‘The Missing’ Finally Returns After Two-Year Hiatus
A critically ill female stumbles out of the forest and back into the lives of the family that has been searching for her for over a decade. This sounds like a happy ending and the beginning of a long healing process, but with the second season of The Missing (returning after a two-year-plus break), creators Harry and Jack Williams wanted to blow up the very idea of a happy ending. “How do you tell a gripping story after what would be the end for most stories?” asks Jack. “I think that challenge was the most exciting thing about it for us.”
Eleven years after being abducted, a young woman claiming to be Alice Webster (Abigail Hardingham) returns, to the initial relief of her parents (Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey). But in this tangled mystery, nothing is ever quite what it seems. Tchéky Karyo (Nostradamus) returns as French detective Julien Baptiste, now retired but still obsessed with the disappearance of another girl, who may have a connection to the Webster case. As the eight-part mystery unravels, Alice’s return has repercussions that reach from the British military base in the German town where she was taken all the way to war-torn Iraq and back to the first Gulf War.
“It’s not something you can watch while texting. You really have to commit,” Jack says of the many plot twists. “There’s a lot happening, and it rewards that kind of close attention.” And Morrissey (above) knows first-hand how enthralling this complex puzzle of a show can be for fans. “When I was in The Walking Dead, people wanted to know what was going to happen. They would come up to me and say, ‘Tell me who’s dead. Tell me what’s happened!’” he explains. “But in The Missing, people came up to me [during the 2016 U.K. airing] and told me their theories. They didn’t want me to explain anything, because they wanted to say, ‘I’ve worked it out!’”
The Missing, Season Premiere, Sunday, Feb. 12, 8/7c, Starz
The Missing (2014) where to stream
