THE season finale of the second season of the hit BBC series, “The Missing” aired on Wednesday night, November 30, after an epic turn of events in the last second of episode seven had viewers on the edge of their seats.
Creators of “The Missing“, Harry and Jack Wilson promised their viewers would have all of their questions answered during the season finale, after the seventh instalment created a major twist in the already complicated plot.
The finale did provide answers, yet how satisfactory one deems them to be is very subjective.
The mystery series is centred on two missing teenagers who were abducted as young girls; the French, Sophie Giroux and English, Alice Webster.
Sophie Giroux was abducted in France; her abduction lead to her mother’s suicide; which her father blames Baptiste for. In addition, Alice Webster was abducted from a small town in Germany where her father works at an English military base.
French detective Julien Baptiste inconspicuously and unofficially leads the investigation, although he is revealed to be suffering from an untreated brain tumour and is, in fact, dying.
Baptiste initially connected the two girls cases after a very sick and delusional “Alice” turned up in rags, with no shoes, in the woods and whispered the name “Sophie Giroux” to the paramedics in the ambulance when they asked for her name.
Thus, the intricately woven, and admittedly somewhat confusing plot leads viewers through a web that is spun from Iraq to France, Germany and finally Switzerland.
The concluding episode finished with Baptiste on the operating table, counting down as the anaesthetic began to put him to sleep before his brain surgery. The viewer doesn’t learn, however, whether or not he lives and whether or not he will ever solve another intense mystery.
Viewers will be satisfied with the conclusion that the Websters, led by a determined Baptiste, ultimately track the paedophile, who abducted their child more than ten years before, to a small cabin in the woods of Switzerland.
After eleven years of hell, both Alice Webster, who is believed dead by all except Baptiste and her mother, until the last second of episode seven when she is revealed to be alive, but trapped in a dungeon due to her “bad behaviour”. Sophie and her daughter Lucy are also freed from the clutches of paedophile, rapist and murderer Adam Gettrick.
It is intensely bittersweet freedom, however.
Sam Webster, Alice’s father, who insistently believed his daughter was dead after the fire in his shed, was reunited with his real daughter for a brief moment before he died. He was shot mere moments before as he closed in on the cabin where his daughter’s kidnapper was hiding out. Sam was shot by Gettrick, but as the police honed in on both the cabin and Gettrick, Sam saw his real daughter advance from the bushes, just before he passed away.
Sophie on the other hand, was not really given a very happy ending. She grew close with her captor, so close that they concocted a plan where she would pretend to be Alice and then burn herself alive in their shed, where she insisted on sleeping. Gettrick had become nervous about the ongoing investigation into Alice’s disappearance and wanted the family to stop looking for her child. Sophie, who has a daughter with Gettrick, and presumably suffers from Stockholm Syndrome, cooperates with her captor due to the love she has for her daughter.
Even after Sophie has ultimately being found and freed by Baptiste, she professes that she is nothing without Gettrick and their daughter Lucy. Furthermore, after she is brought to safety, she refuses to speak to her father.
And the Stone’s? Well, Eve is having Sam Webster’s baby. Although he died… She also ultimately learnt the truth about her father and how he covered up Gettrick’s crimes. On the bright side, she did receive Eve Webster’s blessing to have the baby which was the product of her husbands affair.
Unlike the first series, the viewer is given a somewhat happy ending.
Gettrick is questioned by police and admits to sending a sick Sophie to the Webster home to pose as Alice when she became almost fatally ill, where he then has her stage her own suicide in an effort to throw the Webster’s off ever finding out the truth of what happened to their daughter.
To make it even more complicated, he also admits to killing a third missing girl – Lena Garber – and placing her body in the shed where the Webster’s would presume the burnt remains were that of their returned daughter.
Tying up all loose ends and seemingly giving himself up straight away, Gettrick also confesses to murdering German detective Jorn Lenhart with an electric drill when he discovered the truth about Gettrick and went to confront him.
He also admitted framing Kristian Hertz for the kidnapping of the girls in an act of revenge against his wife, Nadia Herz. When she was an Army officer in Iraq, she failed to send out a search team to look for him when he went missing in 1991, and he was subsequently tortured for days.
If all of that wasn’t enough, Baptiste, during the questioning, admitted to having a feeling that Gettrick wasn’t admitting to all that he had done.
“How many other girls were there, Gettrick?” to which he replied, “What makes you think that there are more?”
never been so gripped on a TV series in my whole life, credit to the writers for a show that literally takes your breath away #TheMissing
— erin? (@erinmariaconnor) November 30, 2016
https://twitter.com/J4YSEPHINE/status/804099568795271172
Recent Comments