NCIS: Hawai’i’s story may be over, but some of its actors aren’t going anywhere, and in quite a weird way. The show was officially canceled earlier this year after 3 seasons, but the NCIS franchise lives on with the original show’s continuous long-standing run and two more spinoffs making their way to the screens quite soon.
Though characters’ shift from one show to another within the same universe is something normal on modern TV, the recent casting news regarding one of NCIS’ spinoffs isn’t what fans may have expected in this case at all.
Though NCIS: Hawai’i has been unfairly ditched, NCIS nonetheless gets more space to expand its universe by diving deeper into the main characters’ personal and professional stories.
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The franchise is officially set to release a separate series titled NCIS: Origins which will now revolve around the original show’s pivotal character, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, and his earlier years at NCIS back in the 1990s.
With Austin Stowell already being cast as a younger version of Gibbs, the upcoming show also got Patrick Fischler who’d landed the role of Cliff Walker ’s Gibbs’ boss and mentor.
There wouldn’t be any trouble in this if it wasn’t for the fact that Fischler had already appeared in the NCIS universe and, on top of that, he’d portrayed a completely different character. The actor made a brief appearance as Glen Smith in NCIS: Hawai’i’s first season, but his role isn’t one to be merely ignored.
Throughout the 14th episode of season 1, Smith works closely with the show’s leading character, Jane Tennant, and later on gives her a reason to reconsider her relationship with Maggie, Jane’s former mentor and friend.
Now that Patrick Fischler is officially coming back to the police procedural franchise, but in a different role, chances are that the actor who was seen playing two characters within the same universe may indeed cause some confusion among NCIS’ fans.
On top of that, Fischler is now set to appear in another timeline that takes viewers to much earlier times than the events of NCIS: Hawai’i, something that would certainly work if he was still to portray Glen Smith, but not someone else.
With all the fans that still associate Fischler with his NCIS: Hawai’i’s character, the show in fact risks willingly creating one more plot hole that will be difficult to turn a blind eye to.
