‘Last Seen’ Team Breaks Down [Spoiler]’s Fate, Ian & Sarah’s Meeting, and More

Last Seen, so far, has been building toward the ending of Episode 4, when everyone comes together, and Ian (Patrick Brammall) sees Sarah (Chloe Jean Lourdes), the girl he believes is his daughter (and is), and it all falls apart into a chaotic scene with gunshots and one character possibly dead. TV Insider spoke with the cast and writer and executive producer Kris Mrksa about that and more.  Warning: Spoilers for Last Seen Season 1 Episode 4 ahead!

Ian’s convinced that Henry (Brendan Cowell) and Jenna (Maxine Peake) have kidnapped his daughter and goes with the cops to their land to check it out and seemingly prove his claim wrong. Henry and Jenna even have a birth certificate for Sarah, but once there, and once Ian sees Sarah from a distance, he insists it’s her. Then, later, when he and his ex-wife’s new husband Bill (Bert La Bonté) return to the compound, Jenna admits out loud that Sarah is not their daughter, for both Ian and the young teen to hear. But that’s when things go terribly wrong, with both Henry and Bill pulling out their guns. In the subsequent shootout, Ian, Jenna, and Bill are all shot, and Sarah leaves with Henry and Jenna.

Ian and Jenna were looking rough but like they’ll likely live. Bill is a different story. So, is he dead? “It’s still uncertain because Ian doesn’t know,” Mrksa tells TV Insider. “You’re with the protagonist, right? I mean, we are seeing that from Ian’s point of view, but it looks bad, right? I mean, unlike Ian who is seriously injured, but hasn’t got a headshot or a body shot or something — he’s still moving and struggling against his wound — things look bad for Bill.”

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With how everything goes down, is Ian able to process that his daughter was right in front of him?

“It’s so unexpected for her to say that,” Brammall says. “And then everything happens so quickly after that, I don’t even think I had time to respond on an emotional [level]. Ian keeps getting presented with this evidence. He’s so dogged that there’s no doubt in his mind that this person is his daughter. But when she says it, it’s so unexpected. I think it’s a great revelation for him, but I don’t think it breaks new ground in terms of… I think what it reveals is that they’re breaking down. This thing over here is starting to spill, and maybe he’ll get what he wants, but there’s no doubt in his mind that she’s his daughter.”

Adds Mrksa, “At that stage, he’s just overwhelmed. Events are moving so fast that he’s just swept up in it. And I think that he hasn’t really been thinking very rationally right from the moment of that phone call. This show is, to me, about turning a lot of the conventions of the missing child genre on their head, and that includes in the way the protagonist is written and played. And so instead of being this guy who’s just on this righteous journey to reunite his family and save his child, I think our hero, Ian, is a guy who’s a mess. He’s not thinking straight, he’s not thinking rationally, he’s not thinking what the next best move would be. He’s just driven by this obsession, which is to some extent quite a dangerous obsession because he’s probably capable at this stage of doing almost anything. [Episode] 4 does actually end in an explosion of violence, which, to me. is good for no one, definitely not for Sarah/Maggie.”

Giving Ian that confirmation at this point is also part of “challenging the usual genre tropes,” he says. “It’s about the character choices, the choices they make and the things that they do in extreme circumstances, in extreme circumstances of guilt, grief, desperate desire to be reunited. I mean, those really strong emotions that are driving people.”

As far as what Sarah/Maggie believes, Lourdes spoke with a child trauma therapist. “She’s so far away from Henry emotionally at that stage,” she notes. “It’s the beginning of the end, really.” And so when Ian shows her the toy, it was about “focusing on the bodily reactions to sense memory and listening to that music. It’s familiar, and it’s really hard almost for her to hear that because she doesn’t want it to be.” She calls the moment that Jenna reveals she’s not their daughter “the point of heartbreak.”

Lourdes also says that Sarah’s relationship with Jenna is the one that’s key and why she leaves with the Reids at the end of the episode. “The family dynamic shifts when Henry’s away, and when it’s just Sarah and Jenna, they’re a lot more open with each other, a lot more honest. I think there’s maybe less pressure to be good in a sense because her mom is so open and casual, and really Jenna’s her closest friend. And so hearing her mom admit that, I went down the path of believing that she’s heard it but blocked it out because there’s sort of this instant adrenaline when she realizes that Jenna’s injured and that becomes her number one priority, regardless of what her mom could have said to her.”

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When it comes to that final scene and how their characters are feeling, the word that immediately comes to Peake’s mind is “sore,” causing Brammall and Cowell to laugh. “Ready to go to some sort of wellness spa for a week,” adds Cowell.

Brammall shares he was “really excited” to film that scene. “It’s the first big action sequence that happens really. And it’s so consequential. And I don’t think we’d done anything together as all of us. And so it was really exciting, and the logistics of how it happens and who fires when and what the effects are. It was super, super tense, but also really enjoyable because you want that. You want to be vibrating like that. I felt like on set that day, everybody was really locked in. I felt it was a lot of fun. Actually, I loved that.”

Cowell agrees: “Especially for us because we’ve been in this kind of family drama in this fortress, this utopian paradigm, this beautiful natural, and then all of a sudden this action movie comes in to threaten it.”

Brammall also points out that his, Cowell, and Peake’s characters all had different perspectives. “For Henry, he’s like, ‘This has to stop. Stop, stop, stop.’ And he’ll do anything to stop it. And Jenna, things are cracking, and she’s in this kind of Lady Macbeth state of like, ‘I need to tell, but I can’t tell, but I’ve found myself saying something,'” he details. “And Ian is in this area where he’s brought this toy to play for this person he believes is his child, and he doesn’t want anything to happen, but stuff does happen. And it’s a really interesting clash of realities.”

Ahead of that scene, Jenna goes to see Ian’s ex-wife Debbie (Jessica Wren), trying to convince herself that Sarah/Maggie is better off with them. It’s a scene that, in a show that’s very mcc about fatherhood, puts the women at the forefront.

“It’s the moment where Jenna finally confronts her guilt, confronts what she’s really being complicit in. And of course, for Debbie, it’s just the scales falling from the eyes,” says Mrksa. “She’s at first thinking that they’re just having a casual chat in her shop with a customer and that horrible dawning realization.”

Last Seen, Wednesdays, Apple TV