerge victorious without the killer’s help. They realized that Hope had buried his victims according to their religious beliefs. Rice was Catholic, so Hope buried him under a cactus that cast a cross-like shadow. The passerby was Muslim, so Hope buried him with stones and a shroud-like covering. Although Anna was not religious, the final chapter of Hope’s book describes how to find “religion” and God from other sources, including money, sex, alcohol, and power. That was exactly what Franks needed to solve the case.

As he rushed to reach Hope before his execution by lethal injection, he shouted at the perpetrator that they knew he had buried Anna in the nearby Viva Vineyard because he thought his wife saw wine as her god. Hope died knowing his final secret had been revealed, and Anna was finally able to have a proper burial after all these years.

Randy, Gibbs and Lala in NCIS: Origins view the document

(Image credit: CBS)

Lala revealed to Gibbs what happened in his psychological evaluation

NCIS: Origins is set just a few months after Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ first wife, Shannon, and their daughter, Kelly, were murdered by drug dealer Pedro Hernandez. We also learned in last week’s episode that when Gibbs learned they were dead while he was serving overseas, he deliberately walked into the enemy line of fire during an attack. This left him in a coma, although as “Last Rites” revealed, he finally woke up when his father Jackson visited him.

The thing is, Gibbs isn’t in a big headspace while working on these early NIS cases, and Cliff Wheeler, head of the agency’s Pendleton division, even notified Mike Franks to let him go if he gets out the hand started walking. Lala Dominguez also got a glimpse into Gibbs’ psychological evaluation, and five episodes later she let him know what was in it after an incident in which Gibbs pulled a gun on some men driving near where Albert Hope (wrongly ) Anna said. Larson was buried.

Lala confronted Gibbs about what happened next, and Gibbs talked about how he lashed out as a child after his dog was hit by a car, so his father taught him to fish to get his head straight. Gibbs hadn’t fished in a long time, and Lala must have been moved by that story because she didn’t report that incident to Mike Franks. Not only that she informed Gibbs after Anna’s funeral that his evaluation said he was “in a depressive state due to trauma,” had “impulsive tendencies, unaddressed anger issues,” and that the “evaluator strongly recommended comprehensive therapy and concluded that he would not do that’. It doesn’t work for long at NIS.’

However, Lala told Gibbs not to worry about it because there was some crazy stuff in her evaluation, and she didn’t even want to know what was in Mike Frank’s evaluation. Instead, she advised him to go fishing once a week to get his head straight. It’s hard to say whether Gibbs’ psychological evaluation will continue to play a major role in the story Origin is significant, but since we fish it frequently NCISat least we know he’ll eventually take Lala up on her proposal.

New episodes of NCIS: Origins airs Mondays at 10 PM ET on CBS, immediately following the flagship show’s 22nd season. Stream the entirety of the NCIS franchise with a Paramount+ subscription.