NCIS: Origins star offers fresh update after shocking ‘character death’

There may still be hope for NCIS: Origins fans, after the season finale ended with a heartbreaking final shot of Special Agent Lala Dominguez’s (played by Mariel Molino) seemingly lifeless body hanging upside down in her car following a fiery crash.

Now, days after the episode shocked viewers, Mariel shared that she has been given no update on Lala’s future, and that she is not even sure if Lala is dead or alive.

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Lala’s return

“Oh man…. I hope she comes back. I hope that she’s alive,” she told TV Line at CBS Fest on May 7. 

“NCIS has taken big swings before with characters and their futures, so it’s tough to say,” she added, before asking fans to turn on those candles and pray, please!”

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The scene showed Lala on her way to tell Leroy Gibbs (Austin Stowell) that Lara Macy (Claire Berger) had agreed to drop the investigation into Pedro Hernandez’s murder, letting Gibbs off the hook.

Mark Harmon, who originated the role of Gibbs, is the narrator of the show and his final words over the scene were: “She was coming to tell me she had saved me. I would only find out later what she did for me. But that’s not what made me love her. I loved her all along. I still do.”

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Showrunner statement

Showrunner David J. North has also teased that we may not have seen the last of Lala, as he told TV Insider that they always planned on taking “big swings”.

“Mariel, the whole cast knew what we were doing, that we were going to take big swings and they just show up every day and are willing to do the work at an exceptional level,” he shared.

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What is NCIS Origins?

Origins follows a young Leroy Gibbs in the early 1990s, just starting his career at the fledgling NCIS Camp Pendleton office. The series, which airs on CBS, also features Kyle Schmid as a young agent Mike Franks, a proud Texan patriot who befriends Gibbs and helped him to become an agent himself.

It is a spin-off of NCIS, which is still running on CBS and just concluded season 22. The long-running CBS procedural began with Mark as Agent Gibbs, but he left in 2021.

It details the experiences and stories of a team of special agents working for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), the main federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of the Navy.

Sean Murray as NCIS Senior Field Agent Timothy McGee, Brian Dietzen as Dr. Jimmy Palmer, and Wilmer Valderrama as NCIS Special Agent Nicholas Torres now lead the show.