‘The Missing’: A Lost Girl Found, With a New Mystery
Two years ago, The Missing told a story about the search for a missing boy in France. Season 2 has now arrived, premiering Sunday on Starz, and this time, The Missing tells the story of a missing girl, but the plot is thicker, more emotional, and more involving. The show’s biggest selling point for some viewers will be that it stars David Morrissey, known to millions of Walking Dead-heads as the Governor.
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This new Missing is one of those puzzlers that benefits from watching it knowing as little as possible, so I’m going to be light on the plot details while also urging you to watch it. The plot centers around a British military family stationed in Germany: Morrissey’s officer Sam Webster, his wife, Gemma (Keeley Hawes), and their son, Matthew (Jake Davies). The Websters’ daughter, Alice, was kidnapped 11 years earlier, and in the opening hour of this eight-part series, a cold, sickly young woman is found stumbling along a road: By some miracle, Alice (Abigail Hardingham) has been found; the Websters rejoice.
But the mystery is only beginning. Alice was being held along with another female victim, and it is the search for that girl that brings back a character from The Missing’s first season, the dogged yet debonair police detective Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo), who has pledged the family of the other victim that he will find that girl.
Every episode of The Missing was written by creators Harry and Jack Williams and directed by Ben Chanen. The series follows three timelines: Alice is found alive in 2014; Baptiste searches for the other girl in the present-day; and there are flashbacks to everyone’s lives in 2003. The filmmakers do a fine job of keeping those constantly shifting time periods clear and distinct — well, I do admit that The Missing is so twisty, there were times when I had to check the length of Baptiste’s beard to figure out which timeline I was watching.
Nevertheless, The Missing is one compelling piece of work, full of what the anguish of having an abducted child does to a family over the years. It’s also a prickly mystery story that occasionally relies on a few too-neat coincidences to pull off its startling conclusion. The performance that ties everything together is Karyo’s. His now-retired detective Baptiste is a wonderful creation: stubborn, charming, wry, and blunt. The character has a medical condition that might suggest he may not be able to return for another edition of The Missing. Or maybe that’s a red herring to throw us off. In any case, as I was watching Karyo’s Baptiste, I got a brilliant idea that I hereby give to any TV producer, for free. You know that clever update of Sherlock Holmes that Benedict Cumberbatch has pulled off? I think someone should snap up the rights to a few novels by Georges Simenon about the assiduous detective Inspector Maigret, update them, and have Karyo star. I realize PBS aired some Maigret mysteries starring Michael Gambon in the 1990s, and that comic Rowan Atkinson recently did a few for Britain’s ITV, but they are period pieces. Modernizing different novels (Simenon wrote literally scores of them) and making Karyo the star — I’m telling you, that’s a hit. Oh, and do watch The Missing, won’t you?
The Missing airs at 8 p.m. Sundays on Starz.
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