‘Last Seen’ Ending Explained: Sarah’s Choice & Where It Leaves Her and Ian

Last Seen, at multiple points in its six-episode run, has flipped the genre on its head as Ian (Patrick Brammall) searches for his missing daughter 11 years later. And it does so again in the finale, which sees Sarah/Maggie (Chloe Jean Lourdes) make a choice between the two fathers in her life — Ian and Henry (Brendan Cowell), who kidnapped her as a child — and leaves things open-ended. TV Insider spoke with the cast and writer/executive producer Kris Mrksa about the finale. Warning: Spoilers for the Last Seen finale ahead!

Sarah/Maggie’s choice between Ian & Henry

Henry brings Sarah/Maggie and Jenna (Maxine Peake) to his father’s compound, but it’s too late for his wife (she’s dead by the time they arrive) and Ian’s not far behind, thanks to Henry’s brother Don (Daniel Henshall) directing him to the location. When Maggie warns Ian that Henry’s father and others will shoot him, the two take cover in a barn. He assures her none of this is her fault and shows her a family photo from when she was a kid. But she only remembers him “maybe” a little, she admits, and when the two men face off, she pleads with Ian not to shoot Henry. Ian argues he’s her father, but she reminds him that she doesn’t know him. She’s already grieving her mother’s death, and she can’t lose Henry, too. Even as Ian protests, she tells him her name is Sarah and chooses to leave with Henry. For Cowell, that moment is more about Sarah deciding not who her parent is but who she is.

Lourdes tells TV Insider that Brammall was “phenomenal” to work with in those moments. “He does everything to 100%, and he really transformed,” she shares. “I think his vulnerability is what drew me in to be present with Sarah. And of course, she makes some decisions that maybe as an audience member I didn’t agree with, and it took me a long time to justify, but it was really interesting working with Brendan and Patty together on that final scene where it wasn’t really until after I figured out why she did what she did.”

She explains, “Henry spends the whole show fighting because he loves his family, and he’s endured grief, so has Ian, but they’ve both done different things with it. And so to watch Ian have her right there and they could have just left, but he chooses to act towards hate… She realizes, ‘Oh, you’re not after me, you’re after Henry.’ Whereas she’s always been Henry’s number one priority. And so she sees a man acting out of desperation and love and a man acting out of desperation and hate and chooses the one that she sees love and familiarity in.”

For Mrksa, while the show is about parenthood and the choices made for the good of children, it’s also “a coming of age story” for Sarah. “She’s been sort of a pawn in a way almost in the battle between these two men. And in the end, she becomes powerful and she gets agency of her own and she speaks for herself. The truth of her position is that this is the only life she’s ever known with Henry and Jenna. She was so little when she was taken that she didn’t remember Ian. Ian’s ‘claim’ on her in a traditional genre show of this type would be bulletproof. We’d all be just assuming, of course, he should get his daughter back right? Whereas in this story, it’s more about, well, what does this child or this young person want?” he says.

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He does think that her choice will “surprise” viewers. “The people that this young person has a relationship with are the people who raised her, who are not to her monsters, they’re just her parents,” he continues. “It turns everything that Ian assumed on its head. Ian just assumed that once he finally got to his daughter, she would want to be with him as much as he wants to be with her. But she turns out to be an independent person who has her own agenda, her own desires, her own priorities. And that’s a massive slap in the face for him, the idea that maybe everything he’s done has just inflicted terrible loss and pain on her, on this young person that he loves, and he’s been telling himself he’s acting in her interests.”

Henry & Jenna’s deaths

Jenna dies from her gunshot wound, and for Henry, his death is suicide by cop. As he’s driving away with Sarah, they come across a police blockade. She tries to get him to give up, but instead, he tells her he loves her and she’ll be great and apologizes before getting out of the car, armed.

For Henry, “I don’t think there is a point to life when life isn’t being with his daughter in a peaceful part of nature. She is his higher power. She is his purpose. She is his identity, especially now that Jenna’s gone,” Cowell explains. “I can’t see there’s much point to him living. And I think that might almost, not in a Christian sense, but it might be actually the nicest thing he can do for her. I know that sounds quite bold at that point, but just like he says, and I added that line at the end of, ‘You’re going to be great.’ It’s not about him. It’s kind of like, ‘You go, don’t worry about me.’ It was a tough scene to do, and it plays all on her, which I think is such an amazing directorial choice.”

Brammall points out, “He’s exposing her to another trauma and loss of another parent,” to which Cowell adds that both men are “so selfish” when it comes to Sarah.

Peake agrees: “Everyone forgets about Sarah. Everybody forgets about the legacy this young woman is — You want to see, what’s the next series of Sarah, Mags, her life. How do you heal and move forward from that when you’ve had this? But it’s because everyone else has been so self-interested.” That includes her character, she adds. “Jenna to a point. The scales start to fall, but all these adults as usual have been so full of self-interest and not thought about the impact on this young life.”

Those deaths and her subsequent grief are “complicated” for Sarah, says Lourdes.

“There’s the final sequence of the show, she’s playing the piano, and I took that approach with the mindset of almost she’s holding a bit of a personal vigil for her parents because to the rest of the public, they’re the villains in this story and no one will ever know them the way that she knew them,” she shares. “It’s really painful to think on people that loved her so much and that she had so much love for be remembered as these monsters. And there’s no one that she can kind of prove or justify to because they’re all thinking, oh, she’s been in prison, they’ve brainwashed her. But that love was real, especially the love that she felt for them.”

Also grieving is Don, who lost his brother and the woman he loved (he and Jenna were together when they were younger). And so at the end of the finale, he’s “at a complete loss, with the thing he was so desperate for, a connection of place and family, all gone, and the one true friendship, it would seem he had, gone — and the guilt and the shame, and the loss, the grief of it all, and that perhaps he could of ended this before anyone lost their lives, I’m sure tears at his heart,” says Henshall. (Don was also Ian’s sponsor.)

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Mrksa tells us that he did consider “all the possibilities” when it came to killing (or not killing) off Henry and Jenna. After Bill’s death in Episode 4 was “the first disastrous consequence” of Ian and Henry’s “extreme actions,” the writer/executive producer calls Jenna’s “the second. So I think that for me, always, probably Jenna was going to die because that was the price that Henry was going to have to pay for what he’s done. But whether Henry died or not, yeah, it was something we talked about a lot. I mean, that was debated, so it could have gone either way.”

As much as Ian has changed by the end of the season, especially after Sarah chooses to go with Henry, Mrksa doesn’t think that he ever could have forgiven the Reids for what happened. “Jenna, yes, maybe,” he allows. “Henry … that’s a much harder ask. If Ian does recognize the parallels between himself and Henry, I think that would be more likely to inspire self-loathing in Ian, rather than a capacity for forgiveness of Henry.”

Ian and Sarah’s ending explained

The season ends with a big question mark for Ian and Sarah’s future. Sarah is back home living with her mom (and Ian’s ex-wife) Deb (Jessica Wren) and brother Dean (Tobias Muhafidin), but she and Ian don’t seem to have any sort of relationship. But according to Brammall, Ian’s hopeful.

“That scar is still very fresh, and so it makes sense to me, even though in a way you expect that character to get his reward for the thing that he’s done, but there’s still this terrible wound there,” he says before pointing to the “healing” between Ian and his son. “There’s that moment between them that to me was very moving because he mistreated his son for many, many years, even though he said he paid lip service to, ‘Wasn’t your fault, mate, you were too young, it’s OK.’ He still definitely blamed his son for what happened, and Ian’s grief overshadowed — I don’t think Dean was allowed to have the grief that he was owed because Ian took up so much space with it. So there’s this beautiful healing that happens there, which I think is a really lovely thing to put in the end, but maybe he has hope for future healing and he’s certainly in the right position for it, but it’s too soon by the end of the season.”

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Lourdes agrees. After all, Sarah is grieving herself at the end, too, and the life she lost. As for whether she even wants any sort of relationship with Ian, the star shares “that was debated upon.”

Lourdes explains, “I was really set in this idea that if I was her, I wouldn’t want anything to do with Ian. But Christian [Schwochow, director] did speak to me about it, and to be honest, it took me a while to come around on the idea, but I think I see something for them because it’s not a hopeless show, and that’s consistent throughout in her relationships with people that keep her grounded, whether it’s Tommy and maybe getting closer to Ian and her relationships with her parents go up and down. And so I do believe that one day, they’d be able to sit down and have a coffee and talk about what happened and grow closer to one another because she’s not a cold person and she really looks for excuses to love people.”

Should that happen, it would need to be Sarah’s choice. “Everybody’s tried to push her in a million different directions and it’s caused so much pain. And this show is her figuring out that adults are still very flawed human beings and they don’t have all the answers and she has the autonomy to make decisions that could be correct in a circumstance where an adult could come in and try and impose something that’s wrong,” Lourdes says. “And so I think knowing that no one really has all the answers and maybe it’s not as black and white as people make it out to be, she would really find confidence in gaining autonomy to make that decision, and it would feel really powerful to come from her to prove that love can conquer hate.”

Adds Mrksa, “For Sarah, Ian is still a figure who’s deeply ambiguous because he has been the catalyst for so much loss and suffering in her life. At the same time, there’s an irony in that because I guess we see that the family unit that has been kind of rebuilt, partly through Ian’s efforts after all, with Deb and Dean. It does look solid, and it does look like there’s something there for Sarah and the new baby. There’s definitely new hope and new life there, and Sarah looks like she’s fitting well into that. So I think there is a good chance that in time they will be able to rebuild some kind of relationship. Obviously, that’s all that Ian’s ever wanted, but for me, the final sequence is saying this time, he’s going to have to be patient. He can’t just storm in there guns blazing and make it happen. He’s going to have to wait ’til Sarah’s ready for that, and I like to think that once she is ready, that’ll happen.”

He reveals, “It used to be that he always — it didn’t make it through, these things change as you make these shows — listened to ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’ on his earbuds while he was doing his little ritual of making his dinner and testing himself with the bottle of booze. That was Ian’s big part of the ritual. And so that callback of that music that she chooses to play at the end was a kind of a little subtle, I guess, kind of Easter egg for anyone who’d been really paying attention that she chooses the music that Ian chose. That didn’t get through to the final version of the show, I’m sorry to say, but that was the intention, that there was going to be that kind of almost subliminal suggestion of a connection between them, that when left to her own devices, she chose what is kind of his theme music to play on the piano.”

What did you think of the finale? Let us know in the comments section below.

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