‘NCIS: Sydney’ Boss Previews ‘Combustible’ Episode With Revelations for DeShawn & Evie

It’s a season of revelations for the international edition of the hit franchise. In the premiere, NCIS Special Agent Michelle Mackey (Olivia Swann), the team leader, shared with her Australian Federal Police counterpart, Sgt. Jim “JD” Dempsey (Todd Lasance), that she has a teenage son. Now, NCIS’s DeShawn Jackson (Sean Sagar) opens up about his past in the March 14 episode of NCIS: Sydney.

In “Hell Weak,” the suspected suicide of a former U.S. Navy SEAL leads NCIS: Sydney to a wellness retreat to investigate a group of his fellow former SEAL buddies. Below, executive producer Morgan O’Neill previews the episode, talks the Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) of the seasons-long mystery, and more.

What can you preview about this case and what challenges the team?

Morgan O’Neill: It’s a fascinating episode, particularly for DeShawn, because in going to this wellness retreat, ostensibly to investigate a former U.S. Navy SEAL’s suicide, we get to peel back the lid on DeShawn’s backstory a fair bit and really discover what makes him tick. There are a couple of huge revelations about him, both as a former Marine but also as a human that I think the audience is going to really lap up. It’s not only interesting from our perspective to understand more about what makes DeShawn tick, but it’s really interesting to watch Evie [Tuuli Narkle] experience all of that because their relationship is becoming so fascinating and complex and I think gorgeous, but there are big chapters of each other’s lives that they’re not yet privy to. And so this is one of the occasions where one of our intimate kind of pairings gets to discover a whole lot more about the other one, and it’s pretty combustible.

Daniel Asher Smith/Paramount+

What does that mean for how they each handle the case? 

Well, for DeShawn, it involves coming clean about his past. It’s a revelation [that] really goes to the heart of who he is as a person, and that’s a shock for Evie. And I think by tapping into Evie’s shock at the discovery about what DeShawn’s gone through, where he’s come from, it really deepens the relationship. It makes us realize just quite how much Evie and DeShawn care about one another in terms of how they approach the case. DeShawn is kind of compromised by his history in a funny way. He makes a few assumptions about the people they’re investigating based on his own personal history, and Evie has to call that out at some point, and it really is a case of each of them ultimately protecting the other one, having the other one’s back in ways that are kind of life and death.

Is there potential for a romance there? What can you say about that?

It’s funny. Some people look at the relationship between Evie and DeShawn and see kind of romantic green shoots sprouting. I personally look at it all like brother and sister. I feel like the relationship between Evie and DeShawn reminds me of the relationship between myself and my sisters — good-natured bickering at each other of no holds barred, but deeply loving. Whether that becomes something more, I guess time will tell, but it is interesting to note that there’s a huge portion of the readership who’s kind of shipping that. So I guess we’ll see.

Meanwhile, there’s the Rankin of it and that ongoing case, which is very much continuing to hang over their heads this season. What can you say about what’s coming up in that investigation and how close they are to getting answers at this point?

There’s an overarching mystery that’s coming into really stark focus as we move through Season 2. And ultimately it will reveal itself as being the solution to the question of who is the big bad from the very first episode of the show. So it’s in classic NCIS style dropping breadcrumbs along the way. But as of Episode 6 of the second season, we’re really rocketing towards a conclusion, and I can promise the viewers that we will get some definitive answers by the end of the season. It’s really fun. It’s Mackey and JD and the team piecing together what appear to be disparate elements that are slowly starting to come to focus and revealing themselves to be connected one to the other. So it’s all part of a growing mystery that, as I say, we’ll end up answering at the end of the season.

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At the end of Episode 5, they see that Rankin had this teddy bear he took everywhere and took photos of it, then sent it home. What can you say about that teddy bear?

Up until then, we’re assuming that Rankin is nefarious, that he’s some way connected to the big bad, that he’s complicit in the abduction of JD’s kid, that he’s potentially complicit in the theft of the biometric technology from the first season when they went into the bunker and almost killed Mackey, Evie, and Blue [Mavournee Hazel], that he was in some ways responsible for the attempted theft of the nuclear propulsion technology from the very first episode. So he’s on everyone’s s**t list basically. And Mackey and JD in particular have zero trust in this guy. So when they discover that not everything is as it appears to be and that he’s taken this teddy bear of all things and he’s photographed this teddy bear all around the world, wherever he is traveled, it raises their suspicions that there’s more to this than meet the eye.

And when they discover inside the teddy bear that there is a thumb drive encrypted with some sort of data that’s obviously fundamental to what Rankin was doing, then the stakes go up again. The question is, can we decrypt that data and what will that tell us when we do? Because what it’s telling Mackey and JD at the time is that everything that they think is not necessarily everything that is, and that there is much more mystery to Rankin that meets the eye, and that perhaps he’s not simply a bad actor looking out for himself, working with a bunch of co-conspirators. Perhaps there’s more nuance to that and perhaps, who knows, maybe he’s actually not as bad as we might think. Maybe he’s doing it for a whole bunch of other reasons. The rest of the season we’ll get there. But it certainly is about complicating Rankin’s story and putting Mackey and JD in the position where they’re not entirely sure who or what they can trust.

Because right now they’re waiting for Rankin to wake up from this coma, but the thing is, how much would Mackey trust anything he has to say at this point?

Yeah, look, it’s a really good question. What we wanted to do was to make sure that all the answers were held in a vault that was inaccessible, and by putting it all inside Rankin’s comatose head, we’ve got just that. But you’re absolutely right to point out, at this point, Rankin has no cred. He’s, as far as they know, been complicit in the kidnapping and attempted murder of JD’s son. We don’t know why he did that, and we’re desperately waiting for him to wake up to offer any sort of excuse because that’s a really hard one to forgive. But at the same time, Mackey needs answers and she’s got nowhere else to go. So Rankin will provide one of the keys to unlocking the mystery of the first two seasons of the show. Whether she can fully trust what he says or not, it’s a really good question, and I think it’s something that Mackey is pondering all the way through herself right up until the point where potentially he comes out of his coma and delivers the answers that we’ve been waiting for for so long.

NCIS: Sydney, Fridays, 8/7c, CBS

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