The seaplane came for them in Naktok Bay, Alaska, and Tim McGee was ready to go home. Gibbs wasn’t.
They had spent the afternoon fly fishing, with Gibbs talking more than he usually did—about his father, his childhood, and finding a personal rhythm. “It’s about progress, not perfection,” he told McGee. McGee missed the hint. Then the plane touched down on the water, and Gibbs said it plainly.
“I’m not going back, Tim. I’m not going back home.” He explained that he hadn’t felt this kind of peace since Shannon and Kelly died, and he wasn’t ready to let it go.
That was “Great Wide Open,” Season 19, Episode 4 of NCIS, on October 11, 2021. It was Mark Harmon’s last episode as a series regular.
It was also his 418th. From the pilot “Yankee White” on September 23, 2003, all the way to that gravel bank in Alaska, Harmon was credited in every single episode. He never missed one. Then he chose to stay behind.
It Started as a Pitch on Another Show
Gibbs didn’t start on NCIS. He walked onto JAG in April 2003, in a two-part story called “Ice Queen” and “Meltdown,” which was really a pitch for a new series. Five months later it was a series, and Harmon was the lead.
People tend to remember it as an instant hit. Harmon doesn’t. “I think people think that that show just jumped out, it was a hit right off, and it wasn’t,” he told TV Insider in 2025. “It took years to develop that.”
It got those years. Gibbs led the team for 18 full seasons and four episodes of a 19th, through the head slaps, the rules, the basement boat and the coffee, and through more cast changes than most shows ever have. Harmon was the center of all of it.
The Number That Gets Away From People
Search for his episode count and you’ll probably see 435. It’s everywhere, including his Wikipedia filmography, and it isn’t made up. It just isn’t counting the right thing.
After Gibbs stayed in Alaska, Harmon stayed in the Season 19 opening credits for the rest of the season. The season finale was the show’s 435th episode. That’s 418 episodes with Gibbs in them and 17 where only his name appears. So 435 counts his billing. 418 counts the times you actually saw him.
The real Gibbs total is higher than 418 anyway, because he traveled. Besides the two JAG episodes, he showed up four times on NCIS: New Orleans. He was a voice on the phone for Dwayne Pride in “Breaking Brig” in 2014. He came for the crossovers “Sister City, Part II” in 2016 and “Pandora’s Box, Part II” in 2017. And in the 2018 premiere “See You Soon,” he gave LaSalle advice over a video call while Pride fought for his life.
Never Count Him Out
The goodbye in Alaska didn’t have a funeral or a farewell party. It was a man who didn’t get on a plane, which fit Gibbs perfectly. Harmon later said the path the character took was “honest,” and he added a detail fans held onto: Gibbs was “not retired.”
Showrunner Steven D. Binder gave fans a line that stuck, too. “Never count Leroy Jethro Gibbs out.”
Harmon never left the building, either. He stayed on as an executive producer, so his name kept appearing on the show long after his face stopped appearing in it.
A Voice in the Dark, Then a Man at the Fire
In 2024, Gibbs came back in a way nobody had quite pictured. NCIS: Origins went back to 1991 and Camp Pendleton, with Austin Stowell as the young agent. Harmon became the voice of the older man looking back, and he narrates every episode. He also made a brief appearance in the pilot, still alone in Alaska.
He takes the narration seriously. He says he goes in “every 10 days” or so to record it, because that keeps him “physically involved.” He also likes to point out that the prequel’s co-showrunner, David J. North, started on the original show getting coffee and worked his way up to writer.
The next on-screen return almost didn’t happen. For the 2025 Veterans Day crossover, North and co-showrunner Gina Lucita Monreal planned to open their hour with old clips of Harmon. Then they thought about how much Gibbs loves dogs and wrote him a new scene instead. North said Harmon’s answer was, “Let’s do it. Let’s rock and roll.”
So in “Funny How Time Slips Away,” on November 11, 2025, Gibbs rode out a snowstorm in his cabin with a stray dog, fed it from his dinner and told it a story about a case from the ’90s. It was quiet, and it was very Gibbs. Harmon explained his yes simply: it “seemed like a good time to check in with him.”
Asked whether he’d be back on screen again, he gave the most Gibbs answer possible: “I don’t know… So we’ll see.”
Salmon, Fresh From Alaska
The flagship show had its own way of keeping him close. It mostly didn’t show him.
In May 2026, the man tied to Director Vance’s death, on his way into witness protection, was killed by a sniper shot from 4,500 feet. Not many people could make that shot. In the last scene, Parker cooked his sister salmon “fresh from Alaska.” Gibbs never appeared on camera, but nobody watching had any doubt. Binder said the return “had to be worthy,” and protecting his family was “about as worthy as it gets.”
He also explained why the show had kept Gibbs offscreen. “I don’t want to think of Gibbs living in an apartment in Anchorage,” Binder said. He wanted him out in the woods, fishing, a little larger than life.
Then His Past Came Looking for Him
This fall, the peace finally ended. The Origins Season 3 premiere on October 6, 2026 opened in the present day. Gibbs was walking outside his cabin when a bullet hit him in the chest. One of the two gunmen checked his pulse, found nothing and said, “One down, one to go.”
Gibbs had slowed his heart on purpose with an old Marine breathing trick. He got up, stitched himself closed and loaded his sniper rifle. “Time to get to work,” he said.
A week later, in “My Own Worst Enemy,” he left Alaska behind and asked his old friend Woody (Bobby Moynihan) to run a fingerprint he’d lifted from his own neck. Woody couldn’t get to the file. Only the director of NCIS could, and these days that’s Tony DiNozzo. Their first scene together in ten years airs October 20, 2026, and we covered what “Copy that, boss” means now.
Harmon is slated for all ten episodes this season, the biggest stretch of Gibbs since 2021. The man who wouldn’t get on the plane is heading back to the Navy Yard.
The Ghosts He Went Looking For
Off screen, Harmon has been chasing a different kind of history.
Ghosts of Honolulu, which he wrote with Leon Carroll Jr., came out on November 14, 2023. Carroll is a former NCIS special agent who served as the show’s technical adviser for 20 seasons. The book tells the true story of Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, the Japanese spy sent to watch the fleet at Pearl Harbor before the attack.
Harmon said he felt “compelled” to tell the real story of what became NCIS, about agents who served their whole careers without anyone knowing their names. “And now that story gets told,” he said. “All because of a TV show.”
If you want more of the man behind the badge, we told Mark Harmon’s story before Gibbs, and how the 2025 crossover came together.
The Count, for the Record
NCIS: 418 episodes, 2003 to 2021
JAG: 2 episodes, April 2003
NCIS: New Orleans: 4 episodes, 2014 to 2018
NCIS: Origins: the 2024 pilot, the 2025 crossover and every episode of Season 3 so far, plus the narration of every episode
That puts his total at 428 on-screen appearances, climbing with every Tuesday night this fall. The numbers tell the story of one of TV’s longest, most disciplined runs. But the defining image will always be the seaplane taxiing away without him—and the peace he found that the world just won’t let him keep.
