‘Last Seen’ Reveals If Sarah Is Maggie

Last Seen doesn’t waste any time revealing if Ian (Patrick Brammall) is right and his daughter, Maggie, is still alive. Warning: Spoilers for Last Seen Season 1 Episode 3 ahead!

Over a decade after his daughter went missing, former detective and current dispatcher Ian becomes convinced that Maggie (“Mags” as he calls her) is still alive. At first, it looks like her remains are found, then they turn out not to be hers. But then Sarah (Chloe Jean Lourdes), daughter of Henry (Brendan Cowell) and Jenna Reid (Maxine Peake), has flashes of herself as “Mags” while drunk at a party and calls “000” for help… identifying herself as possibly “Mags.” By the time Ian got to the phone booth she called from, she was gone.

Now, in Episode 3, it is confirmed onscreen that Sarah is Maggie. Jenna confronts Henry about just that, and he doesn’t deny it. She didn’t want to remember what had happened. He argues that Maggie’s parents are bad people — he’s a drunk, and she’s a sinner — and Jenna agrees that the teen is better off with them.

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Jenna needs to tell herself and believe that more than Henry, Peake agrees. “Jenna definitely tussles with it,” she tells TV Insider. “She’s really at this point where it’s starting to crack open.”

Henry, on the other hand, can’t have that happen. “I just can’t have it ever crack open. I have to patch up the walls even as the dam is bursting. And so it’s a really nice tension there. And especially when my co-conspirator starts to go, ‘No, I think it’s time for the secret to come out,'” Cowell says. “It’s just bursting everywhere from inside, which is great to play as an actor, and that chaos. And his greatest fear is coming true. And I guess for Patrick’s character, his greatest fear did come true and now it’s flipping. So it’s really interesting that subversion, isn’t it?”

Adds writer and executive producer Kris Mrksa, “Henry believes that he did this to some extent for Jenna, that he brought this child into their lives. I think he’s also a guy who’s kind of fooling himself in a way. I think he did it as much for himself, but he’s the kind of guy who takes a course and stays with it no matter what, never doubts himself. And Jenna, on the other hand, is riddled with doubt. She’s, to some extent, found herself in this situation where Henry’s done something supposedly for her benefit and she’s accommodated, she’s adjusted, she’s gone with it in the end, as difficult as that is. She’s in a much more fragile place, and I think that to some extent she’s also almost lived in denial about what’s going on, whereas I don’t think Henry’s ever really been in denial about what he did. He’s just never questioned the rightness of it.”

“Sarah” meanwhile, is still questioning just what’s going on and isn’t quite sure what to believe. Lourdes shares that they filmed different takes exploring the possibilities, including ones where she’s thinking Mags could be her sister, an old neighbor, or herself.

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“I think this deep-rooted feeling of unease is really what drove the general idea of what she’s feeling, even though she doesn’t exactly know. And I think that the idea, you know when someone’s lying to you, you can kind of feel it. And so you might not know what the truth is, but you know that the information that you have is not 100% correct,” she says. “And so there’s this unsettling feeling that she’s closer to the mystery than her parents are letting on. That is really what drives that internal discomfort.”

That’s also shaping how she’s now looking at her parents, the only people in her life; they’ve kept her isolated.

“She really, really trusts them, and so to feel this layer of lurking deception puts a barrier between them. And it’s a really tough thing to see as she’s growing and needing more from the outside world and they’re not giving that to her, that creates this disconnect between everyone in her family and it’s quite isolating for her as well,” Lourdes tells us. “And we see her turn to Tommy [Felix Cameron] to try and get answers from someone that’s disconnected from her immediate family unit, just for a sense of grounding in a way, because they’ve always been 110% honest with one another and so she knows that she can find that with him when she starts to lose faith in her parents.”

There is someone else in her life: her uncle Don (Daniel Henshall), who’s the one who found her in the phone booth and brought her home to his brother Henry. Don is also Ian’s sponsor, and so when the dispatcher tells him about the 000 call, he puts the pieces together and calls his brother. Henry insists Sarah is his daughter and that Don drop it; losing Sarah would destroy both him and Jenna.

“Don is in one of those terrible, irresolvable dilemmas. He’s a guy who is, I think, ultimately a decent man, who desperately wants connection with family, who desperately wants to rebuild his relationship with his brother, but who also has a special sort of relationship with Jenna,” explains Mrksa. “And so he wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt them. That’s so important to him. At the same time, like I say, he’s essentially a decent man, and he’s a close and kind of intimate friend of Ian’s. So I think that’s the essence of his situation, a terrible, irresolvable dilemma, a moral quandary that he can’t get past.”

Last Seen, Wednesdays, Apple TV