Cult

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for NCIS: Sydney Season 3 Episode 2 “True Blue.”]

Why does their forensic pathologist have bones in her home?! That’s the question the NCIS: Sydney team wonders about Blue (Mavournee Hazel) after they search her home when it becomes clear she’s missing. It leads to revelations about her past and present, and it leaves Mackey (Olivia Swann) and JD (Todd Lasance) with a quandary.

As the others learn, Blue was once part of a cult, and the woman she found in her home at the end of the Season 2 finale, Aspira (Doris Youane), has gotten her to return by telling her her twin brother needed her. But what Blue doesn’t know is the prophecy which essentially says that everyone will follow the twins in death by suicide. What Blue uncovers is Aspira doesn’t plan to take the poison and instead will be selling the land. She raises the alarm just as the team arrives to help, and while Blue’s brother drinks the poison, Doc’s (William McInnes) there in time to save him. Blue is then left to meet the grandmother she didn’t know she had. Oh, and the bones? Her father’s, which are proof that he didn’t leave as Aspira claimed.

Meanwhile, Mackey and JD are left to wonder what to do about what they’ve learned about Blue during the course of their investigation: She’s an ex-felon, having been arrested for aggravated breaking and entering. Her file was sealed.

Below, showrunner Morgan O’Neill discusses Blue’s backstory, Mackey and JD’s conundrum, and more.

Why did you make this Blue’s backstory?

Morgan O’Neill: We spent a lot of time thinking about Blue and crafting her in the first couple of seasons of the show. There’s something tantalizing about someone who knows where all the digital bodies are buried in this world and yet has none herself. We discover little bits and pieces and breadcrumbs about Blue all the way through the first two seasons of the show. We know that she lives on her own. She has many locks on her doors. She has no digital fingerprint. She asks Doc to look into something for her when they get back from Darwin in a professional capacity. She doesn’t like her photographs being taken. She has a strange relationship with the music of Nova and the bluebird and the tattoo — and she’s got all sorts of unusual tattoos, which could almost be prison tattoos, and she doesn’t want to talk about them. We just kept piling interesting, intriguing things into Blue’s backstory, knowing that at some point we’re going to have to bring it all back out and try and lay it out in an order that made sense.

The nature of cults is really, really fascinating to me, and the way they can sometimes control people and manipulate people into certain patterns of behavior, and the courage it takes to get out of those situations is really compelling for me. We just found the opportunity to go into the first 15, 16 years of Blue’s life to be so compelling. And I think one of the really fun things about peeling back the layers of characters is that, in some ways, it makes the character that you know profoundly richer. And so looking at where Blue has come from changes how I see Blue now. A lot of the things that she does, a lot of the ways she is, a lot of the way that she wears this kind of cool and really unusual and kooky makeup, that’s either someone who loves makeup or that’s someone who’s trying to disguise herself. That’s either someone who’s really confident or someone who’s not confident at all with who she is.

And so suddenly, looking back at those first two seasons, I’m seeing a whole different reason for the way Blue is. And for me, that’s super exciting, and it’s super exciting having peeled back that layer to then question what happens next because she’s not the character we thought she was. Her backstory is such that you have to ask yourself whether she can continue to be part of NCIS. It’s a really complicated situation that we’ve uncovered, and what JD and Mackey do with that information is really key moving forward.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Before I get to that, though, how is Blue going forward after what happened, after the fact that now the others know about her past? That informs how she acts around and interacts with them, right?

That’s right. She’s forced to acknowledge that she has been, for a whole bunch of really good reasons, deceptive. She hasn’t told the truth. And when you fail to tell the truth to people that you love and respect, that impacts trust, right? It’s impossible not to feel, on some levels, betrayed by that. So, how does Blue even start to repair that breach in trust? And I think, as we’ll see, that’s a huge mountain to climb, but in finding NCIS, in finding herself where she is, for the first time in her entire life, she has found family. And that’s something, when you find it, that is worth fighting for.

That’s her arc moving forward, is discovering the thing that is, for the first time in her life, something that actually resonates like family, and she’s going to defend that discovery with her very life, I think.

Yeah, her “He’s family, too” about Doc when meeting her grandmother was such a good moment.

I’m glad you liked. It’s one of my favorites, too.

Speaking of her grandmother, are we going to see her again? Are we going to see Blue’s brother again? Are we going to hear about what’s going on with their relationship now that they’re both free of that cult?

The short answer is possibly, but the longer answer is, her brother has to deal with a few legal challenges. He’s not without some kind of complicity in what goes down in Episode 2, as you know, and so he won’t be popping up straight away.

But I think in a sort of broader sense, in terms of family, like I was saying before, the discovery of Blue’s backstory has actually made where Blue has ended up much more clearly a version of family for her than she’s ever experienced. So, I feel like the exploration of family for Blue will be, to a very large extent, seen through the lens of NCIS because as you say, she’s got a kind of grandfather figure in Doc, she’s got a mother and a father figure in Mackey and JD, she’s got siblings in Evie [Tuuli Narkle] and DeShawn [Sean Sagar] and increasingly Trigger [Claude Jabbour]. So, I feel really excited, and I know Marvournee does in the portrayal of Blue, she’s finally found her people, and that’s profound, and it will allow her to go to places that she felt unable to go to before that.

You brought up Mackey and JD, and they have that exchange at the end about how they’re the only ones who know that Blue’s an ex-felon. How do they feel about keeping that to themselves, and how is that going to blow up in their faces?

They feel conflicted, and it will, is the short answer. I mean, it’s like any mother and dad, right? You find out something about your kid, you’re like, “Oh, man, do we tell their brother and sisters? Do we tell the cousins? Do we tell a school teacher, or do we just try and keep this to ourselves and hope it goes away?” And back to the theme of Season 3, which is that you can’t outrun your past, here is an example of Mackey and JD deciding to actively try and outrun their past. Well, we know how that ends up — not well — so it will come back to roost, but for now they’re caught in that tricky situation where they’ve only just put it back, what do you do? You can’t throw her to the wolves. If Blue is feeling like, for the first time, she’s found her people, Mackey and JD feel the responsibility of having provided her with that, too. But yeah, you’re absolutely bang on. The chickens will come home to roost, that’s for sure.

Is there any possibility of any type of crossover whatsoever? Or might we just keep getting maybe mentions of characters from the other shows? Anything like that?

Look, never say never. It’s a really tricky one for us because we are kind of exotically poised in the southern hemisphere about as far from continental United States as you can get. But we are really mindful of how fun those crossovers are, and we’re kind of actively exploring all those possibilities. So I suppose watch this space is the best I can say without being coy.

Daniel Asher Smith/Paramount+

With this theme of you can’t on your past, we’ve talked about what’s going on with Mackey. We just had Blue face that. Who’s next up?

The truth of the matter is everyone in their own way gets their dose of that medicine. In a comedic sense, we’re talking about JD and his dating and sort of throwing himself back into that terrifying horror show of modern dating. It’s actually JD reacting to his past in a way that’s not genuinely authentic because he’s not actually acknowledging the elephant in the room. He’s trying to pretend the elephant’s not there. “What elephant? There’s no elephant here.” And so when that comes back to hit him, it’s going to smack him in the teeth, too. For Evie and DeShawn, deeper into the series, as the arc starts to solidify, we’ll discover that DeShawn is in possession of a piece of information that Mackey is not, but it pertains to Mackey.

From the JAG days?

Possibly, yeah. He’s made a whole bunch of decisions around what to do with that information, and history will be the judge as to whether those decisions have been right or not. But again, he has made the decision to try and outrun that information, and the information loads him down. So, everyone gets a taste of it across the season, which is really exciting. And it doesn’t feel forced or contrived, it’s just that’s the nature of being a human, isn’t it? If we’re not honest with where we’re at, eventually, where we’re at makes us honest one way or another.

NCIS: Sydney, Tuesdays, 10/9c, CBS