Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Sydney Season 3 premiere are ahead!
The NCIS: Sydney Season 3 premiere just finished airing on the 2025 TV schedule, and as a welcome change from the previous two seasons, the series is now on the same night as NCIS and NCIS: Origins. Unfortunately, “Gut Instinct” didn’t shed any light on the Bluebird twist from the Season 2 finale besides revealing that Mavournee Hazel’s character had left the team a month ago. Don’t worry, it looks like we’ll finally get answers regarding her mysterious past next week.
Instead, Sydney’s Season 3 premiere focused on our protagonists investigating the sudden reemergence of two U.S. Navy aviators who thought they’d only been missing six weeks, but it’d actually been six years. In the midst of this, a new character was introduced who I hope we see more of this season. That said, what’s really concerning me is how things currently are between Mackey and JD after what went down in the Season 2 finale.
Welcome To NCIS: Sydney, Trigger
Let’s start on a more positive note first. JD brought in an AFP colleague of his named Travis “Trigger” Riggs (played by Claude Jabbour) to run a full security audit of the team’s headquarters, i.e. install locks on the front door, making sure there were no blind spots with the CCTV cameras, etc. However, he got a cool reception from Evie, Rosie and even Mackey, who called him the “work experience guy” and took issue with him having a sealed personnel file and a skill set she couldn’t use.
Luckily for Trigger, he proved useful later on in “Gut Instinct,” starting with when he analyzed the explosives that nearly scorched the team on a recently-arrived ship and learned they originated from the episode’s bad guy. Later, he discovered that the emission of a certain frequency was what caused one of the Navy aviators “freaked out” in a middle of a conversation with Mackey. Finally, he aided Rosie in removing an explosive from that same aviator’s body safely so he wouldn’t go into septic shock.
Rosie said at the end of “Gut Instinct” that Trigger was a “keeper,” and I hope that’s foreshadowing that we’ll see more of him. I don’t expect Trigger to become an NCIS: Sydney series regular, but as a member of the AFP’s Bomb Response Team, it would be easy enough to bring him back for the odd episode. Who knows, maybe he’s the new character who’s going to challenge the dynamic between Evie and DeShawn, as showrunner Morgan O’Neill told TVLine.
There’s Clearly Tension Between Mackey And JD
You’ll recall that in the NCIS: Sydney Season 2 finale, Mackey discovered that Etienne, an old friend of hers, was secretly working with a weapons supplier. When she learned the truth, he nearly killed her, but JD took him out with a headshot just in time. At the beginning of the Season 3 premiere, we saw Mackey undergoing a psychological evaluation to see if she was ready to go back to work after what she went through in Darwin. The psychiatrist advised her to not look the other way on her trauma, or else it could end up impacting her more powerfully down the line.
And yet, when JD later asked Mackey if she had any “major revelations” from her psych eval, she didn’t tell him anything. Mackey also behaved somewhat awkwardly when she brought up how she’d heard JD signed up for a dating app. But then it got really uncomfortable between them in the episode when Mackey said she was trusting her gut that something was off with the aviators, and JD countered with how her gut didn’t serve her well in Darwin. He admitted he was wrong at the end of “Gut Instinct,” but I can’t help feeling that things are going to stay weird between them for longer than just one episode.
Don’t get me wrong, I think in the long run, these characters will be fine, even if, like Olivia Swann speculated, being romantically paired isn’t in their future. But for the next few episodes of NCIS: Sydney, I suspect their usual dynamic will be off kilter. Catch new episodes of Sydney Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on CBS, and stream them afterwards with your Paramount+ subscription.