The Missing: She's back. But is it really Alice?
When it first aired in 2014, The Missing set itself apart from most thrillers with its dark and twisted tale of a lost child. Now it’s back with an entirely different plot and a new cast including Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey as the parents of an abducted daughter who returns after 11 years.
The Missing: Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey
By Henrietta Knight
When it first aired in 2014, The Missing set itself apart from most thrillers with its dark and twisted tale of a lost child. Now it’s back with an entirely different plot and a new cast including Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey as the parents of an abducted daughter who returns after 11 years.
The only character to return is Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo) the charismatic, retired French detective.
The second series of most crime dramas can often be a disappointment, but after the first episode viewers having nothing to fear on that front. In fact it is even more thrilling than the original. The story flits between three time frames and four different locations.
The first scene is set in 2003 with a girl with a spider web tattoo called Alice Webster walking away from her brother Matthew in the snow in a German town called Eckhausen where their family live.
He says: “Mum and dad will go mental if you keep bunking off.”
But Alice walks through the woods and is picked up by a yellow camper van. That’s the last her family see of her for 11 years when she stumbles back in rags and shoeless by the side of a damn that looks like the one from The Returned.
In the ambulance she mutters the name Sophie Giroux, a young French woman whose disappearance was never solved by detective Baptiste.
Fast forward two years to the present day and the Webster family is falling apart at the seams. Dad is having a torrid affair, while teenage Matthew has gone off the rails and is buying drugs in a supermarket car park.
Meanwhile Baptiste is off on a dangerous mission to Iraq in search of a missing soldier and also has an inoperable brain tumour.
Like the first series, it is littered with unanswered questions leading down different strasses. Where has Alice been all this time? Could it be that she and Sophie were abducted by the same person? What happened to Alice’s baby, or was it babies? Is that really Alice's grave? Is Alice really Alice, or could she possibly be Sophie? Why does the mother keep looking at photos of people at a funfair?
Then there is the mystery of the former soldier Daniel Reed, who Baptiste is looking for in very dangerous circumstances. His son Harry Reed is seen washing blood off the floor.
Keeley Hawes gives a powerhouse performance as Alice’s mother and David Morrissey is excellent as the slightly sinister dad, who seems to hide secrets and agendas that will be revealed in later episodes.
It is also a moving tale of child abduction and the horrors a family has to endure, even after they return. So many couples’ do not survive the stress and strains it puts on a marriage.
It is also about the weird and creepy relationship that victims sometimes have with their captures. Natasha Kampusch who was kidnapped aged ten now lives in the house in Germany where she was held and cleans it from top to bottom every day. Whether or not Alice is suffering from Stockholm syndrome will be discovered as the drama unfolds.
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THE COOLEST RETIRED DETECTIVE ON THE PLANET!
By Andy Lloyd
Now and again you quite literally get bowled over by a new programme that comes on the telly. You go to bed thinking about it, you wake up thinking about it and you cannot wait for the next episode to start. This is what has happened to me after I watched last night the first episode of the second series of the BBC One abduction thriller 'The Missing'. If you allow me to go all 'Strictly Come Dancing' judge Craig Revel Horwood on you for a second, it was A-MA-ZING!!
Beforehand, there was some slight hesitancy on my part about watching this second series. Firstly, I feared it might fall victim to second series syndrome, i.e. be nowhere near as good as the first. Secondly, the first seven episodes of the first series were brilliant but the series finale badly let it down. It was corny and I felt angered by being so letdown by the writers Harry and Jack Williams.
The first episode of series two though was absolutely tremendous. It really was faultless television. I loved the haunting quality of it throughout. I loved the stylistic European art-house cinema feel to it. The plot kept delivering twists upon twists, just as I had recovered from the last big revelation then along came another one to shock me yet again. Half way through I became self-aware that I was watching something very special here. Originality is why this programme appeals to me so much.
The narrative was challenging (but in a good way) to watch at times because it was told in three different time frames. Firstly, we saw a girl get abducted eleven years ago, then the action kept going back and forth between 2014 and the present day. The young girl abducted was a British girl called Alice Webster(Abigail Hardingham) and we saw her make this shocking reemergence in 2014, finally freed from her torture whilst staggering and collapsing in the German town of Eckhausen.
Soon we saw Alice reunited and visited in hospital by her dumbfounded family. Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey both gave fantastic performances as her parents, namely Gemma and Sam Webster. The mystery behind her disappearance then sparked the search for the other girl who was imprisoned with Alice called Sophie Giroux. There was only one man thought capable enough of solving this mystery, step forward the best former detective on TV right now, the magnificent Julien Baptiste (Tcheky Karyo).
Julien Baptiste to me is like the polite French version of Dirty Harry, that famous no-holds-barred movie character played by Clint Eastwood. He is charismatic, strong-willed and fights for justice to prevail. In Julien's case he spent a career in the police force searching for missing children and arresting pedophiles. Tcheky Karyo is a sublime actor and so it was a brilliant bit of casting to cast him in this role.
In the present day we saw Julien travel to dangerous Iraq in an attempt to find a man called Daniel Reed (Daniel Ezra), the person who it looks like at this stage is responsible for the kidnappings of the two girls. It also appears like his recently dead father has something to do with it as well. Julien at the end left us with the biggest of bombshells. He voiced his belief to his driver that the girl believed to have been Alice Webster, might not have been the real Alice Webster after all. I think my mouth stayed wide open in shock for about thirty seconds after this revelation. WHAT A CORKER OF A TWIST, WHAT AN ENDING!!
Before this Julien had dropped another huge bombshell on us when he revealed he only weeks left to live after being diagnosed with brain tumour. I am praying (even as an atheist) that this was a lie by him in order to get driven to his desired destination very soon. If he does die at the end of the series though then a third series of 'The Missing' has well and truly gone for a burton, so my hunch is that this is a red herring.
The narrative was so impressively multilayered with different connecting strands that watching how it all unfolds over the coming weeks should be a real treat. Yes, it was a challenging watch at times but I do not buy the notion by some that perhaps it is too complex for its own good. We just need a much better ending to this series than we got in the first one.
A brilliant first episode with the promise of so much more brilliance still to come! 5/5.
The Missing: confusing
Thanks to both of you for your take on the new series of The Missing, I have to admit I didn't get into the first series and stopped watching it after the first episode. I am absolutely and utterly confused and spent the entire programme stopping and starting it to ask my husband what was going on. I get a better grip of it now that it has been explained a bit more.
I kept getting Keeley confused with the Army PC who is having the affair, where did her baby go or has it not been born yet? who knows!! good viewing though but I think that is down to the cast more than the content of the show.
Confused GA xx