I haven’t written about “Missing” since the series debuted. Based on your comments at the time, and on the show’s dwindling ratings, I’m guessing most of you haven’t been watching it. But I did have one thing I wanted to discuss about tonight’s episode, and how it ties back to something from the pilot, coming up just as soon as I have a butler…
Okay, so Sean Bean dies in virtually every role he plays. It’s his thing. But he tends to die at the ends of movies and TV seasons, and not at the beginning. So when I saw Bean appear to blow up real good within the first five minutes of the “Missing” pilot – knowing that Bean had signed on as a series regular – I said to myself, “Okay, he faked his death and will turn out to be behind the whole kidnapping, right?” And as the pilot moved along and Ashley Judd started coming across clues that someone had been photographing her son all those years, I felt like the “Missing” producers were aware that people would assume what I had, and were having some fun with it.
Then I went to press tour, and I asked the producers about that, and they very firmly insisted that Bean’s character was dead and they had hired Bean to appear only in flashbacks. This sounded fishy, and became even fishier when Cliff Curtis let slip that he had filmed a scene where he was running after both Judd and Bean (whom Curtis wouldn’t have known in the past, since he only meets Judd in the pilot). So I asked again, and they denied it firmly again, and at that point, some of my enthusiasm for “Missing” went away. I get that they didn’t want a big spoiler out there in the world, but to me it seemed so wildly obvious that I hoped they might find a way to at least be cleverly coy about it, when instead they were as sober as the tone of the whole series.
So we come to our fourth episode, and we finally get some extended Sean Bean flashbacks, and then close with Judd chasing a mysterious figure through Dubrovnik, and then… ZOMG! IT’S SEAN BEAN!!!!!
Here’s my question, whether you’re still watching or stopped after the pilot: how many of you actually believed that Becca’s husband had been killed in the explosion, and how many of you figured we hadn’t seen the last of him in this story?
And for those of you who’ve stuck around through these first four episodes, are you excited to have Bean back in the middle of things? Annoyed it took this long? Just happy to have anything that takes us away from Becca’s son trying and failing to outsmart his guards?