The Real Reason Mark Harmon's Gibbs Doesn't Lock His Front Door In NCIS

Mark Harmon sits in his living room as Leroy Jethro Gibbs in NCIS

CBS

There are all different kinds of living spaces in this great big world of ours, but it’s fair to say that most homes, regardless of type, have a front door. In many cases, this is the most frequently passed threshold in your abode, but depending on the size of your home and how it’s situated, you may use other entries more often. For those who drive to and from work every day, the garage door is likely to receive the most foot traffic. If you live in an upscale apartment building, the elevator door may also be your front door. And if you reside in stately Wayne Manor, it’s the Batcave all day, every day, unless you’re having company.

As you likely know, there are several important features of a front door: e.g. the knob, the peephole, and, of course, the hinges. But the most vital feature of a front door might very well be the lock. In a perfect world, we would love and trust all of humanity, but there are people out there who, driven by desperation or just plain amorality, want to come waltzing through our front door without knocking. Whether they mean to swipe our brand new state-of-the-art 8-track player or do us harm like Dick and Perry did to the Clutter family, we know we don’t want them in our house. Hence, we lock that front door and hope they aren’t good with windows.

As someone who grew up in a small town before living in two of the biggest cities in the world (New York City and Los Angeles), I can tell you that many folks in cozy little cities are pretty lax about locking up their homes. I’ve seen Brian Bertino’s “The Strangers” too many times to ever leave so much as a window unlatched again. You’d think a veteran lawman like Mark Harmon’s Leroy Jethro Gibbs on “NCIS” would be a major proponent of locking your front door, but no. Throughout Harmon’s 19-season run, Gibbs, who lives somewhere in the Washington D.C. metro area, made a habit of never locking the main entrance to his house. Fans eventually figured out there was a reason for this, and though it was never stated in an episode, there was. And it’s probably going to bum you out.

Gibbs’ indifference to home security is driven by grief

Mark Harmon as Leroy Jethro Gibbs converses with his dog Lucy in NCIS

CBS

On a June 24, 2024 episode of the podcast “Off Duty: An NCIS Rewatch” hosted by series stars Michael Weatherley (Anthony DiNozzo) and Cote de Pablo (Ziva David), the latter revealed Gibbs’ rationale for leaving his front door locked. It wasn’t because he harbored a dream of shooting an intruder dead in his living room, and it wasn’t a religious thing where he viewed his home as a church where all are welcome. It also wasn’t because he adopted Lucy the dog.

No, Gibbs’ reasoning had to do with the stateside murder of his wife and daughter while he was serving in Desert Storm. According to David, “The answer is because he has already lost what was most important to him, so he actually doesn’t care.”

Gibbs carried this grief around with him for almost the entire run of “NCIS,” but he finally achieved peace of mind upon moving to Alaska at the end of the fourth episode of season 19. The full impact of Gibbs’ loss was dramatized during the first season of “NCIS: Origins,” where we see him go through a crashing wave of emotions upon being informed of his family’s demise so far away from home. That’s a brutal thing to process anywhere, but in the confines of a combat zone? I’d be so busted up that I’d leave my front door unlocked and never close my garage door again for the rest of my life. I bet you’d do the same.