‘You put a great deal of thought into this,” says Julien Baptiste towards the end of this final episode of The Missing (BBC1). He’s talking to Adam Gettrick, apprehended at last. But Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo) could equally be speaking to his own creators, The Missing writers Jack and Harry Williams.
It’s been an extraordinary cat’s cradle of a series: multistranded; (at least) triple time-framed; jumping around in Europe and the Middle East, with different people playing the same person at different stages of their lives; characters whose identities blur and then clearly become someone else; the whodunnit part solved three episodes before the end; hair that comes and goes. I’m not going to lie, there have been times when I’ve been a bit muddled.
And there have been some fairly big asks along the way, not least Sophie going back as Alice, and the Websters’ – Sam’s at least – acceptance that she was their daughter. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?” was something said a few times in our house.
Yet it does all come together and make sense in the end. And suddenly events from previous episodes have a purpose: Sophie’s encounter with the friendly Swiss waiter for example – now he can point Baptiste in the right direction. No major holes, then. The only big question I have remaining is how Gettrick paid for the toy monkey when he had left his Swiss francs behind in Germany. Credit card? No, he’s far too canny to leave electronic footprints. Maybe he just bumped off the shopkeeper and bundled the body into the boot of the car. Again.
He – Derek Riddell’s Gettrick – has become more and more convincing since we learned who and what he really is: a monster driller-killer child abductor, but also a warped kind of family man. You can imagine Josef Fritzl or Ariel Castro having similar ideas of close-knit families. I think the Williams brothers did their research.
Keeley Hawes has been the standout performer, though: a mother’s pain personified. Her eventual reunion with her real daughter, alive, holding her tight, whispering “I’ve got you, I’ve got you now,” is very moving. I do have another question: is there a better television actor, more capable of wringing every last drop of humanness from a role, than Hawes?
It’s a fabulous final episode that builds and builds in stomach-clenching tension until Baptiste and the Websters cross the little bridge, enter the woods, find the van (where’s the Skoda by the way? Another question). It’s almost unbearable. There has already been one shot, but that was a false alarm: hare for tea for Adam, Sophie, little Lucy – maybe a bone or two tossed down to Alice in the cellar. Again, that served a purpose, we now know Gettrick has a high-powered hunting rifle.
This time he’s firing it at two-legged foes in a desperate last attempt to save his sick sort of family. Man down! Sam! And special forces, men in black, swarming the forest under the mountain. Little Lucy makes a run for it, is scooped up by a Swiss robocop. Her mother Sophie escapes to the top of a precipice, Julien lollops up. Noooo! Back off Baptiste, remember what happened when you tried to talk her mother down from a similar situation (nice symmetry, by the way).
I think Sophie’s going to jump just to get away from Baptiste’s bow-legged limp, his sing-song intonation and because he’s on the point of spewing out a François de la Rochefoucauld maxim: “Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes a candle and fans a fire.”
She doesn’t jump. It’s Sam who dies, to be interred in the same Eckhausen graveyard where he had earlier thought his daughter was buried (could the headstone be re-carved I wonder, to save a bit of cash?). At least he got to see her alive one more time. And made peace with his wife. Plus a bit of him is about to be born again, out of Staff Sergeant Stone’s bump. It’s a more than satisfactory ending – cat’s cradle complete, loose ends tied up, redemption. Not over-soppy though, thanks to Brigadier Stone and the Herzes.
And Baptiste? That’s a nice touch too, going in for his op, actually looking frightened for the first time, a countdown to blackness, but stubborn to the last, even to the anaesthetic. Final, but not necessarily the end for ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw Julien Baptiste again. Hope so, tout de suite.
