There’s a lot to love about the “NCIS” spinoff “NCIS: Los Angeles,” which premiered in the original show’s sixth season in 2009, per IMDb. However, fans hate to see it when beloved characters get injured, or sometimes lose their life, on the hit procedural show.
One character who’s suffered her fair share of bumps and bruises is Special Agent Kensi Blye (Daniela Ruah), who has been on the series since its beginning. While Kensi’s proven just how tough she is out in the field, she, like her fellow agents, isn’t impervious to injuries, and there was a time when she was slated to experience a pretty serious one that would have changed everything for her as a character.
Want to know more about the devastating injury Kensi was supposed to suffer on “NCIS: Los Angeles?” Don’t worry, we’ve got the scoop on what could have been, though we’re grateful that never came to pass.
Kensi almost experienced a life-changing injury during NCIS: LA Season 8
According to CheatSheet, Ruah touched on what could have been a major change in Kensi Blye’s appearance while participating in a panel discussion in 2017. After the host asked her what was most surprising for her character in the show’s eighth season, Ruah talked about how a life-changing injury shocked her.
She responded, “So, Kensi becomes debilitated for a short while, and then eventually recovers. Originally, the storyline is that she was going to actually lose a limb. And I remember when our showrunner was like, ‘What do you think of this?’ I was almost so devastated for Kensi because it’s kind of difficult to emotionally distance myself from her when it comes to her happiness or her sadness, whatever it is.”
And we get it — portraying a character that’s experiencing such a major trauma would be difficult, and it would have influenced how Ruah would have to play Kensi on “NCIS: LA” going forward.
There were a couple of instances in which Kensi could have lost her leg on NCIS: LA
In fact, Fandom notes that there were a couple of separate instances in Season 8 of “NCIS: Los Angeles” in which Kensi could have lost a limb. The first scare comes when her helicopter is shot down while she’s part of a team hunting down a terrorist in the desert, and she becomes pinned down by some of the debris. Her teammates save her, but she ends up having an injury to her spinal cord that causes the temporary paralysis of her left hand and leg, as well as a loss of feeling in her right leg. These injuries require months of physical therapy.
The second instance is the one that where Kensi was originally supposed to lose her leg. In the episode “Payback,” she has been kidnapped by Ferris, a man she knew as Sullivan in her physical therapy sessions, and he says he’s going to cut off her leg. However, he fails to follow through with his threat before she’s saved by her fellow NCIS agents. Hopefully, Kensi’s luck will hold for future seasons and she won’t find herself in dangerous situations where she could lose a limb or suffer another serious injury.
