‘NCIS: Sydney’ Boss Breaks Down Season 2 Finale Cliffhanger & Teases What’s Next for Mackey, JD & More
It all comes down to money. The NCIS: Sydney Season 2 finale, which aired on Friday, April 25, revealed who’s been behind everything all this time, including putting that pacemaker Rankin (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) didn’t need in him, and it was someone close to Mackey (Olivia Swann).
Mackey went way back with Etienne (John Fabry), who was seemingly helping the team with their latest case, only for JD (Todd Lasance) to realize he’s the one who was going to make off with $1.7 billion; he made money building up international aid contracts following chaos in certain regions. Mackey, of course, took him down before he could blow up a plane. But what’s sure to have people talking over hiatus is whoever that woman is who was waiting for Blue (Mavournee Hazel) when she got home. She’d been looking for her. Below, showrunner Morgan O’Neill breaks down the finale and teases what’s ahead in Season 3.
How did you settle on who was behind everything? Were there any other possibilities you scrapped before landing on at Etienne and having it be someone with such a personal connection to Mackey?
Morgan O’Neill: Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. What we wanted to do was make sure that it wasn’t some sort of boogeyman that descended from the clouds that had no personal connection to any of our team. When we were coming up with the storylines, we wanted to make sure that in peeling back the layers of who did it, we were also peeling back the layers of our characters, of our family. And Mackey seemed the most obvious place to do that. And because she’s such a tough nut to crack and she plays her emotional cards so close to her chest, it just made sense for the one thing that got through her defenses, that it should be the one thing that might ultimately prove itself to be the big bad.
Look, here’s the thing. When we sat down to work out what the fight was going to be, we talked about what it would be like to fight someone to the death having just potentially been very intimate the night before. And so we got together with a fight choreographer and we worked out a fight sequence that was kind of bizarrely intimate given what was going on. Because if you think about it, it’s an unusual situation to find yourself in. You’ve opened yourself up emotionally the night before and then suddenly you discovered that the whole thing is an enormous betrayal. And so we designed the fight sequence and then we sat down with Olivia Swann, who plays Mackey, and we said, “So this is how we’re going to do it.” And she said, “Great, I’m going to do it all.” So every single thing you see in that fight sequence is Liv throwing it down. She trained for a month for that fight sequence and she absolutely kicked ass.
Olivia Swann as NCIS Special Agent Captain Michelle Mackey — ‘NCIS: Sydney’ Season 2 Finale “Sting in the Tail”
Daniel Asher Smith / Paramount+
How is Mackey doing at the end after all that? How has that changed her? Her in the cab … I felt so bad for her.
Yeah, look, that’s the thing, isn’t it? The last two episodes of Season 2 sort of plumbed a really interesting dynamic between she and JD because it was sort of hard to tell whether JD was reacting like he was because he was just hot and bothered and he was suffering from a little bit of mango madness or whether there was something more akin to jealousy that was going on that was fueling him. And as it turns out, he may have had cause to be concerned for Mackey’s choices there.
And so at the end of Episode 10, of the finale, I kind of feel bad for both of them. Mackey’s driving back in the cab on her own. There’s a very awkward encounter at the airport as they leave. And then JD goes back to his mate’s garage where he’s living his best life in a foldout bed surrounded by his mate’s junk. We really wanted to leave that big question mark hanging at the end of the season. These two guys who clearly have a strong affection for one another, certainly a strong professional connection, have really been put through the ringer a little bit, and hopefully like you, the audience feels for that dislocation at the very end.
Speaking of JD in the garage, I was going to ask what is it going to take for him to move out of that garage?
