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