As Found Ends Its First Season, I Realize The Basis of Its Protagonist

 

 

Note: Spoilers for Season 1 and the last two episodes of Found ahead.

 

As I watched the first season of Found which I named one of the best shows of 2023 I began to realize which protagonists Gabi Mosley, played scorchingly by Shanola Hampton have reminded me of. The go-to response would naturally be the African-American female warriors at the heart of Shondaland such as Olivia Pope or Annalyse Keating, but the writers are smarter than that.

It is only as the final two episodes have aired that I finally put together who Gabi is a conglomerate of: Jack Bauer and Ray Donovan. The comparisons to Kiefer Sutherland’s iconic character are pretty obvious: Gabi’s team are called vigilantes in the opening episode and vigilantes are all about the end justifying the means. Throughout Season 1, Gabi’s actions became increasingly harder to justify even by her own friends and associates as her behavior became increasingly reckless and destructive to those around her. Halfway through the season Trent (Brett Dalton)  the DC detective/frenemy of M & A nearly lost his job as a consequence of his working with her too closely and she had to encourage him to go back to it. It did not lead to an end to Gabi’s behavior as she has continuously become erratic and her friends are well aware she is lying to them.

The link to Ray Donovan is more obscure but it is there. Ray, like Gabi was traumatized immensely as a child due to an abusive relationship with a trusted associate (in his case, a parish priest) who spent months grooming and then molesting him. Ray spent the entire series unable to fully heal from his experience and spent the length of the series protecting the people he cared about but never sharing with them and always hurting them in the process. One can see the parallels between Gabi and Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar). We’re still not clear if there was any actual sexual abuse but the abduction and kidnapping for a year has traumatized her in a way that she has truly never moved past despite all outward appearances. This became very clear at the beginning of the penultimate episode when she revealed Sir’s presence to Dhan, one of her most trusted soldiers.

Dhan, we find out, spent months tracking Sir and lured him to the farmhouse at Gabi’s behest. But he did so under the expectation that Gabi was going to kill Sir – something he makes very clear, that at the time, he would have willingly done had she only asked. It doesn’t come as much of a shock that Gabi asked Daan to do so after her father died – he never recovered from the alcoholism that he fell into after she went missing twenty years earlier and she’s always blamed Sir for that. But Gabi can’t explain why she didn’t kill him herself. She calls Dhan because she clearly wants him to do so, and he says he’d not that person any more.

Dhan stays behind when the next case begins – and learns from Sir himself that he has spent the last eight months helping them find all the people they’ve rescued. Dhan is justifiably horrified and the fury he shows Gabi is absolutely merited. He reminds her in no uncertain terms that every case they have solved has been tainted by Sir and he clearly believes he is redeeming himself in her eyes. Sir confirms as much to her when Gabi confronts him later that same episode and Gabi still can’t bring herself to admit it.

I believe that is why Gabi, in the midst of the case, decides to make a public announcement daring a serial killer who abducts and murders young African-American woman to hunt her down. Part of me feels that when she is abducted by the killer she  needed that happen, that she was crying out for some kind of absolution.

The scene between Dhan and Sir is one of the highpoints of the entire first season. Dhan has come to him out of desperation but has no room for nonsense – he says if Sir doesn’t help him, he’ll put a bullet between his eyes. Gosselaar is just as magnificent: for the first time all season Sir is terrified for someone else. In his twisted mind, he believes he loves Gabi and he wants to help her. We leave him demanding to be released – but it’s not out of rage, it’s fear.

Gabi is eventually rescued, that’s not a shock either. But what makes the episode work is the final scene. Dhan acknowledges that desperation makes you do horrible things and mistake. But Gabi makes it just as clear that does not let her off the hook. For the first time in the series she acknowledges that a part of her has been doing this all this time because in her head, she’s still trying to prevent her own kidnapping. The episode ends with Gabi saying the next day she will go to her team and tell them the truth about Sir and then she will face the consequences of her actions. “We built something good here,” is her last line of the episode, “and tomorrow, it all changes.” This is a realization that it took Bauer and Donovan the length of the series to realize (and in both cases, it may have been on the point of death) and that I’m not sure Olivia Pope or Annalyse Keating ever did.

And indeed in the season finale it did – though not even Gabi could foresee that point. She clearly spent the night after her abduction and M & A and had a conversation with Trent. Trent is too good a detective not to have picked up on certain things – he revealed to Margaret that she always talks about ‘Sir’ in the present tense, which means he must suspect she knows something about his location – but he acquiesces when she tells him she wants to tell her friends first.

Then she comes home and finds what was both inevitable and horrific – Sir had escaped. When Daan came back to the basement prison, he assumed that he broke free assuming Gabi was in danger. Gabi was facing a more pertinent fear – she remembered all too well how Sir has promised he would kill Lacy if he were ever set free. Her first call was to Lacy – and then she learned that a cold case – the one in fact we saw Gabi publicizing in the pilot – had just come through an anonymous tip.

Gabi spent the entire episode doing everything in her power to keep it together to pursue this lead, something that she was unable to manage the entire case. Dhan spent the episode trying to find any lead on Sir and it quickly became clear to everybody – first Margaret, then Lacy – just how bad a job the two were doing at covering things up.

And when the case was resolved, it became clear that Gabi knew how trapped she was. Sir was the one who sent in the anonymous tip and had cleverly covered his tracks to make sure no one saw the footage of him in the train station where he’d found her. Gabi was forced to do what she had spent the season avoiding – reveal the truth.

The decision for us not to actually hear Gabi tell them was the right call –  we all know that there was nothing she could say that could excuse her behavior and nothing that could absolve her from her sins in their eyes. And that’s exactly what happened. Margaret walked out first, Zack shut off his screen and then Laci stormed out. Only Dhan is still in her corner at the end of Season 1 but we all know there is no guarantee of safety.

Because in the last minutes of the episode we saw that before Sir left he went out of his way to take some rat poison from Gabi. Throughout the episode we saw flashbacks to Gabi’s first day in Sir’s class, how quickly he was taken by her – and how ruthless he could be when it came to defend her. It was revealed Laci’s dog has been poisoned by the end of the episode.

The episode ends with the entire team isolated in various ways, all of them about to sit down to eat, in some cases alone. It’s hard to fathom that Sir has the ability, having just been released, to deliver a message to every member of Gabi’s team – aside from Dhan and Laci, there’s no indication he knows about any of the others, much less had the ability to find where they lived. But we all know that’s not the point of those final shots;  because in the last shot of the episode we see that Sir has every intention of keeping his promise – and the one person who knows this for certain is the last person Laci wants to talk to.

I think the episode’s flashbacks are as much proof of the parallel between Gabi and Ray Donovan. Even the first day they meet, it is clear that Sir is exactly the kind of predator that prays on the innocent. It’s still not clear if there were previous victims before Gabi walked into his classroom (I’m hoping we find out in Season 2) but as we saw in the scenes in school, Sir spent years being able to build up a façade and was capable of lying to the faces of the parents of the children he abducted.

The series was renewed for a second season at the end of 2023 so we know the current status quo can not remain. It is likely the team will rebuild in Season 2, though how they can recover from this betrayal is impossible to imagine at this point. Gabi will no doubt have to explain why she did had Dhan track Sir and why she couldn’t kill him, and it is possible that forgiveness might be doable for some members of the team – but even then, it may take an entire season to rebuild.

And even they do manage that, it remains to be seen how Trent will deal with it.  It’s nearly inevitable he will learn the truth – there’s a very good chance that may be how the cliffhanger is resolved – but then what? Trent has been willing to bend a lot of rules during his interactions with M & A but it is nearly impossible to imagine him letting this go and remaining a cop. I suspect at some point in the series maybe not next season, Trent will end up working with M & A permanently (that’s usually how these formulas work). But it will take far more effort to rebuild whatever trust he and Gabi built up this past season.

I have been grateful for the existence of Found for many reasons the past several months. First because it is one of the only new shows in a sea of reruns and even after the strike was resolved, we will likely not be getting any new network series at all until this coming fall. But it very quickly proved its merits as more than a fill-in show. Found, along with Will Trent and So Help Me Todd, have proven that there is life in network television beyond the revival and the procedural. I will be waiting eagerly to – well, find, how the next season plays out.