NCIS: Sydney Finally Set Up Introducing Mackey’s Son, But I'm Stressing Out About Why

Warning: SPOILERS for the NCIS: Sydney episode “Berthed” are ahead!

During the NCIS: Sydney Season 2 premiere, Olivia Swann’s Michelle Mackey shared with Todd Lasance’s Jim Dempsey that she has a teenaged son. I’ve been waiting for the show to bring the now-18-year-old Trey since then, and the groundwork has finally been laid for that to happen in Season 3. However, the circumstances in which this will happen on the 2026 TV schedule are less than ideal.

To be fair, we’ve known since last October that Trey would appear in NCIS: Sydney when TV Insider reported that Noah Eid was cast in the role. Now the events of “Berthed” have set up Trey entering the picture sometime in the coming weeks. Both last week in “Van Life” and this week, we saw Mackey looking at a picture of her and Trey that she keeps in a drawer at her desk. Unfortunately, that picture has been stolen by masked men.

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This all started when the doors at the NCIS Sydney headquarters started acting up as the team was investigating the death of a U.S. Naval officer who just learned he was going to be a father (you can learn how that case unfolded by streaming “Berthed” with your Paramount+ subscription). Everyone was having trouble using their key cards to open the doors, and Evie and DeShawn’s computers were indexing for over an hour, so Bluebird Gleeson looked into the issues.

As she was doing so the evening the case wrapped up, the aforementioned masked men broke into the headquarters, and one of them held Blue at gunpoint. Thankfully, Trigger arrived just in the nick of time to lay a beating on the other guy, but the intruders escaped when Blue managed to activate the alarm. When Mackey, JD, Evie and DeShawn came back to the building, Blue informed them that she discovered someone hacked into their security system to look for something in their internal servers. So when they couldn’t find it remotely, those men came to look for it “the old-fashioned way,” and that’s when Mackey discovered her picture was missing.

This can’t be good, and the immediate implication to me is that the picture was taken so that whoever’s behind this can track down Trey and kidnap him. I’m certain this has to do with Mackey learning in “Lost in Translation” that she’d been a target of the late assassin known as The Ghost. Then at the end of “South of Nowhere,” Rankin implied that the U.S. government, or at least a rogue party within it, put her on the kill list. So are the people who have it out for Mackey now planning to use Trey against her?

Next Tuesday, the first half of the NCIS: Sydney two-parter “Lone Wolf” airs on CBS at 10 p.m. ET. While there’s been no mention of Trey appearing in either episode, I will not be surprised if this plot thread is revisited soon. Keep visiting CinemaBlend for more Sydney Season 3 coverage.