Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Sydney episode “Sting in the Tail” are ahead!
NCIS: Sydney Season 2 has finished its run on the 2025 TV schedule, and the finale saw the long-awaited emergence this season’s big bad and the team foiling their sinister scheme. But “Sting in the Tail” didn’t end on an entirely happy note, partly because when Mavournee Hazel’s Bluebird Gleeson returned to her home, there was a woman waiting for her inside whom she clearly wasn’t glad to see. Needless to say that NCIS: Sydney Season 3 will follow up on this, and I’m intrigued by showrunner Morgan O’Neill’s teasing statements about this shakeup in Blue’s life.
In an interview with TVLine covering the events of the Season 2 finale, O’Neill was unsurprisingly unwilling to disclose any specific details about the woman in Blue’s flat.However, he was willing to rule out that is more than just her estranged mother, saying:
Yeah, it’s way bigger than that’s her mother she didn’t get along with. I promise you that. If you go back through Season 2 and concentrate on Blue’s character a little bit…
Just like Morgan O’Neill promised to me when I interviewed him ahead of NCIS: Sydney Season 2’s premiere, we finally started to learn about Blue’s past. First in “Shucked,” she shared with Doc Rosie that she doesn’t know her real birthday. Then in “Breathless,” it was indicated that Blue had, as O’Neill put it, “some kind of profound understanding of this coercive controlled relationship” the singer Nova had with her father.
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It would seem that this woman who managed to get into Blue’s flat while she was away is somehow tied to the forensic scientist’s dark past. When TVLine’s Matt Mitovich pointed out how Bluebird has a lot of locks on her door, O’Neill continued:
All the locks on the door. The fact that she doesn’t want to be photographed when she was going to the concert, the fact that she has no digital footprint, the fact that she asks Doc on the pier up in Darwin, when they get back to Sydney, whether he can take a look at some stuff for her in a professional way. There’s a lot of breadcrumbing when this happens, and obviously, this woman is, in some ways, the combination of all of those breadcrumbs.
The only reason this woman was able to find Blue was because she was shown in a photograph for a newspaper article about a man who caught a $1 million barramundi using Doc Rosie’s fishing rod. That apparently was enough to pinpoint Blue’s location, with the woman saying to her, “Been looking for you.” The youngest member of NCIS: Sydney’s main lineup of characters could only stand there with a shocked expression before the episode cut to black.
Earlier in the interview, Mitovich speculated that the woman is part of a “shady hacker gang” that Bluebird used to be part of, but O’Neill would not confirm or deny this. What he did say was that that there will be an “absolute cracking episode early on in Season 3 where all those questions are answered.” He also said that there will be a time jump between Seasons 2 and 3 (unlike how Season 2 picked up right where Season 1 ended), but it won’t be “very much later on.”
While NCIS and NCIS: Origins are expected to return in the fall, which is also when we can expect the debut of the Paramount+-exclusive series NCIS: Tony & Ziva, it’s hard to say when NCIS: Sydney Season 3 will be released on the same streaming platform and CBS. Whenever that does happen though, it’s good to know that the mystery of Bluebird Gleeson will be solved relatively quickly rather than dragged on.