Spoiler alert: this article assumes you’ve seen the finale of The Missing, which aired on 30 November. Please don’t read on if you haven’t.
That was as close to a happy ending as we were likely to get from The Missing, which has finished after eight weeks of unbearably tense, unimaginably grim action. The death count was lower than I had expected – farewell, Sam, at least you lived long enough to see your daughter and admit, at last, that you were wrong – and almost every loose end was tied up. And what a series it has been, easily one of the best British crime dramas since the first series of Broadchurch.
The finale opened with a descent into Adam Gettrick’s now-empty underground bunker, where Alice, Sophie and Lena (whose body was in the shed, not Alice’s, after Stone Sr planted dodgy DNA evidence) were kept prisoner for years. Sophie had been freed to get treatment for a burst appendix; Gettrick had recruited Henry Reed and Adrian Stone to help him by blackmailing them about the young girl they had killed in Iraq during the first Gulf war. (An aside – when Gettrick talked about “the girls we were with back then”, was he implying that Stone, too, might have been a paedophile?) Revealing Gettrick as the villain at the end of episode five was a risk but there were still so many pieces to put together, such a thorny army conspiracy to unravel, that it didn’t dull the impact in the slightest.
In the present day, Baptiste and Gemma went about not disturbing the crime scene by spreading Gettrick’s post all over the dining room table. The Missing has had its daft moments, but intuiting where the Swiss bolthole was, based on a picture of the cabin he’d passed on the wall, was one of Baptiste’s more impressive feats. There were a few points, in fact, that stretched credulity – the entire appendix plot was as mind-bogglingly silly as it was cruel, and the fact that Baptiste happened to be looking at a picture of Sophie on his phone just as the waiter who asked her out happened to be serving them and looking over his shoulder was a coincidence too far.
Despite the “sod it, let’s get to the action” leaps, it worked brilliantly, and that’s down to two key factors. It’s been hugely entertaining to try to crack the mystery of which character fits with which misdeed, and the tension has been expertly cranked up throughout the series. When Sam, Gemma and Baptiste were approaching the cabin – while Gettrick had a woodsaw in his hands, and we all know what he’s like with a toolbox – it was so stressful that it became difficult to watch. “We don’t need to rush,” said Baptiste, wobbling at the last. He wasn’t the only one.
Primarily, though, it’s been such a success because we’ve ended up caring so deeply about the characters. Even the moment when the framed butcher was freed, and walked in the opposite direction to his doubting wife, completing Gettrick’s revenge on his superior officer, was heartbreaking. I hadn’t expected Alice to make it out alive, nor be reunited with her family. To hear Gemma talk of her as “doing so well” at the end was surprisingly emotional, as was her scene at Sam’s funeral with Eve. A lesser show might have made their relationship into a rivalry, but it was touching and complex, and felt true to the story. The entire cast has been phenomenal but Keeley Hawes and Laura Fraser really held it together, with their muted pain and resilience – along with the ever-intuitive Tchéky Karyo as Baptiste, of course.
There was one ending left open, aside from the long-lasting psychological impact on little Lucy of seeing a man get his head drilled in: whether Baptiste would survive his brain surgery to crack another case. The anaesthetic didn’t knock him out at first, because this is a man so tough he can divine locations from old photographs and will travel to Isis-held territory with an advanced brain tumour to get the answers he seeks. But I suspect he will make it out alive; there are plenty more bad guys to catch, after all.
