‘NCIS: Sydney’ Boss Breaks Down Season 2 Finale Cliffhanger & Teases What’s Next for Mackey, JD & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the NCIS: Sydney Season 2 finale “Sting in the Tail.”]

It all comes down to money. The NCIS: Sydney Season 2 finale, which aired on Friday, April 25, revealed who’s been behind everything all this time, including putting that pacemaker Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) didn’t need in him, and it was someone close to Mackey (Olivia Swann).

Mackey went way back with Etienne (John Fabry), who was seemingly helping the team with their latest case, only for JD (Todd Lasance) to realize he’s the one who was going to make off with $1.7 billion; he made money building up international aid contracts following chaos in certain regions. Mackey, of course, took him down before he could blow up a plane. But what’s sure to have people talking over hiatus is whoever that woman is who was waiting for Blue (Mavournee Hazel) when she got home. She’d been looking for her. Below, showrunner Morgan O’Neill breaks down the finale and teases what’s ahead in Season 3.

How did you settle on who was behind everything? Were there any other possibilities you scrapped before landing on at Etienne and having it be someone with such a personal connection to Mackey?

Morgan O’Neill: Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. What we wanted to do was make sure that it wasn’t some sort of boogeyman that descended from the clouds that had no personal connection to any of our team. When we were coming up with the storylines, we wanted to make sure that in peeling back the layers of who did it, we were also peeling back the layers of our characters, of our family. And Mackey seemed the most obvious place to do that. And because she’s such a tough nut to crack and she plays her emotional cards so close to her chest, it just made sense for the one thing that got through her defenses, that it should be the one thing that might ultimately prove itself to be the big bad.

What did you want to do with Mackey and Etienne’s fight? Because that was rough.

Look, here’s the thing. When we sat down to work out what the fight was going to be, we talked about what it would be like to fight someone to the death having just potentially been very intimate the night before. And so we got together with a fight choreographer and we worked out a fight sequence that was kind of bizarrely intimate given what was going on. Because if you think about it, it’s an unusual situation to find yourself in. You’ve opened yourself up emotionally the night before and then suddenly you discovered that the whole thing is an enormous betrayal. And so we designed the fight sequence and then we sat down with Olivia Swann, who plays Mackey, and we said, “So this is how we’re going to do it.” And she said, “Great, I’m going to do it all.” So every single thing you see in that fight sequence is Liv throwing it down. She trained for a month for that fight sequence and she absolutely kicked ass.

How is Mackey doing at the end after all that? How has that changed her? Her in the cab … I felt so bad for her.

Yeah, look, that’s the thing, isn’t it? The last two episodes of Season 2 sort of plumbed a really interesting dynamic between she and JD because it was sort of hard to tell whether JD was reacting like he was because he was just hot and bothered and he was suffering from a little bit of mango madness or whether there was something more akin to jealousy that was going on that was fueling him. And as it turns out, he may have had cause to be concerned for Mackey’s choices there.

And so at the end of Episode 10, of the finale, I kind of feel bad for both of them. Mackey’s driving back in the cab on her own. There’s a very awkward encounter at the airport as they leave. And then JD goes back to his mate’s garage where he’s living his best life in a foldout bed surrounded by his mate’s junk. We really wanted to leave that big question mark hanging at the end of the season. These two guys who clearly have a strong affection for one another, certainly a strong professional connection, have really been put through the ringer a little bit, and hopefully like you, the audience feels for that dislocation at the very end.

Speaking of JD in the garage, I was going to ask what is it going to take for him to move out of that garage?

It’s a very good question, Meredith, and one that we will definitely be answering in Season 3. It’s interesting, sometimes in situations like this, certainly in my experience, you got to go to the far ends of the earth a little bit. You really got to break it down before we can start to put things back together again. And I think for JD, he kind of feels like it’s a little penance that he’s paying. He could go out and rent an apartment, do all that stuff, but in the case of my friends whose marriages have broken down, you kind of hold out hope until there is no more hope. And I think the idea of moving out of his mate’s garage might’ve been sort of the final nail in the coffin that said that his marriage is not coming back anytime soon and that he should step out and open a new chapter of his life, and I don’t think he’s quite willing to do that yet. But come Season 3, we might see a different JD.

Yeah, because he’s comfortable — not physically comfortable because you can really be physically comfortable living in a garage, but comfortable emotionally and mentally and where he is in that position, right?

That’s right. And it’s that moment where people look at the necessary rebuilding of a life and they just take a big deep breath and work out exactly if that’s what they’re going to do. And for JD, as I said, he is going to be forced to entertain the reality that his marriage is over and that he’s a single guy and all the things that flow from that.

The woman waiting for Blue when she gets home, what can you say?

Obviously I don’t want to give away too much, but from the expression on Blue’s face, it’s clear that she knows who this woman is and the woman has, as she says, she says, I’ve been looking for you. And all the way through Season 2, as you would know, we’ve been slowly dropping some breadcrumbs about Blue’s really unusual, opaque past. And even if you look at Episode 7, which was the episode with Nova, the singer, when Blue was on her way to that concert, you could tell that she was trying to avoid being photographed and she has no digital footprint, which is strange for a person who works in the type of situation that Blue works in. And so when she got her photo taken with the kid up in Darwin, who snagged that million-dollar fish — which by the way actually happened, but that’s another story — it’s triggered someone to come looking for her now that they know where she lives. And so there’s an element of menace, at least I feel like there’s an element of real menace in who this woman is, and I’m confident that the questions that you’re asking will be answered very early on in Season 3.

So what can you say about the relationship between those two and about just the dynamic as well?

Well, I mean it’s more about what we’ve already said in the season leading up to that and the pieces of that jigsaw puzzle. We know a little bit about Blue’s tattoo. We know that it was designed by her brother. We know that they haven’t spoken for a long, long time. We know that she’s got something that she wants Doc [William McInnes] to take a look at. When they get back to Sydney, when they’re fishing up in Darwin, she says, “I’ve got this thing, can you help me out with?” So she’s obviously got a secret that she wants to unburden herself of. And the question I suppose is, will she ever get the chance to do that? Because that woman who has somehow found her and broken into her apartment and is lying in wait, what’s she going to do with Blue at that point? From my perspective, it doesn’t look particularly rosy for Blue. I’d be terrified if I were her. What do you think is going to happen to her?

I don’t know. I’m like, is she her mother? But is that too obvious? Is this a relative? I’m kind of stuck on all possibilities.

Well, look, I hate to be coy, Meredith, but that’s a good place to be, from my perspective. [Laughs]

So the team has really settled into a well-functioning. What can you share about the conversations you’re having about how to keep that going or how to shake that up more going forward?

It’s interesting. The first season was about can we build a family, and then the second season was about how we put as much pressure as we can on that family to see whether the binds will tie. And we’re in production on the third season, as you know, and we’re kind of exploring what is a pretty universal theme, which is that, if you don’t deal with your past, the past will deal with you. And so a lot of the questions you’re asking are thematically linked into Season 3. What does Mackey do with the fallout from Darwin? What does JD do with the breakdown of his marriage? What does Blue do with a strange woman sitting in her living room, having tracked her down, waiting for her? The past coming back to haunt our characters is the central theme of the third season of the show. So you’ve kind of intuitively latched onto where we’re going. I can’t be too specific about it because I don’t want to spoil for anyone, but it’s definitely a case of accepting the reality that you can’t outrun your past and that if you don’t deal with it, it’s going to come back and hit you like a freight train. And in Season 3 it does.

So we’ve talked before about the potential for romance for Mackey and JD and Evie (Tuuli Narkle) and DeShawn (Sean Sagar) and those complicated relationships there. What can you say about both those relationships and the possibility of the show going there for each heading into Season 3?

[Laughs] Look, who knows what emotional possibilities lie ahead. I would say that we find ourselves in a really interesting situation with Mackey and JD, obviously, as we just described. Mackey has exposed herself, revealed herself emotionally, and she’s been kind of punched in the face literally and metaphorically. JD has effectively saved her life, but also revealed that the reason that he was so skeptical of Etienne in the first place may have been equal parts personal and professional. And yet they’re both very, very aware of the fact that if there’s an emotional bond that’s building between them, it’s not something that anyone wants to entertain. They’re work colleagues. They’re heads of an office, which is this blended family between America and Australia, and to go there romantically would risk a whole lot. So there’s a lot of reasons for them not to succumb to any kind of romantic tension. But that being said, that’s me being logical. As we know, our emotions aren’t necessarily always that logical, and so Season 3 will see a fair bit of that tussle between head and heart, I suspect, with Mackey and JD.

With Evie and DeShawn, it’s a different thing. See, I always look at them as brother and sister, and they bicker a little bit like myself with my sisters. I know a lot of people out there see it through a different lens, and that’s cool and who am I to judge? Maybe there is something that’s there. I think the reality is, Tuuli and Sean, who play Evie and DeShawn, are such good friends and their own personal connection bubbles through to the surface so easily that it’s kind of hard not to ship them on some level. Whether anything happens significantly moving forward in Season 3, I really can’t tell you, but I will tell you that there will be, and I don’t think I’m being too coy here, there’s the fly in the ointment that arrives in Season 3 that will really send that relationship into a kind of different realm. So there’s a fly in the ointment that arrives that will potentially upset that beautiful thing that they’ve got going.

Is that a new character?

I can’t really say at this point, but you’ll know when you see it.

Can you say if we’re going to be meeting any significant new characters?

Yeah, there will be a couple of new characters coming along in Season 3. And again, the new characters that will arrive will in a lot of ways further that idea of the past coming back to haunt you, not in any kind of obvious way, but they’ll take our characters down the rabbit hole. And I suppose the question is, will they all make it back?

Are these recurring characters or are you adding a new series regular?

A little bit of both. A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.

Is there anything else you can tease about Season 3? And there’s always that question of a crossover.

Yeah, look, I was really thrilled the other day to hear the mothership give NCIS: Sydney a shout-out, and we’ve been talking about ways that we can make that work. The tricky thing just from a practical perspective is that we’re 9,000 miles from you guys, but we’re definitely talking about it and trying to work out how that might happen. We would like nothing more than to work out how to cross over with the mothership. My favorite episodes of the show are the crossover episodes, and I know there’s a lot of love for them from the audience in general, so we’re definitely exploring that possibility, let me say.

Yeah, because even the little mentions are great just to hear Mackey’s name on NCIS.

Yeah, it was cool, wasn’t it?

Were there any significant storylines or scenes that you had to scrap from the season for any reason, whether it was just through the other stories that you were telling or due to time since it was only a 10-episode season?

Not really. We had the season planned out pretty well in our heads. I will say that the nature of the storytelling that the NCIS universe affords us is that you want to tell more stories. Obviously you want to go deeper into character and you want to peel back all of the people that we want to spend that hour with every week, and you want to find out more about them. You want to find out what makes them tick. And there’s been so much love shown for Mackey and JD and Evie and DeShawn and Doc and Blue that we’re just desperate to tell more stories and we’re really excited to be back in production for Season 3 and to get the opportunity to do that. We certainly didn’t leave any stories on the floor, but we’ve got a whole lot of stories up our sleeves that we want to tell. There are really interesting backstories behind each of these characters that we’re really looking forward to revealing.

NCIS: Sydney, Season 3, TBA, CBS