‘Last Seen’ Boss Breaks Down What Ian Believes After That Shocking Phone Call

Years ago, police detective-turned-dispatcher Ian (Patrick Brammall) had his worst nightmare happen: His young daughter was taken from him. Now, he may be getting her back, with a major sign of hope coming at the end of Last Seen‘s second episode (the first two dropped on September 9). TV Insider spoke with writer and executive producer Kris Mrksa about that and more. Warning: Spoilers for Last Seen Episodes 1 and 2 ahead!

Adapting Ryan David Jahn’s novel The Dispatcher, the Apple TV thriller picks up 11 years after that fatal day, and Ian’s life is, simply put, a mess. He’s divorced, six months sober, and sleeping with one of his subordinates. When remains are found that could be his three-year-old daughter Maggie, he drinks. He blames himself for what happened — he and Maggie’s mother had been out dancing and left her home with her older half-brother, Dean, who was 16, that night — but now there’s a glimmer of light: Maggie could be alive because those remains aren’t hers.

Apple TV

She certainly does seem to be Sarah (Chloe Jean Lourdes), the teen that Henry (Brendan Cowell) and Jenna (Maxine Peake) are raising in isolation from the rest of the outside world; there’s an alarm system in place whenever anyone approaches their property. Despite Henry’s attempts to shelter Sarah, she finds a piece of a flyer about Maggie and, after sneaking out in an attempt to run her own investigation and ending up a party where she gets drunk, she remembers carving “Mags” — Ian’s nickname for his daughter — into a log.

“Sarah” leaves the party, gets to a phone booth, and calls 000 for help … and Ian answers. When he asks her name, she calls herself Sarah at first before adding, “maybe it’s Mags.” With that, Ian tells her it’s her father and rushes out to find her — but she’s gone when he reaches the booth.

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So, is Sarah really Maggie? “It’s part of the mystery, what’s really on there, how this circumstance arose, how these two men’s lives have intersected in a way that is part of the overall mystery for the show,” Mrksa tells TV Insider. “I guess that it does become clear at a certain point in the narrative who she really is, and then it becomes more of a, not so much of a — It’s never really a whodunnit. It’s a, how did they do it and why and what the hell’s really going on there?”

Ian does rush out of his workplace, thinking that he could be seeing his daughter again after all these years. How much is Ian thinking she’s actually Maggie, and how much is it him just hoping she is and he’s not sure? “I think that Ian has, at some level, always just clung to this hope that she was going to come back to him. That’s his lifeline, right? I mean, the guy’s life imploded, it spiraled out of control, and that is the thing that he’s hung onto. So, I think that it’s a sort of a mixture of the two,” says the EP.

“When he gets that call, yeah, he so desperately wants to believe it that he kind of does. I guess there’s a degree of cognitive dissonance there because I suppose as an ex-police officer and a rational guy, he must know that it’s sort of crazy, but I think, like I say, that lifeline has been so vital to him and he’s lived in that place of hope at a deeper level for so long that as soon as he gets a spark of something to ignite that again, he’s 100% there,” he continues. “So he becomes, I think, almost obsessed with the idea that that’s her.”

Last Seen, Wednesdays, Apple TV