The Missing 16/11/2016

This may be an unpopular opinion and if it is, I apologise in advance, but I was a teeny tiny little bit disappointed with tonight’s episode of The Missing. After watching it, I turned to my mum and the only words I could use to sum up how I was feeling were “well, at least it answered a lot of last week’s questions”. 

After last week’s firework of an ending, it would’ve been brave to repeat the same amount of drama in the following episode. Plus, we’re so close to the end now that time is of the essence, so I fully understand why tonight’s episode mostly answered questions instead of raising them. Saying that, I still have a few. Of course.

As always, if you don’t want to know what happened in tonight’s episode of The Missing, then please don’t read any more of this blog. 

As I say, I was slightly disappointed. Maybe disappointed is the wrong word to use. Perhaps frustrated would be a better choice. If there’s one thing I dislike about writing, it’s lazy endings. By that, I mean anything where the main character wakes up and we realise that the entire storyline has been a dream (think The Wizard of Oz) or where the answers are given to us too readily, so we’re spoon fed rather than working it out for ourselves (think Poirot or Jonathan Creek). 

Sometimes the whole “waking up and realising it’s been a dream” pantomime can be done quite cleverly, but it’s rare. In fact, the only one I can think of where it was done well is in the first series of The Missing, where Ian Garrett’s wife was hallucinating that her and Ian were on a private yacht, when in reality, she was in an insane asylum. 

Anyway, I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that lazy writing irritates the hell out of me. If I’m being completely honest, I found the ending of tonight’s episode of The Missing just a little bit lazy. It was very much a ploy to get us to watch next week’s episode. Yes, I know, that’s the point of having a drama series. But with The Missing, we don’t need to be convinced! We’ll be sat on our sofas watching it regardless. 

So, when tonight’s episode ended with Julien confronting Nadia, the butcher’s wife, about her involvement in the murder of Mirza Barzani’s sister in 1991, Nadia reluctantly appeared to be about to confess as she boldly declared, “I’ll tell you what I know”. Cue the credits. 

If we skip back to last week’s blog entry, I’d already suspected that the third person involved in the 1991 murder in Iraq was Nadia. I found Adrian Stone’s wording a little too careful – “what the three of us did to that girl” – note: not specific to men. So, I was pleased to see this week that I was correct. Although when Nadia opened a package and discovered her husband’s missing camera containing a photograph of imposter Alice, she gasped and appeared shocked. Perhaps it was just sheer horror that her husband was capable of such an atrocity. 

I think the reality is someone had sent the camera to her to scare her or warn her that they know she’s involved. Perhaps the beginning of a blackmail situation, until Nadia ruined it by being in hospital for months. 

At this point, let’s discuss her recovery. Nadia was brutally attacked by two masked men shortly after her husband’s arrest. In tonight’s episode, we discover that Matthew Webster’s friends, the two bald twins, were the culprits behind this attack. However, if we think back to episode two when Matthew saw Nadia in a supermarket car park and began to heckle her, the two twins didn’t know who she was. Are they just dim-witted? Unlikely. The Williams brothers never write something in if it doesn’t have a purpose. So are they covering for someone? Or are they simply bragging about a crime they didn’t commit in a bid to look ‘cool’? 

Which brings me to my next point. Every so often, we catch a glimpse of a young boy who works at the butchers. He is seemingly a bit character who has very little to offer us. Somehow, I smell a rat. I don’t suspect him of illicit activity but I think he knows more than he’s letting on. I can only hope we get to know him more in the remaining two episodes. Or perhaps he’s completely uninvolved and it’s just a nice little extra part for a budding young actor.

In tonight’s episode, we see crazy Scottish soldier Adam cleaning up the aftermath of his wicked ways with a drill. What we didn’t see, however, was how he disposed of Jorn’s body or where he put it. Why was this? Also, no one appeared particularly phased by Jorn’s disappearance. Admittedly, Adam sent a text from Jorn’s phone to a colleague asking him to cover his next few shifts, but is this really believable? Why is no one questioning it more? Or maybe they will later in the series.

Tonight, we saw Julien’s illness truly get the better of him as he began to experience frequent hallucinations and even paranoia that he was being followed. As much as our hearts ache for poor softly spoken Julien, we also began to question whether or not he was as reliable as he once was. In his defence, he was the only person who noticed Jorn wasn’t around, so we won’t completely write him off just yet.

We also watched a particularly tense scene between Julien and Adrian Stone, where Julien was determined to extract the truth from Adrian about the 1991 murder in Iraq. Adrian strikes Julien with his hand and they begin to struggle before being discovered by a nurse. At this point, Adrian shouts to her “He attacked me!” 

Let’s just think about this for a second. Adrian Stone is a man who is so deeply lost to dementia that he cannot control his bowel movements. He doesn’t recognise his own daughter. He speaks to everyone as though he believes they are soldiers. Yet when he strikes out and tries to physically hurt Julien to prevent further questions about the murder, Adrian covers this up by saying Julien attacked him? It doesn’t sit right with me. I’ve said it for weeks now: I don’t believe this man has dementia.

I’m aware this is an unpopular opinion. Tonight, straight after the fight scene, I called Adrian Stone a “little Billy Bullshitter” and my own mother scolded me. She’s certain that he’s an ill man. I, however, smell a rat.

We also learn tonight that Eve isn’t planning on keeping her baby. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but is there any possibility that Mr Webster isn’t the father? Does anyone remember Jorn’s mix tape? Was it more than just a crush?

Furthermore, when Mr and Mrs Webster are arguing about Eve’s pregnancy, Mrs Webster says “You said this before”, implying that a previous affair has taken place. Who was this with – was it Sophie Giroux’s mother? Lena’s mother? (Speaking of Lena, if Jorn was the only person to link the girl on the rollercoaster with Lena and Jorn has now died, will anyone else put the pieces of the jigsaw together?) 

Eve is furious that Julien is still sniffing around and she warns him off, not too long before Mrs Webster locates the military files that Julien needs. The more I started to think about Eve and Adrian’s relationship, the more doubts I have and the more questions I think of. I can’t forget Adrian’s line, “You remind me of a girl with alabaster skin”. 

At the time, I thought he was likening her to Alice Webster. As the weeks pass by, I’m starting to wonder if Eve is more involved with the story than we think. Not necessarily in a criminal manner but perhaps – and I’ve said this before – she isn’t Adrian’s daughter. Is there any chance she is Mirza Barzani’s sister? Or another abducted girl? 

Finally, we get to understand a little more about the relationship between imposter Alice (who from now on, I will call Sophie as that’s what Adam called her) and the little girl who rumbled Adam in last week’s episode. I think it’s easy to assume that Sophie is Lucy’s mother but is that too easy? Are we being false spoon fed? Is this child the child of someone else?

For the eagle eyed among us, we will have noticed that in Adam’s hell hole of a house, there were two boarded up doors. Behind one was Sophie and little Lucy. Who was behind the other? Alice? Lena? Or is this where Adam stored Jorn’s dead body?

We also detected a little French being spoken by Sophie, which didn’t go down well with Adam. It would be easy to question Sophie’s British accent if she really is a French girl living with a Scottish man but if Adam is crazily manipulative (and it looks like he is!) perhaps it’s a case of him brainwashing her with how he wants her to be. 

Throughout the scenes between Adam and Sophie, there was a growing sense of unease as we realised just how little Adam trusted her. Is this because she ran away? Or is it because she told someone – Henry Reed, for example? Are we being too naive to accuse Adam of murdering Henry?

Speaking of Henry Reed, the more I’ve dwelled on last week’s episode, the more I think there’s a reason for why the prostitute was a transsexual. As I’ve already said, the Williams brothers don’t write something for no reason. It will always have a reason, even if we don’t realise it at the time.

Perhaps I’m being pernickety here but in last week’s episode, little Lucy said her and mummy were kept in the basement, yet they were clearly upstairs in Adam’s house. Is this implying that they’ve not always been in this house and somewhere along the lines they’ve been moved? 

Another episode without Daniel Reed, although he was mentioned this time when Julien took a phone call off his ex-girlfriend who said something cryptic about his father. Hopefully more light will be shed on this next week.

No more questions to be asked other than the ones already asked above but I would like to hear people’s theories and suggestions, as always.