Leroy Jethro Gibbs is the central character of NCIS, one of the longest running and most popular shows on network TV. It premiered in 2003, has just completed its 19th season. Gibbs is a Supervisory Special Agent and a former Marine sniper. He’s highly respected by his superiors and subordinates and seems to be almost legendary, at least in certain circles. I’m interested in three aspects of his characterization, that “point beyond the edge.”
What do I mean by that? That will emerge as we examine them: the mysterious woman, the boats in the basement, and Gibbs’ rules.
The Mysterious Woman
At the end of the first episode, as Gibbs is standing around, a woman pulls up in a silver Mercedes convertible. Gibbs gets into the car and they drive off. No one remarks about it, then or later. This happens throughout the first and second seasons and into the third. We never learn who she is.
What’s up?
We assume, more or less by default, that they have a sexual relationship. But we don’t actually know that. That she’s a redhead is one thing; we learn in the course of things that Gibbs likes redheads. That’s it.
That she’s in a Mercedes indicates that she’s got money. The Mercedes convertible is also a bit exotic. It’s a bit of a James Bond touch, though admittedly Bond favored sportier vehicles. But Gibbs is not a Bond kind of guy. Yes, they’re in the similar businesses, but Bond is a cosmopolitan urban sophisticate who favors bespoke suits while Gibbs is more mundane. We’ll eventually learn that he from a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. Bond jets all over the world while Gibbs stays mostly in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region, though he does travel to Mexico, Arizona, the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan as required. He does not don a Tuxedo to gamble in clubs peopled by wealthy folks and Eurotrash. It's almost as though that woman-in-the-Mercedes serves to tells that the Bond world exists, but this is not that. It is something else.
A blogger writing as hessd as an interesting take on this motif. That Gibbs is pursued by a wealthy woman establishes his sexual attractiveness without encumbering him with a relationship that might interfere with his job. As the show moves on he has affairs with other woman, an army colonel, a psychiatrist, a lawyer, and others, but nothing that becomes permanent.
Gibbs is offered as some kind of prototype of ideal masculinity, as is the somewhat different James Bond. As such, he has to be sexually attractive and active. This motif is a way of achieving that. But it only lasted into the third season. On the one hand it’s not the sort of they could have gone on forever. One the other hand, things did change in the third season. NCIS got a new director, an attractive redhead names Jenny Shepard. We learn that in the past Gibbs and Shepard we agents together and had had a torrid affair. Every so often we’d get flashbacks to that affair, but, in the present, their relationship we professional and free of sexual complication. After two or three seasons – I forget exactly – Shepard is killed and the show comes up with other women to keep us aware of Gibbs’ sexual heat.
The boat in the basement
I don’t know when we first went down into Gibbs’ basement, but I assume it was relatively early in the first season. There we see an upturned hull of a sailing vessel supported on sawhorses. At first it’s just the keel and ribs, but in time planking is added. How is he ever going to get it out of the basement? It’s much too large to go up the steps.
Every so often someone will ask Gibbs about that. He just smiles and shrugs it off. It’s a mystery.
Gibbs goes down there to think while he works on the boat, generally sanding or planning. He pours some bourbon into a mug, offering his visitor the same. And they talk, about the case, or perhaps about life. Whatever.
Though Gibbs is working for the navy, albeit in a civilian capacity, he shows no particular interest in the sea or sailing. Sometime a case will take him aboard a ship, but we never see in sailing about in the kind of boat he’s building.
At some point the first hull disappears, without comment, to be replaced by another somewhat different hull, one for a small motor launch. Then the boats disappear entirely and Gibbs builds other stuff.
What’s up?
Whatever else is going on, this is a device for displaying Gibbs’ love of craftsmanship and carpentry. He does it for the activity itself, not to achieve some practical end, though occasionally he will build something for a specific purpose, such as the ornamented coffin he built for his friend, colleague, and mentor Mike Franks. Some people meditate; Gibbs crafts boats, coffins, and other things.
I suppose woodworking also contrasts with the high-tech world of crime fighting, from the cell phones (which Gibbs hates), to the computers, to the lab equipment. Agent McGee is an MIT graduate with excellent computer skills and Abby Sciuto handles all the laboratory instrumentation. But Gibbs is an old-fashioned guy who likes woodworking with hand tools.
Gibbs’ rules
And then we have Gibbs’ rules, a running motif in the show. If you do a search on “Gibb’s rules” you’ll get multiple hits, like this one. Some of them seem specific to the job – Never Let Suspects Stay Together, Never Get Personally Involved on a Case – others are more general – You Don't Waste Good, Never accept an apology from someone who has just sucker punched you. There doesn’t seem to be any particularly logical order to them. It’s a more or less arbitrary list.
Apparently #91 is the highest number mentioned so far: When you decide to walk away, don't look back. But there are many numbers without rules attached to them, e.g., 17, 19, 21, 24, 25, etc. Only 35 rules have been mentioned so far. (I’ve only watched the 15 seasons available on Netflix, so I’ve not encountered all that have been revealed.)
Gibbs’s agents are supposed to learn the rules. Every once in a while you’ll see one of them write one down. Occasionally someone, not necessarily Gibbs, will mention a rule by number only.
I suppose the central point is that these are Gibbs’s rules. No one else gets to have them. They establish the world as his world. The fact that they don’t exist in any logical order or structure, yet they are numbered, suggest they radically open-ended nature of this world. It is not logical and orderly – it is, after all, a world structured by crime, terrorism, and war.
* * * * *
Addendum, 1.8.22: In S16, E13, “She,” near the end, Gibbs opens a small file box where he apparently keeps slips of paper with his rules on. He takes out the slip for rule 10, Never Get Personally Involved on a Case, and tosses it in the fire (in his fireplace). This is in response reading Ziva David’s old personal notes about a case that then team had just solved. It seems that Ziva had kept a private office which she rented in a small building and kept personal notes on every case she’d worked on.
What have we got?
Any fictional world is going to imply things that we do not see actually happening. But these three motifs – the mysterious woman, the boat in the basement, Gibbs’ rules – serve explicitly to point beyond what we see on screen. Though I’ve not thought this through, nothing else in NCIS works like this, nor have I seen anything quite like it in any other show I’ve watched. Of course, there any many shows I haven’t watched. Any or several of them do this sort of thing, I wouldn’t be surprised. But I’d be curious.
I wonder what role, if any, these motifs play in the show’s popularity. More likely, they tell us something about the show that is central to its appeal. What?
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