Tyla Abercrumbie, who plays Mary Jo Hayes, the field operation support officer who runs the NIS office on NCIS: ORIGINS, has a theory about how her character could someday cross over to the flagship series, and she has already worked out the details.
“I thought about this. I thought about Rocky Carroll. Mary Jo is related in some way, where somebody says to me at some point, ‘What’s your uncle’s name?’ And my character says his name, and you know that he’s in the future,” Abercrumbie said Tuesday, July 14, on the “NCIS: Partners & Probies” podcast.
The podcast, hosted by NCIS stars Brian Dietzen, who plays Dr. Jimmy Palmer, and Diona Reasonover, who plays forensic scientist Kasie Hines, closes every episode with fan-submitted “Probie Questions.” Dietzen asked whether Mary Jo might ever be worked into the mothership, and Abercrumbie ran straight at it.
She landed on Rocky Carroll’s Leon Vance, the longtime NCIS director killed off in the franchise’s 500th episode this past March, reasoning that Vance’s age made a family connection plausible. Reasonover offered her own angle, suggesting Mary Jo could instead be tied to Kasie’s father.
“Maybe Kasie’s dad knew Mary Jo,” Reasonover said, and Abercrumbie liked the idea enough to keep building on it, floating a flashback where the two families’ histories quietly overlap.
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It would not be NCIS: ORIGINS’ first handshake with its parent show. The prequel, which follows a young Jethro Gibbs through his earliest days at the Naval Investigative Service in 1991, already crossed over with NCIS once last season in a story that rippled across both timelines.
Abercrumbie also used the podcast to explain a quieter decision behind Mary Jo’s backstory. Before writers settled on a divorce, she told showrunners Gina Lucita Monreal and David J. North that she did not want her character to have a husband at all.
“I thought, ‘The minute this always happens, the minute a woman gets a husband, all her conversation is about her husband,’” she explained. “So, I was like, I don’t want a husband.” The compromise landed on divorce, which let Mary Jo keep her independence without erasing a marriage from her history entirely.
Movieguide® has tracked NCIS: ORIGINS since it premiered in October 2024. Our review of the two-part pilot, “Enter Sandman,” found a grittier, more secular show than its predecessor, one that traded the original’s found-family humor for crude language, drug references and a bedroom scene, even while keeping a moral center built around justice and hard-won truth. We have since followed the show’s expanding cast, its Season 2 renewal, and now its approaching third season.
The broader NCIS franchise has fared well at the Movieguide® Awards recently, even if ORIGINS has not yet joined it there. Season 22’s “Sticks & Stones” picked up nominations for the Faith & Freedom Award for Television and Streaming and Best Television for Mature Audiences at the 2025 Movieguide® Awards, and Season 23’s “God Only Knows” returned with a 2026 nomination for Best Streaming for Mature Audiences.
NCIS: ORIGINS Season 3 premieres this fall, Tuesdays at 10/9c on CBS, with North staying on as showrunner while Monreal departs the series. Mary Jo’s tie to Vance is still just a pitch tossed around on a podcast. But for a franchise built on legacy, found family and the quiet cost of service, a little kinship stretched across two timelines would not feel out of place.
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