NCIS: The Origins Of Gibbs' Rule 11 Are Truly Tragic

Contains spoilers for "NCIS: Origins" Season 2, Episode 5 — "Funny How Time Slips Away"

Mark Harmon's Leroy Jethro Gibbs famously has a long list of rules in "NCIS," and viewers discovered the reasoning behind one of them in a Season 2 episode of "NCIS: Origins," the prequel series that features a younger Gibbs played by Austin Stowell. "Funny How Time Slips Away" spotlights the creation of rule #11, which is: "When the job is done, walk away." It's a motto that Gibbs will come to live by and one he'll share with colleagues like Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) later on, but it sprang up from tragic circumstances.

In "Funny How Time Slips Away," Gibbs' close friend Mike Franks (played by Kyle Schmid in "NCIS: Origins") talks him into letting go of a dossier of pictures of victims that he has collected and uses for motivation. Mike tells Gibbs that there will be plenty of people whose murders he will have to solve over the years and that fretting over a small handful will only hinder him. Gibbs reluctantly follows his friend's suggestion and he seems to find relief in doing so, but what he doesn't know is that Mike is secretly doing the exact same thing, obsessing over a past case that he cannot let go.

While Mike Franks preaches the value of leaving work worries behind when you leave the office, he has been quietly obsessing over the case of Thomas Mulligan (played by Luke Edwards in "NCIS" and Shiloh Fernandez in "NCIS: Origins"), who confessed to the murder of a naval officer. Franks doubts the validity of the confession and ultimately he's unable to understand why the man insisted upon confessing to a crime he didn't commit. Franks becomes so mentally tangled up with the case that he makes it his business to visit Mulligan and try to extract the truth from him.

Franks goes to see Mulligan annually for decades, but he's never able to learn what happened. By the time he left the show (here's the real reason "NCIS" killed off Mike Franks), he still wasn't aware of what really happened. Had he practised what he preached to Gibbs, he would have saved himself from many years of turmoil, but, tragically, he wasn't able to shake the case. Does that make him a hypocrite? Technically, it does, but he was clearly trying to stop his friend Gibbs from going down that same dark path. Had it not been for Franks, Gibbs' eleventh rule would have been something else entirely.