Caitlin Todd
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Agent Caitlin Todd is a fictional character from the NCIS television series by CBS Television, portrayed by Sasha Alexander.
Caitlin Todd is introduced as a Secret Service agent assigned to Air Force One and helping to guard the President. When the naval officer aboard the airplane dies mysteriously, she finds herself unwillingly helping Special Agent Jethro Gibbs and the NCIS team in uncovering the reason for the man's death. During the investigation, Todd confesses to Gibbs that she is having a romantic relationship with another naval officer who is also assigned to Air Force One. That man is later killed as a byproduct of a terrorist attempt to assassinate the President. Following the successful resolution of the situation, Todd resigns from the Secret Service after having broken the rules by becoming involved with an officer. Gibbs, who had been impressed with Todd's resourcefulness, immediately offers her a position with NCIS.
Todd often questions authority, including her immediate boss, Gibbs. She is often referred to as "Kate" or "Caitlin." She bonded extremely well with forensics specialist Abby Sciuto, as they are the only two women on the regular team. Todd usually serves as crime scene photographer, and is also called upon to use her criminal profiler skills during interviews and interrogations.
Caitlin had a love/hate relationship with teammate Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo. She and Gibbs were also shown subtly flirting on a few occasions, though in one early episode Gibbs makes it a point to stress to Caitlin that relationships between NCIS agents never work out (a probable reference to Gibbs' own relationship with Jenny Shepherd which was confirmed in the third season).
She is a talented sketch artist; an early episode showed she had drawn accurate caricatures of the team: showing Tony lusting after a pretty girl and Abby as a bat. She apparently drew one of Gibbs as well, but managed to change the subject before it was revealed since she had also sketched an accurate likeness of a suspect.
She is an accurate marksman, dedicated agent and tries to see the best in people. Todd may have a tattoo on her lower body; its existence was suggested during playful banter with Tony and while Tony believed it to be of a rose, Gibbs indicated that it wasn't. Todd, by this point, however, was denying that she ever had a tattoo.
At the very end of season two, Caitlin Todd was killed in the line of duty. She was shot by a sniper, Ari Aswari, a renegade Mossad operative who was alleged to be on a personal mission to assassinate Gibbs. The NCIS team had several run-ins with Ari prior to this, and in fact during her first encounter with Ari in the episode "Bete Noire", in which he held her hostage, Todd had the opportunity to kill the man with a scalpel, yet chose not to. (The episode ends with the suggestion that she might have experienced a minor case of Stockholm Syndrome which prevented her from taking action). The way in which she died -- shot through the head -- is foreshadowed in the first season finale, "Reville", in which Gibbs has a dream in which he sees Todd's dead body in the morgue, a bullet hole in her head.
After Todd's death, the character reappeared as a "ghost" at the very start of the third season, in a story thread that saw the various NCIS members come to terms with her loss. She was replaced on the NCIS team by Mossad operative Ziva David after David helps track down Caitlin's killer; while cleaning out Todd's desk, David finds her sketch pad and gives it to Gibbs.
Behind the scenes
Sasha Alexander's departure from the series and the death of Caitlin Todd was a very closely-guarded secret that caught many fans by surprise (a rarity in the era of Internet spoilers). Although the decision to kill off Todd angered fans, co-creator Donald Bellisario said that Alexander had asked to leave the series (See [TV.com: Fans react with anger at Sasha Alexander's NCIS death]). As noted above, however, the fact that her character would be killed (and by Ari) had already been foreshadowed in the series.Her replacement, Cote de Pablo, was integrated into the show with the same storyline in which Sasha Alexander was written out, and Alexander agreed to make a return appearance early in the season to allow her character to have a proper farewell.
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