How This NCIS Writer Reacted to Killing Off Major Character: ‘You Kidding?’

Published: December 10, 2024

How This NCIS Writer Reacted to Killing Off Major Character: ‘You Kidding?’

Movieguide® Contributor

NCIS writer Jesse Stern reflected on killing off a significant recurring NCIS character, Mike Franks, played by Muse Watson.

“Gary Glasberg, rest in peace, handed me that assignment. He said, We’re going to kill Mike Franks.’ And Franks hadn’t been in an episode that season,” Sterns recalled. “And I was just like, ‘Are you kidding? We’re going to bring the guy in just to kill him off.’ I’m like, ‘Everyone’s going to see it coming. It’s not the way to do it.’”

“So I tried to talk him out of that decision, but he was determined that we were going to kill Mike Franks,” he continued. “So I was like, ‘Ok, well, if I’m going to do it…’ That was my last script. I was like, ‘If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it in a swan song.’ I’m going to do it in a way you don’t see coming and I’m going to do it in a way where the actor can come back.”

Franks’ death came in the Season 8 premiere, “Swan Song.” One rainy night, Franks spots murderer Jonas Cobb, the Port-to-Port Killer. He attempts to nab him but gets stabbed to death instead. It’s later revealed that Franks had terminal cancer.

“While Jesse Stern initially wasn’t on board with killing off Mike Franks when the late Gary Glasberg instructed him to do so, he ended up making the best of the situation and delivered what I consider to be one of the best death scenes in NCIS,” Cinema Blend reported. “The good news is that, as mentioned earlier, this didn’t mark the end of Muse Watson’s involvement with the show, as Gibbs would occasionally see his deceased friend in ghost form. Watson last appeared as Franks in the Season 15 episode ‘Voices.'”

Franks’ role still lives on in NCIS: ORIGINS, where he’s played by Kyle Schmid.

In the latest ORIGINS episode, which released yesterday, young Leroy Jethro Gibbs must face his past as he heads to Mexico to look for a missing girl. The person who murdered Gibbs’ family was suspected to be hiding there, but the NIS never found him.

Young Gibbs, played by Austin Stowell, finds his role to be a “daunting task.” But Mark Harmon, who played the original Gibbs, helped him feel at ease on set. Stowell described him as “welcoming,” and someone who “leads by example.”

NCIS’s Season 9 episode, “Engaged,” won a Movieguide® Teddy Bear Award®.