Mariel Molino, Austin Stowell, and creators Gina Lucita Monreal and David J. North weigh in on that big twist.
We always knew that Cecilia “Lala” Dominguez (Mariel Molino) was going to make a dramatic exit from Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Austin Stowell) at some point.
After all, the older Gibbs (Mark Harmon) never once mentions her on NCIS. But we didn’t expect that departure to be so soon.
The season 1 finale of prequel series NCIS: Origins leaves Lala’s life (and body) hanging in the balance. After lying to Lara Macy (Claire Berger) about the death of Pedro Hernandez and telling Macy she was present when Gibbs pulled the trigger, Lala sets off in her car. Presumably to tell Gibbs, the man she’s realized she’s in love with, the good news.
But when a little girl runs into the street chasing her dog, Lala swerves to avoid hitting her and it sends her car into a barrel roll, resulting in a fiery crash. There’s glass everywhere and Lala hangs upside down from her driver’s seat, bloody and bruised and unconscious (at best).
Is Lala dead? Or might there be some shred of hope that she’ll survive this accident with major injuries?
When we ask showrunners David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal whether or not Lala is dead or alive, Monreal only says, “We will neither confirm nor deny.”
Molino is also mum about Lala’s fate, but she warns fans that anything is possible. “In the past, the franchise hasn’t been scared of taking risks with characters and storylines,” she says. “I also had my share of questions when I read it and when I did it, but all I can say is that you have to tune in to season 2 to see what happens.”
All that we know for sure is that no matter the outcome, this is going to have a huge impact on Gibbs. “This will have gigantic ramifications on him,” says Stowell. “No matter what happens, he just cannot seem to stop hurting people. I don’t know whether it’ll make him double down on his feelings for her or make him so scared that he wants to completely retract.”
“Is she dead? Is she in a coma? Is she paralyzed?” asks Stowell. “I don’t know any of these things. I know this much. He’s going to find out that she was in a car accident after it seems like she was on the way to his house, so the guilt will only build.”
The one thing Molino will say is that she didn’t know this was coming. So it’s not as if she signed onto the show knowing that Lala would die by the end of the season. “This was not discussed in the beginning,” she says. “I knew that Lala’s story would have to have a major impact on Gibbs, and I knew that that probably would come with something very dramatic and high stakes.”
Longtime NCIS viewers will know that Gibbs seems to have incredibly bad luck when it comes to female members of his team. Famously, the season 2 finale of the original series ended with the death of his partner, Kate Todd (Sasha Alexander), when a sniper bullet kills her instantly.
Monreal and North say that they absolutely considered that fact when shaping the Origins finale. “I was actually on the writing staff of NCIS way back then when Kate was killed,” says North. “And that felt real and true in that moment.”
“In this season finale, hopefully we invoked that same kind of emotion out of the audience,” he continues. “What happens with Lala at the end is real. We’ve all dealt with this sort of tragedy in our own lives in different ways. And as tough as it is to see, it’s genuine and certainly a part of what we’re learning is what made Gibbs.”
Aside from Lala’s fate, there are plenty of other open questions, including what it was she was going to tell Gibbs if she reached him safely. “She was going to go and tell him that she loved him,” muses Molino. “And that he is free and that he’ll be okay. That he has nothing to worry about and that she loves him and she’ll do anything for him.”
But regardless of whether Lala lives or dies, it seems clear from the original NCIS that it’ll be years before Gibbs learns the potential extent to which Lala went to protect him. “When we meet the Lara Macy character and older Gibbs in the mothership, in that episode he learned that she did have the evidence to take him down,” explains Monreal. “He finds out in that episode. So, he couldn’t have known about that or about Lala until at least that point.”
However, it seems that Gibbs is finally ready to talk about Lala’s impact on his life, if the closing narration gives any indication. “This is a story I don’t tell,” he says. “I can’t find the words. But it never stops running through my head. The story of her.”
Gibbs has suffered a lot of trauma in his life, including the murder of his wife and child. So, one does have to wonder what makes Lala’s story the one that he can’t find the words to tell. “This must be pretty bad, huh?” posits Stowell. “That’s what I keep joking about with David and Gina. For this to be something he never talks about, what is this? What could have happened that was so bad that it’s so painful that he just cannot talk about it with anybody?”
For Monreal and North, the answer is just what Gibbs says it is – the story of her. “We don’t fully understand that yet because we haven’t seen the aftermath of what happens in the finale,” says Monreal. “We don’t see his reaction to it yet. We don’t know all of the intricacies of everything happening around it. We can’t fully comprehend yet what he’s meaning by that because we haven’t seen it in totality.”