TV GUIDE: On The Set: Celebrating NCIS' 200th Episode
Jan 18, 2012
by Chris Willman
One of Southern California's peculiar mid-winter heat waves is keeping things toasty on this early January afternoon, so the setting isn't particularly conducive to sudden chills. But you might get one down the spine anyway if you're visiting the NCIS set, since the whole damn soundstage is spook-infested.
Darby Stanchfield is making one of her rare appearances on the series — rare because her character, Shannon Gibbs, got killed 20 years ago. Which, if you're doing the math, is more than a decade before NCIS even began. Nonetheless, she's a critical specter in the show's folklore, as the first wife Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) has never gotten over. Facing him now on a diner set, with their equally deceased daughter beside her, this angelic redhead is trying to convince TV's most haunted hero that his life hasn't been so tragic. "If we hadn't died, you never would have become an agent," she says, tearfully going on to mention the lives he's saved as a direct result of his family being murdered.
George Bailey, won't you please come home? "Life Before His Eyes" is Gibbs' It's a Wonderful Life episode, in which he has a moment of mortal terror and imagines a series of alternate-reality scenarios that reveal what all the characters' lives might be like if he'd made a few different decisions along the way. That's the kind of out-there gambit that, in the wrong hands, might be as much cause for shark-jumping as tear-jerking...
[NOTE: NCIS' 200th episode airs Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 8/7C on CBS. Guest stars include Muse Watson, Darby Stanchfield, Michael O'Neill and Rudolf Martin.]
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