Mike Franks has been dead, on NCIS, since 2011. On Tuesday, Nov. 17, Muse Watson is back as Gibbs’ old mentor anyway. He guest-stars on NCIS: Origins Season 3, Episode 6, “Shot Through the Heart,” at 10 p.m. ET on CBS.
Watson first played Franks in the Season 3 finale, “Hiatus,” in May 2006. He was Gibbs’ former boss and mentor, the retired agent who helped shape him as an investigator. TVLine puts his flagship run at 20 episodes. On Origins, Kyle Schmid plays the younger Franks in the 1990s at Camp Pendleton. This week, both versions of the character are in play: Schmid in 1993, and Watson in the present-day story with Mark Harmon.
How Mike Franks died
Franks was killed in the Season 8 episode “Swan Song,” which aired May 10, 2011. CBS’s official logline was careful at the time. After new evidence showed that the Port-to-Port killer had infiltrated the agency, the NCIS teams raced to track him down. Watson was listed as a guest, along with Kerr Smith as Navy Lieutenant Jonas Cobb.
In the episode, the fight ends outside Gibbs’ house, in the rain. Franks challenges Cobb, the Port-to-Port Killer, and loses. Gibbs hears shots and finds his friend dying. The next week’s season finale, “Pyramid,” includes Franks’ funeral.
It was a hard call inside the show. “It wasn’t an easy decision for us,” then-showrunner Gary Glasberg told Entertainment Weekly after the finale. “We love Muse Watson, we love the character, their relationship is very special and unique.” Glasberg also said Franks had written Gibbs about a terminal illness, and that Gibbs had been building a coffin for his friend in the basement.
Why he kept coming back
Glasberg left the door open. The writers were happy, he said, with the way “Swan Song” used Franks as “this voice that spoke to Gibbs internally.”
The opportunity is there for that conscience or voice to return again at some point. So I won’t say that is the last time that you’re gonna see Muse Watson.
That is what happened. Deadline reports that Watson later appeared to Gibbs as a ghost on the original series, and that he last shared the screen with Harmon in Season 15, Episode 8. In a 2025 crossover between Origins and NCIS, Watson appeared again, but not in a scene with Gibbs. The episode ended with a time-lapse morph from Schmid’s young Franks into Watson’s older Franks, a way of showing the weight of an unsolved case. Deadline says this week’s episode is the first time Watson and Harmon will share scenes since that Season 15 appearance.
Why he’s back on Tuesday
The official CBS synopsis explains the hook without giving the hour away. “Past and present collide for Gibbs as he searches for answers about what happened to Lala all those years ago.” In the 1993 story, “an unexpected bond forms between Franks and Lala” as the team races to expose a mole after FBI Agent Casey Bloom, played by Sean Harmon, is shot. Emily Wickersham also guest-stars as Ellie Bishop. The episode is written by Noah Schechter.
A short warning: the next few lines discuss last week’s Origins episode.
Earlier this season, present-day Gibbs told Bishop that Cecilia “Lala” Dominguez, his old partner, had died in a plane crash years ago. In last week’s “Baila Esta Cumbia,” Gibbs and Bishop questioned a tracker who had been hired to find two former federal agents. According to TV Insider, the man said the person who hired him looked at Lala’s obituary, smiled, and said she “wasn’t on the plane.” That is why Gibbs is now looking for answers. The official logline does not say how Franks appears on Tuesday, or what he tells Gibbs, and we are not going to guess.
Deadline reports that Watson’s return “sheds new light on the mystery about what happened to Lala,” and that Franks, Vera Strickland, and Tobias Fornell will each provide insight into her disappearance. Roma Maffia returns as Vera on Dec. 1. Joe Spano, as Fornell, follows on Dec. 8.
For now, the story is simpler than all of that. Mike Franks died in 2011, protecting a friend, and then stayed in Gibbs’ head for years. On Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET, on CBS and streaming live on Paramount+ for Premium subscribers (and the next day for everyone else), Muse Watson is back on screen with him.
