r/NCIS • u/spooky-spacegirl • 1d ago
NCIS Jenny
Jenny has always been my favorite character, even with all her flaws. I always felt like it was a huge tragedy for Jenny to have been written the way she was, particularly in season 4. I’m sure the writers strike during her time on the show lended to the loss of direction with her character, but even before that it seemed like the writers were loosing their sense of direction with her.
My question is, had there been more consistency with her character (and with Lauren Holly staying longer, of course) do you think she would have been a truly viable love interest for Gibbs?
It always felt like such a tragedy that there was some very real chemistry between them, and it always made me sad that, as Mike put it, her last stand was to protect Gibbs. Her major flaws aside, I think her character genuinely viewed Gibbs as the love of her life (obviously just my interpretation, totally get if anyone disagrees).
Anyway, thoughts?
[Edit: it’s a hard life defending when your favorite character is horrendously written but someone’s gotta do it]
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u/chickenwings19 1d ago
I found her character mostly annoying.
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u/radiodreading 1d ago
Same. The whole La Grenoiulle arc was a chore but the more she got obsessed with it and him and the more reckless she got, the more I couldn't stand her. (Maybe mostly because of how she used Tony to get what she wanted. Poor guy. And poor Jeanne.)
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u/spooky-spacegirl 1d ago
I think the older I get (I was still a kid during Jenny’s run) I definitely see how glaring her flaws are, and I think I’m starting to realize that I just like Lauren Holly and maybe not Jenny herself
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u/LadyLovesRoses 1d ago
Not at all. Gibbs had one love and no one could ever capture his heart like Shannon.
I didn’t care for Jenny at all and was relieved when her character was gone. She was annoying.
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u/spooky-spacegirl 1d ago
I have such mixed feelings on Gibbs and his love life post Shannon. On the one hand, Shannon was the great love of his life. On the other hand, his character is/was very much deserving of a second chance of happiness, though at the same time I get that that undercurrent of tragedy in him is what made his character who he was.
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u/AllBlueTeams 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think by Season 4 they had probably committed (or nearly so) to Gibbs never having another true love. The Hiatus 2-parter that ended S3 solidified the tragic nature of Kelly's Shannon's death and how much she meant to him compared to every wife and love interest since. Jenny was arguably better suited to Gibbs than many of the others who came after Kelly Shannon, but he was destined to be a tragic loner character in matters of romance.
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u/gonzotek77 1d ago
I loved her,and think that most of the hate she gets is because is a woman
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u/Maleficent-Prior-219 3h ago
What a lazy ass over simplification....I guess it had to be misogyny and the patriarchy, not shitty writing that couldn't capture the nuances of a women in a extremely powerful position.
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u/Ninja108Zelda 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think some of the issues with the Jenny character came from the fact she wasn't supposed to be on as long as she was so the writers were already trying to come up with stuff for someone who wasn't supposed to be a long term character.
Throw in the writer's strike and you end up with a poorly written character.
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u/Frosty_Astronomer909 21h ago
And the fact she was upset with the removal of Belisario.
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u/Ninja108Zelda 10h ago
Which I know she got mad at Mark Harmon for, even though Harmon was really speaking on behalf of virtually everyone else who had gotten tired of Belisario's management style.
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u/AffectionateGold5459 1d ago
Didn’t they change showrunners in there too? If I remember from the time, there were several BTS reasons for the mess her character became.
I always loved her. It always fascinated me that Gibbs protected her, even above his team. I think if he was ever going to move on, it would have been with her. And frankly, maybe if he was less endlessly tortured I would have liked him better by the end.
Jenny had a lot of flaws, her obsession being one of them. I never held the Tony mission against her like some did. I think she genuinely thought he was capable of being an agent like her and Gibbs and when she figured out he wasn’t, he was in too deep. She wasn’t giving his role in the mission up to protect his feelings. She really did believe in his capabilities and potential though.
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u/Old_Damage_95 1d ago
No, I never could. I deeply dislike Jenny for multiple reasons, but the biggest two was forcing Ziva, who had helped to orchestra Cate's murder, into the hole that had been made by said murder and the La Grenouille debacle.
Ziva wrote the team profiles for Ari, so she knew about the murder of Gibbs' family and knew that the women in his life would be a prime weakness for him, and told Ari this. She admits this to Gibbs in the lab after she's introduced. It comes out later that Ziva was under orders to kill Ari so that Gibbs would feel indebted to her, allowing her a way in that would leave her supervisor unsuspicious and therefore less interested in keeping her under strict monitoring, but Jenny didn't have to agree to it. She should've had better sense than to give another agency that level of access or power over her, especially as someone who's working at an agency director level.
I know it was intentionally written that way to bring Cote into the series, but it's an awful idea that never made any sense to me. Placing a liaison officer on an investigative team is absurd, not to mention it leaves every case open to potential acquittal by having an untrained international spy handling case evidence in the place of what should be a trained federal agent. The show made it clear that Ziva was trained otj instead of attending FLETC, but then I'd imagine FLETC wasn't something available to someone who's not a citizen.
It also gave her very questionable access to information that another country's spy agency just shouldn't have. If they were going to have her anywhere, she should've been in a heavily monitored position in counter terrorism on a joint task force between the two agencies maybe, but with limited intelligence access. I can't imagine any other country giving a US agent the kind of access that Ziva had.
The other issue is the La Grenouille issue. The entire plot line of having an agent working under cover with zero back up while also working his day job is beyond absurd, it's egregious. One crime scene where Tony was investigating and Jeanne happened to walk and see him would've been enough to blow his cover. Anyone following Tony for 24 hrs under orders from her father would've been enough to blow his cover, which is what happened. Again, anyone working at director level should've had better sense than to have an agent do this. With as fast and loose as Gibbs could be with the actual rules and revenge, she would've been able to work something out with him about getting vengeance.
The show wrote the first woman director as an obsessive woman so desperate for revenge she made bad decisions from the start. The whole mess left it impossible for me to see her as a romantic possibility for Gibbs, much less like her at all. I like the idea of what she could've been, but not her.
Had they left off those two points, I think it could've been a really interesting story. Gibbs dealing with the woman who was the reason for rule 12 in charge of him could've been great had they not made her an absurd character from the very first.
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u/spooky-spacegirl 1d ago
Oh gosh, I had completely forgotten that she was the reason behind rule 12.
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u/No-Mistake7860 11h ago
I like Jenny for a short time. But I just got tired of every time her and Gibbs we’re talking they will always do that flash vaccine of them in Paris like we get it they hooked up in Paris while on a case you don’t have to constantly remind us
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u/Maleficent-Prior-219 4h ago
Worst fuckin Director ever...its was painful how she couldn't get outta of her own way....and all that "Hey Gibbs, remember when we use to fuck" nonsense was absurd...especially when in the next breath your demanding respect...SMH.
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u/Elbereth919 1d ago
I liked Jenny in theory, but I definitely think she was a casualty of the writers not knowing how to write women, especially women in positions of power. The writer’s strike didn’t help, as you mentioned, because we never got to see the end of her father’s story which might have helped explain some of her more bizarre actions.
As for Gibbs being the love of her life, yes, I think he was. It makes me think of Diane telling Gibbs that he was her Shannon. Perhaps Gibbs was the great love of many of his former partners’ lives. I don’t think what they showed on Origins so far really supports that statement of Diane’s, so I’m really hoping we get to see Jenny on Origins eventually and see the beginning of their relationship.