The Missing 30/11/2016

“Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire”.

You all know how much I love a Julien Baptiste quote and this one was no different. Oddly enough, it sums up how I’m feeling right now – and most likely you, too, as you’re reading this. After eight magical weeks, what on earth are we going to do with our Wednesday evenings without The Missing? It quite literally feels like a piece of us will be missing (yes, I cringed writing that). As though something isn’t quite right. 

But we’ll pick ourselves up and we’ll carry on and we’ll watch other original British drama series and we’ll think yes, okay, we’ve moved on from The Missing and we’ve stopped speaking about it now. Before we know it, in the most sneaky way possible, we’ll hear a whisper of a third series. And we’ll be right back to where we are now, obsessively clicking on the hash tag for The Missing on Twitter and calculating the likelihood of different theories.

As always, for anyone who hasn’t caught up on tonight’s episode, please don’t read any further than this. I don’t want to be the one to spoil the fun for you. But go and watch it, enjoy, then come back and read this afterwards.

Tonight’s episode was the final in the second series and it tied up the majority of the loose ends we had. It answered the majority of our questions. But not quite all of them. 

In tonight’s episode, we saw Alice and Sophie in their basement prison in a flashback to 2014. Sophie was close to death, as she lay on a filthy makeshift bed on the floor, clutching her abdomen in pain. She had appendicitis and without medical intervention, it was inevitable that she would die. Bearing this in mind, creepy psycho crazy Adam came up with the ludicrous plan which would have Sophie be discovered, pretend to be Alice, get better and then return to Adam and Lucy (and poor Alice). 

Before shooing her into the wild, Adam flashed her one tiny photo of Christian Hertz, the butcher who went on to be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. 

This is where my first question arose. For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, you’ll know that I questioned this last week: is it really plausible that someone would hold such a grudge against a person for twenty three years because they hadn’t organised a search party when they went missing during the war? I just couldn’t buy into it. 

Last week, I hoped more would materialise and perhaps explain why Adam decided to pin the entire debacle on a person he barely knew anything about. Sadly, we didn’t get that answer. It turns out that Adam was so bitter about Nadia Hertz’s lack of response when he went missing in Iraq in 1991 that he decided to frame her husband for a despicable crime. Out of everything that unfolded throughout the series, I think that was one of the aspects I was the most apprehensive about believing. 

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that Adam Gettrick was a mentally unstable man with psychotic tendencies and inexplicably unbalanced behaviour where anything was possible but it just seemed so extreme.

Then I think about Adam’s house on the military base in Germany. Now, for those of you who’ve never had anything to do with military accommodation before, let me explain. Housing is provided for British soldiers and their families, wherever they may be based. The houses are relatively small and plain but they do the job. There are multiple inspections during a family’s time staying in military accommodation and if the army aren’t happy about something, it has to be changed. I know this from experience. 

So, let’s consider the thirteen years Adam was keeping the girls hostage (we don’t know the length of time Sophie or Lena were held hostage but Alice was definitely gone from 2003 when she was abducted to present day when she was rescued). Adam had a two bedroom house. Why? He didn’t have any children as far as the army were concerned. These houses are like gold dust. Perhaps he got lucky. I’ll buy into that. 

But the two windows at the front of the house being boarded up for years on end? I would bet my life that within a week of boarding up your windows in a military house, you’d have the officials knocking on the door demanding to know why. Perhaps Adam was so secure in his job with the information he had on people like Adrian Stone that he thought he was invincible. I struggled to buy into this as well. 

(Without going into too much detail about what I didn’t like – because these are literally teeny tiny points that are enormously overshadowed by everything that I loved – I also didn’t like the Swiss waiter storyline tonight. It felt a little too similar to what I like to call a Harry Potter get out clause. 

You know how in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One film when Hermione and Harry are looking for Harry’s parents’ grave? In a graveyard with hundreds of tombstones, Hermione bends and wipes the snow off one random grave and goes oh, look, it’s your parents’ grave, Harry! I cannot abide laziness like that. It felt a little similar tonight with the Swiss waiter. He looked down, saw the photo and didn’t say anything but his face gave the game away. I wasn’t massively keen on this but I’ll let it go. Stranger things have happened.)

Speaking of Adrian Stone, cast your minds back to my very first blog weeks ago. I said from the word go that I didn’t buy his dementia sob story. I smelt a rat from the moment he switched conversation at a very convenient moment. Tonight, it wasn’t necessarily confirmed but it was certainly suggested that Adrian Stone is a little Billy Bullshitter. 

The moment he suspected he was going to be rumbled for his involvement with Sophie’s abduction, he planted the seed of doubt in Eve’s mind that his memory wasn’t what it used to be. A little too convenient if you ask me. Perfect timing. 

Then let’s just take a second to think about what Adam said to Adrian Stone about their similar sexual preferences. Adrian Stone was a bad, bad man. I began to wonder whether that was why he was so insistent on going to search for Adam in Iraq when he’d heard that Adam had slept with a thirteen year old girl. Appalling behaviour and I had him sussed from day one. Just call me Baptiste.

Anyway, while I let my increasingly large head deflate, I will say how Sam Webster’s death took me by surprise. I really didn’t expect it and was sad for him, as a father, that he hadn’t got chance to bond with his daughter following her rescue. But in a weird way, perhaps he felt so at peace with finally fitting the missing piece of the puzzle together that he simply let go. 

Speaking of which, we saw Julien about to undergo what appeared to be a very intense operation. Presumably, this was the operation that was needed to keep him alive (fingers crossed) but what if it wasn’t? The last we saw of Baptiste was in Switzerland, a country where euthanasia is legal in certain medical centres. Perhaps, in a similar way to Sam Webster, the mystery was solved and a very tired, very ill Baptiste simply wanted to put things to rest. Quite literally.  

I hope not. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Julien Baptiste is the Albus Dumbledore of the detective world.

Something I just want to touch on – there has been a lot of confusion over the bald chap that Baptiste kept seeing. Perhaps I’m wrong here, but I’ve always just assumed he was a hallucination from Baptiste’s brain tumour. Nothing more to it than that. I’ve read some wonderful theories that this man was actually the brain surgeon tending to his tumour and the whole storyline was really a hallucination or a product of the anaesthetic during his surgery. 

I admire the creativity of this theory but I think it was just the result of a very sick man. Nothing more, nothing less. 

What I was still a little disappointed about was that we didn’t learn particularly much, if anything, about the abductions of any of the girls. We know that Adam knew Lena’s family and we know he worked with Alice’s dad, but how on earth did he know Sophie Giroux? And why did he take them? Was it premeditated? Did he plan to take those specific girls or just anyone he could find? 

And why was his relationship to Alice so much colder than his infatuation with Sophie? Was it simply because Alice was more likely to speak her opinions? Why did he bother keeping her then? Lena was clearly at his disposal for being “annoying”, yet he chose to keep Alice with him for over a decade. Was this just another of his psychotic tendencies coming to light?

A nice unexpected twist at the end was Christian Hertz’s total lack of interest in his wife once he had been released from prison. I wasn’t sure how he would react to the news that it was someone he vaguely knew who had framed him. I guess in some respects, they didn’t really know one another at all. Christian was unaware that his wife knew about the rape of a thirteen year old girl and the murder of a nine year old girl, yet never reported it. Nadia didn’t believe her husband, despite him protesting his innocence throughout the series.

It would be interesting to see if they ever worked through these issues.

The worst and best part of a drama series coming to an end is trying to piece together all the little bits and wondering what, if anything, would ever happen. Eve Stone, for example, carrying Sam Webster’s baby. Eve and Gemma Webster forming an unlikely alliance. Alice returning to her family. Matthew potentially on the road to recovery from years of shutting himself away from his family. Eve getting the truth from Adrian. Sophie’s relationship with Lucy. Sophie’s relationship with her father.

Finally, we are all desperate to know if The Missing will return for a third series. At the end of series one, we got a sneak preview of series two and I was hoping for a repeat of that tonight, but alas, it didn’t materialise. 

There was, however, a wistful feeling drummed up inside me when Baptiste fell asleep on the number “trois” when counting backwards. Perhaps this is an indication of a series number three?

All I can say is that the last eight weeks have been an absolute ball. We’ve gasped and wondered the whole way through and I can only hope that in two years time (if not sooner), we are sat on our sofas as equally obsessed with series three as we were this time and last time.

Until then – it’s been a pleasure!