‘NCIS: Origins’: Inside Emotional Mark Harmon Ducky Moment in David McCallum Tribute

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS: Origins Season 2 Episode 3 “The Edge.”]

“He always had a way of knowing who I was meant to be.” So says Mark Harmon in the emotional voiceover that caps off the NCIS: Origins serving as a tribute to the late David McCallum, with Adam Campbell reprising his role as the young Ducky.

Ducky has come to Pendleton to determine if they need an in-house ME — Franks (Kyle Schmid) is, of course, suspicious — and reunites with his old pal Gibbs (Austin Stowell), ultimately leaving him and everyone he encounters better for it. “He comes in sort of as this wonderful magical storm in a way, and everyone is influenced by his presence,” notes executive producer Gina Lucita Monreal, who wrote the episode with Margarita Matthews.

Below, Adam Campbell and executive producers Gina Lucita Monreal and David J. North take us inside the poignant hour, one of the best episodes of television this year.

Mark Harmon’s narration about Ducky

As with every episode, Mark Harmon provides the opening and closing narration, and it’s the latter that’s especially emotional. The episode reveals just how Ducky began talking to bodies and “What I didn’t know is that once he started talking to them, he’d never shut up. I miss that,” Harmon’s Gibbs says. “I miss hearing him every day. I miss my friend.”

Monreal is quick to give North the credit for those last two sentences, while North says it was a “group effort” with her and Matthews. “David was very adamant that he talk about missing his friend,” Monreal tells TV Insider.

“I wanted to hear Mark say the truth of Gibbs and Mark and how much he does miss Ducky and David,” North adds. “Watching Mark do that in the sound studio was very moving.” Monreal adds that during that recording, they shared their memories of McCallum and reminisced about times they shared together. (Monreal and North were EPs on the mothership.) “We definitely felt his presence there in the VO recording.”

The episode also includes McCallum’s music — the title is for his song — and including it meant a lot to Harmon, says North. “Mark was thrilled we were doing this episode. Mark’s a big fan of Adam Campbell. He knew this would be special for the character and for NCIS, and Mark wrote a nice note to Adam welcoming him back and Mark just checked with us to make sure someone was in touch with David’s family. He’s been very hands-on on it.”

How Ducky became Ducky

While Ducky is at Pendleton in an observational capacity, he ends up helping with the case, and in doing so, accidentally thaws away the evidence (a specific poison). In his frustration, he begins talking to the victim, asking what he can do to help her. (“That is his first moment of appealing to a body in general, and so I think that moment really was pivotal for us,” Monreal tells us.) That’s when he realizes that a porcelain filling in her tooth serves as an insulator and could still hold some of the nerve agent. “I hear you, darling, loud and clear,” he says.

Having the episode explore that origin story of Ducky’s, something the mothership hadn’t, was something they “knew pretty early on,” says Monreal. “That just felt like the right thing to do.” While neither EP nor Campbell ever spoke with McCallum directly about that aspect of the character — North does note that the late actor “adored” Campbell as his younger version — Monreal does point to how much “he loved words.”

Campbell adds that this aspect of his character allows for him to “thread the needle of linking … the fact he’s dealing with dead people and that he’s losing somehow that connection that he used to have with living people,” when he was a medical doctor. “These people are dead, but they were still once living people and he starts to not treat them as lumps of flesh, but rather as humans with dignity who have living relatives.”

Greg Gayne/CBS

The first and last times we see Ducky in this episode is on the NCIS autopsy set. “Because of the nature of this episode, it’s honoring David, I’m wearing some of David’s actual clothes. It did feel quite profound to be on the set where he’d spent so much time. It felt quite significant. I think it was quite moving to be in that room and to carry his flame a little bit. But more than that, it was also just really, really cool that we got to do that, we got to shoot that there, and it was just a brilliant ending to the episode,” says Campbell.

The origins of Gibbs’ boat-building

Ducky follows up his and Gibbs’ past conversation about ships in bottles — from NCIS Episode 400 — with attempts to talk to his friend about it in this episode, culminating in him giving him one as he leaves for D.C.

“He didn’t want to come to Camp Pendleton empty handed, and I don’t know that he totally understands Gibbs’ fascination with it, but he knows he is fascinated and he wants to feed that,” says North.

For Campbell, “Some of it is genuinely a personal keepsake between friends, but there’s also an encouragement I think here from Ducky to don’t give up on your dreams, to pursue things that make you happy to pursue things that even though you are very stressed and you have a very intense and daunting job, also don’t forget that there is levity there as well, and there is time that you can take to take care of yourself. And we see that later on in Gibbs’s life.”

But Ducky’s also planting the seeds, it seems, for a key aspect of Gibbs’ life later on: boat-building. The episode ends with Gibbs looking at that bottle then at the wood he’s gathered.

“We really wanted to reveal something both about Ducky and Gibbs, something that was profoundly significant to each of their characters, because in our minds, that relationship between Gibbs and Ducky was so profound, and so we wanted to show how they brought something extremely significant out in each other,” Monreal explains. “For Gibbs, that was the idea of building this boat. And for Ducky, it was the idea of talking to the bodies.”

As for how boat-building will go, Monreal points out that his father did teach him woodworking. “Gibbs is pretty handy,” adds North. “Soon, we’ll see him start trying to put something together.”

Greg Gayne/CBS

Building Ducky & Gibbs’ bond

When Ducky first encounters Gibbs, he tries to hug him; the agent instead holds out his hand for a handshake. Ducky then tries to get him to call him Ducky, as his friends do; Gibbs sticks with Dr. Mallard. But when the two part ways at the end of the episode, Gibbs does call him Ducky. That was the first scene that Campbell and Stowell filmed together (Mark Harmon’s son Sean Harmon played Gibbs in flashbacks on NCIS).

Campbell calls that moment “wonderful. I think there is that reiteration that this is a deep friendship and a lasting one, and it is an indication of just how close these guys are going to be in the coming years. … Like a puppy, Ducky never really lets up until he brings out the kind of close friendship that he knows he has with Gibbs.”

For the producers, it was about showing the “progression forward of how Gibbs really went from seeing him as an acquaintance that he had crossed paths with years ago to this friend who will become a presence in his life,” according to Monreal.

Ducky helps Franks — and himself

Franks is very against Ducky’s presence, to the point that he wants Gibbs and Lala (Mariel Molino) to sneak a peek at his notebook. But then Franks finally sits down with Ducky — he needs a head wound treated — and ends up getting the help that others have from him, with advice about Gary Callahan. The vet says the dog is depressed, Franks admits, and Ducky can tell that he’s more of a friend to the team’s boss. He explains that animals can mimic an owner’s state of mind, and Franks asks what he knows about brothers; he and his don’t talk. (At this point in time, Ducky thinks his brother is dead. It won’t be until NCIS Season 13’s “Spinning Wheel” that that changes.) Ducky recommends he call his brother. “Thanks, doc,” Franks says. It’s a moment that Ducky needed, too.

“Ducky just brings out this vulnerability in people, and I think it’s because he’s vulnerable himself with how he feels,” Campbell notes of that conversation. He also hopes that fans make the connection about brothers “and just how much personal pain that relationship has for Ducky. I think Ducky here speaks with some wisdom and genuine understanding of Franks’ situation. And also he’s very determined by the end of that scene. He’s like. ‘Franks, you need to call your brother. You need to maintain a relationship with your sibling because you might never get this chance again.’ I like that moment.”

Greg Gayne/CBS

For the producers, there was “a fine line” when it came to including that. “We had many a discussion about that and how far to go with that idea, because we didn’t want to sort of confuse the matter, but we definitely didn’t want to ignore it either,” Monreal tells us.

What did you think of NCIS: Origins‘ tribute to David McCallum and Adam Campbell back as young Ducky? Let us know in the comments section below.

NCIS: Origins, Tuesdays, 9/8c, CBS