In the fall of 2023, CBS pulled from the inventory of its streaming service, Paramount+, and put NCIS: Sydney on the schedule to fill a spot created by the dual wroters’ and actors’ strikes in the U.S. The show did so well that a second season was commissioned, again scheduled to run on the Eye Network before dropping on P+ the next day (the series streams on P+ in Australia). We left the first season with NCIS agent Michelle Mackey holding her DOD contact at gunpoint. The second season more or less picks up where the first left of.
NCIS: SYDNEY SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Government and military officials, including the joint NCIS/AFP team, are lined up at an airfield to honor the memory of a military officer in a flag-draped coffin.
The Gist: Six days earlier, we’re back to NCIS agent Michelle Mackey (Olivia Swann) holding a gun at her DOD liaison, Col. Richard Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), when the phone of the Russian assassin who had kidnapped the son of AFP Sgt. JD Dempsey (Todd Lasance) has his number in it; Dempsey called the only number in the phone after the Russian assassin was killed by another assassin, Ana Niemus (Georgina Haig).
Rankin has a cardiac event at that very second, and as the team scrambles, pathologist “Doc” Penrose (William McInnes) figures out a way to stop the pacemaker/defibrillator in the colonel’s chest, as it seems to be operating out of control. The colonel is put in an induced coma, and he may never give the answers Mackey and the team want.
Because Niemus, whom Mackey and her fellow NCIS agent DeShawn Jackson (Sean Sagar) were sent to Sydney to capture, slipped through their fingers after being in custody, Mackey’s boss Ken Carter (Bert LaBonté) benches her and puts Jackson in charge of the team pending the investigation. At the same time, Dempsey is also benched.
Even with Jackson in charge, though, the goal is still to find Niemus, and when Doc’s assistant Bluebird “Blue” Gleeson (Mavournee Hazel) finds a “tech tat” on the Russian killer’s body, the team — Jackson, Blue, Doc and Evie Cooper (Tuuli Narkle) — take the very ethically-questionable step to charge up the corpse’s electrical system so they can read the data from the NFC chip embedded under the tattoo. In the meantime, Dempsey tries to figure out a way to draw Niemus out of hiding.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Name an NCIS series and NCIS: Sydney is similar to it, including the quippiness that happens while the team investigates and chases bad guys.
Our Take: Season 2 of NCIS: Sydney, created by Morgan O’Neill, tries to dig a little bit deeper into the lives of Mackey and Dempsey, at least as much as any NCIS show is able to. While the two of them are benched — though conveniently still doing a lot of investigative legwork and staying in touch with the team — they get to know each other a little bit better. Dempsey is struggling to keep is marriage intact, and Mackey has a teenage son back in the states, the product of a pregnancy when she herself was a teenager.
For the most part, though, the team is going to continue to investigate the connection between Rankin and these assassins while solving other cases; after all, that’s what the franchise has been about for over two decades.
At the very least, the show is now past the awkward teaming of NCIS and AFP agents, with snippets of dialogue explaining to the Yanks watching just what all of the Australian security agencies and political positions are. The group is now operating as a pretty cohesive team, and that’s evident in all the ball-busting they do with each other while these very intense investigations proceed.
Is the whole web of assassins and kidnappings that carried over from Season 1 a bit convoluted? Sure. Is the plot where the team more or less reanimates a body to read an embedded chip ridiculous? Absolutely. But it’s not anything different than we’ve seen from this franchise, and at this point the team — especially Swann and Lasance — are working well together.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: We find out that the officer that was in that coffin may not really be in that coffin.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this again to William McInnes as Doc, not just because he’s the funniest part of the show — the medical guys always are — but for his uncanny resemblance to Jim Gaffigan.
Most Pilot-y Line: Dempsey sees Mackey’s sparse, modern, expansive apartment with a view of the Harbor Bridge and says, “It’s like you’re some bougie serial killer.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. NCIS: Sydney is better than it was during its first season simply because the team is settled in and working together, doing the usual stuff you see in an NCIS series.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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