Things You Forgot Happened In NCIS Season 1

This entry is really for fans who have been with NCIS since the very beginning. No, we're not talking about "Yankee White," the first episode of season one  — we're going all the way back to "Ice Queen," the episode of the legal drama JAG, which first introduced Gibbs (Mark Harmon), Abby (Pauley Perrette), Tony (Michael Weatherly), and Ducky (David McCallum). The characters appeared on two episodes of JAG that served as a backdoor pilot for NCIS, which was conceived as an investigative crime drama series in the same universe. 

Vivian "Viv" Blackadder (Robyn Lively) was a former FBI agent, with an incredible name, who was working for NCIS before the events of the first season. In the two backdoor pilot episodes, Viv was shown to be a determined, but clumsy, agent. She joined the Naval Criminal Investigative Service after her brother, a Navy Officer, was killed during the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, and her desire to get revenge on the people responsible clouded her judgment. In the JAG episode "Meltdown," she and Gibbs are closing in on a high profile suspect when Viv blows their cover due to her inability to be inconspicuous. The mission is still salvaged, but she has clearly earned the ire of Gibbs. 

Despite being a central player during the backdoor pilot, the character of Viv never made the leap to the main series. According to an oral history of NCIS on TV Insider, series co-creator Dan Bellisario thought, "Lively was 'too soft,'" and decided to nix her from the show.