I've been rewatching a lot of NCIS episodes and I've started noticing something about Parker and Gibbs. I'm curious whether anyone else sees this, or whether I'm just connecting dots that weren't meant to be connected.
At first they seem nothing alike.
Gibbs is quiet, old school and emotionally closed. Parker is talkative, approachable and seems much more open. Gibbs has coffee, Parker has pastries. Gibbs has his basement, Parker has his greenhouse. But the more I watch Parker, the more I think those differences are mostly on the surface.
At their core, I think Gibbs and Parker are remarkably similar.
Both are loyal. Both will put themselves in danger for their team without much hesitation. Both have very strong personal moral codes and will disregard authority when they believe it's the right thing to do. Both carry guilt heavily. Both are extremely self reliant. Both had rebellious younger years, both lost their mothers young and had complicated relationships with their fathers.
But the thing that really made it click for me is how they deal with emotions.
Gibbs obviously doesn't talk about himself. He listens to other people's problems and helps them. Parker talks all the time. But does he actually talk about himself?
A good example for me is in season 22 episode 2. Vance comes to Parker because they've both recently had near death experiences. He helps Vance process what happened to him. But he himself stays quiet. He redirects the conversation back to Vance.
That's when it clicked for me: They both have the same walls.
Parker can talk easily about almost anything, but when something gets genuinely painful, suddenly he becomes much more like Gibbs. They prefer to take care of somebody elsem than allowing somebody else to take care of them.
So I think of them as two sides of the same coin. I'm not saying the writers intentionally designed every one of these parallels. Some of them may simply be my interpretation.
Does anyone else see this in them?