In 2014 TV audiences in the States were introduced to the brilliance of Britain’s Williams brothers, Harry and Jack, who created and cowrote the gut-wrenching eight-episode anthology series The Missing. The series moved back and forth over two timeframes and explored, in painful detail, the devastation that a missing child had on a family, community and the investigators charged with finding 5-year-old Ollie Hughes.
The brothers took their thoughts on other ways in which Season 1 could have ended and wrote Season 2 with an all-new case, landscape and characters.
The new eight-episode season of The Missing (premiering Feb. 12 at 9/8c on Starz) is as emotionally rich as it is a tense psychological thriller. The story begins with a young woman — gaunt and barefoot — stumbling into a small German town. Barely alive, the girl reveals her name as Alice Webster (played by newcomer Abigail Hardingham), a child who disappeared 11 years ago from a military base where her father is stationed. From there, your obsession will begin.
“Everyone assumes it’s a happy ending when the person you’ve lost comes back,“ Harry explained. “We loved the idea that that’s just the beginning — the beginning of a long journey to somewhere else.”
Adding to the mystery, Alice may hold vital clues to another missing girl, Sophie Giroux, who vanished shortly before her. At the heart of the story, which is also told simultaneously through multiple timeframes (the aftermath of Alice’s abduction, the aftermath of Alice’s return and the aftermath of Sophie’s abduction), is each character’s struggle with loss, deceit and betrayal, and their personal obsession to learn the truth.
Alice’s parents are played by The Walking Dead’s David Morrissey and The Hollow Crown’s Keeley Hawes, and her brother Matthew is played by Jake Davies. “What I love about the show is how the family, in those 11 years, have really kept it together,” Morrissey said. “They are successful in trauma and unsuccessful in joy, and that dynamic I thought was really interesting.”
Only one main character from Season 1 carries over to the new season — retired French detective Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo), who believes Alice’s abductor could be connected to Sophie Giroux’s case.
The Williams brothers hook you in early and never let up in this emotional and agonizing thriller.
The Missing airs on Starz Sundays beginning Feb. 12 at 9/8c
