Tonight on CBS NCIS: ORIGINS returns with an all-new Tuesday, November 11, 2025, season 2 episode 5 called, “Funny How Time Slips Away”,” and we have your weekly NCIS: ORIGINS recap below.
In tonight’s NCIS: ORIGINS season 2 episode 5 called “Funny How Time Slips Away”,” as per the CBS synopsis, “When a naval officer mysteriously dies in the ‘90s, Gibbs (Austin Stowell) and the team travel to the small dust-blown town of Serenity, Calif.
Where they encounter secret-harboring residents, an uncooperative sheriff and an investigation that will reverberate for decades”
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In tonight’s NCIS:ORIGINS episode, Gibbs put in three decades towards the job. Yet, the Gibbs of 2025 couldn’t help thinking about the past. He remembered all of them.
This included the ones he never mentioned before. Like Lala. Gibbs said that thirty years goes by faster than you like to think and he wasn’t wrong. Gibbs remembered this one case back in the 90s. He was still a probie at the time. They got called to a small town named Serenity. Mary Jo thought the name was sweet. It turns out that place was full of secrets.
They got called to the scene of an accident. Or what they first believed was an accident. There was a car that got hit by a train and the car was registered to retired Chief Petty Officer Louis Burke. It was believed that the car was empty because the train did so much damage to that little vehicle that they only had half of it left.
They had the back half. It was important to know that because the front half where the driver is wasn’t found and so their assumption the car was empty was also wrong. Gibbs later found a detached arm hidden under car part.
The arm had a watch on it. The Sheriff of that town said that watch was the one Louis liked to wear. Odds are that Louis didn’t survive the severed arm if he got hit by that rain. They felt sure of that and it was confirmed later on when they found more parts of the victim. They also had witnesses. The witnesses weren’t at the scene.
They all ran off to the church. They went there because what they saw was so disturbing that they needed God’s help to make it through. They all told similar stories. They saw Louis’s car on the tracks. They tried to warn him to drive off.
Louis ignored all of them. He stayed on the road. He wanted to get hit. The town was in agreement that Louis killed himself. Gibbs and the others were wrapping up the interviews when he stopped by the local goods store. The one his own father ran in their small town looked just like it. He ran into a pregnant woman there.
He asked about the beer. There was a can of beer in Louis’s car and the woman said he always bought beer in the morning. He buys it before going home to drink it alone. This time was unusual because he asked the pregnant lady if she picked out any names and he wasn’t normally one for questions. Or chit chat.
The woman’s husband then came into the store. He had found the photos that Gibbs dropped when he found the arm. Gibbs asked him where he found them and he then went out into the storm to get the rest of the photos. That’s when he found the car door. There was a bloody print on it that indicated someone pushed the car onto the tracks. The whole town was lying. Louis didn’t kill himself. He was dead before he was pushed in front of a train. They found enough body parts to send back to the medical examiner and he died of a gunshot wound to the heart.
It made them curious why the whole town would lie about what they saw that day. They looked into Louis. He got thrown out of the military for hazing. He was a bully and he wasn’t going to stop. Someone came to NIS headquarters. His name was Jimmy Wallace. He said that Louis got what was coming to him.
Louis liked attacking people. He mentioned that everyone of Serenity lived in fear of him. This goes for Sheriff Mulligan as well. They all tried to stay out of the man’s way until he attacked Jimmy’s grandfather.
The poor man was elderly. He was known as Grandpa Dom because everyone loved him. Louis took a bat to back of Grandpa Dom’s skull. He never saw it coming and now he was in a coma. Jimmy was still with his grandfather at the hospital when he heard about Louis’s death.
He couldn’t see why NIS was investigating because whoever killed Louis did the whole town a favor. Gibbs even took the Sheriff to task because he agreed that something should have been done. Just not murder The Sheriff had one job and he didn’t do it. He couldn’t protect his town from one person.
Gibbs had a book full of victims and he’s only been on the job a year.
The forensics team eventually found a fingerprint on the gear shift. They were going to take prints from the whole town if it meant they found their killer, but someone confessed before that happened. Sheriff Mulligan said he killed Louis Burke and he offered NIS the murder weapon. It didn’t make sense.
The Sheriff was clearly in fear of the guy like everyone else. It didn’t seem plausible that he would suddenly grow a backbone to kill someone. Much less confess to it. And the last part sounded like a false confession.
NIS was forced to arrest some meth heads earlier for messing with their car. One of them mentioned that the Sheriff missed out with a with little birdie. Who’s this woman? The Sheriff downplayed it right before copping to murder charge and that could mean she’s important. It was Gibbs who cracked the case.
He stayed behind as everyone else left and he noticed that goods store fixed their window. It was called Birdie’s. Lainey Sims was called Birdie. The Sheriff was in love with her and it was her that killed Louis.
She has a registered gun. She was expecting a baby and probably feared Louis. She also probably shot him through the front window of her store. Only there will be no talking to her.
She left town with her husband. No one will say where they went. The Sheriff was sticking to his story and he invoked his right to counsel. This case was over. There was nothing to break Mulligan and Franks visited yearly until he died.
Mulligan always stuck to his story.
THE END!