Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Sydney episode “Lost in Translation” are ahead!
Good news, NCIS: Sydney fans: Bluebird Gleeson is back in play! Following last week’s “True Blue” delving into her past and explaining why she disappeared after the Season 2 finale, Mavournee Hazel’s character returned to the team… mostly. Because she’d lied about her background when she first joined the Australian Federal Police, she spent most of “Lost in Translation” filling out hundreds of papers to rejoin the force. However, she did find moments during the episode to discreetly help out with this week’s case.
Hopefully there won’t be any more complications to Blue resuming her work as a forensic scientist, as she’s been through enough already. But that’s beside the point, because what I need to talk about is how “Lost in Translation,” which just finished airing on the 2025 TV schedule, set up two new mysteries that have me even more invested by what’s to come in NCIS: Sydney Season 3.
Trigger Was Suspected To Have A Death Wish
In the NCIS: Sydney Season 3 premiere, we met Travis “Trigger” Riggs, an AFP colleague of JD who was brought in to do a security audit of the team’s headquarters and doing some fill-in forensic science work as the search for Blue’s replacement was happening. I hoped at the time that we’d see more of Trigger, and sure enough, he returned last week and this week. “Lost in Translation,” however, was arguably his most notable appearance yet, as he not only got to put his explosives expertise to good use to save a life, we also got some information on his background.
The events of this week’s case led to Evie and DeShawn finding a little girl who was on a pressure plate bomb, meaning that if the girl stepped off of it, it would explode. The good news is the bomb turned out to be a dud, but before that was discovered, Evie video called Trigger to guide her through disarming it. During this stressful sequence, Trigger clarified that he was an ex-bomb tech due to failing the psychological evaluation because there was concern he might have a death wish. This would explain his sealed personnel file Mackey mentioned in “Gut Instinct.”
So what specifically caused this concern? From the way Trigger was talking, it sounds like he doesn’t consciously have a death wish, but what would lead these psychologists to wonder if that was a possibility? I can’t believe that this tidbit of information won’t be followed up on later in NCIS: Sydney Season 3. The question is will it happen in the next few weeks or much later in the season.
Michelle Mackey Is Being Targeted
You can stream “Lost in Translation” with your Paramount+ subscription to see everything that unfolded, but to cut to the chase, Rashid Rahmati, the Afghani translator, was not The Ghost, i.e. the man who torpedoed that mission in the Herat Province in 2020 and killed this week’s victim. The real deal was eventually identified and gunned down at Central Station in Sydney, and the SD card proving Rashid’s innocence was recovered. Case closed, right? Wrong.
NCIS Special Agent in Charge Ken Carter informed Mackey and JD that when he started asking questions with the other intelligence agencies about The Ghost, he was iced out of meetings. So for now, they’re keeping the full scope of this terrorist and his war crimes under wraps until they learn more about this situation. But then things took a weirder when Blue discovered a kill list on The Ghost’s phone, i.e. people whom his boss wanted out of the picture to cover their tracks about what happened in that village in Afghanistan. Mackey decided to handle looking through the list after sending Blue home, and she discovered that she was on it.
Rather than show JD, who was still in the office what she found, Mackey instead sent the files about herself to her phone, then deleted her entry off the kill list. My guess is Mackey did this so that she wouldn’t be sidelined by her superiors, and she wants to uncover more information on her own before she tells anyone. But why is Mackey on the kill list at all? It didn’t sound like she had any connection to that village, and she certainly didn’t know Rashid and the soldiers prior to this case. What’s going on here?
I have a good feeling that this Michelle Mackey twist will fuel the main ongoing storyline in NCIS: Sydney Season 3, and perhaps it has the potential to leak into a hypothetical Season 4. Ok, I’m thinking too far ahead, but keep visiting CinemaBlend for updates on this mystery as new episodes air Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on CBS.