There were few people
more enraptured then me by Found, NBC’s scorching new thriller that
debuted last September. It resonated with me from the first minutes of the
episode and it made my top ten list of 2023. For the last ten months, like all
the viewers I have reeling from the last minutes of the season finale – when Gabi
Moseley (the peerless Shanola Hampton) finally revealed to her team what the
viewer has known since the pilot: that she has been holding Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar)
the man who kidnapped her and held her prisoner as a child twenty years ago as
a captive in her basement for almost a year, and worse that she has been using
him to help mind the missing persons they’ve been finding all this time.
The betrayal was
immediate: everyone (except Daan, who’d helped track him down in the first
players) walked out feeling utterly betrayed and more broken then they’d been
since Gabi found them. But Gabi couldn’t deal with that for long: she knew very
clearly that Sir was going to punish her team, which meant trying to kill them
all and track down Lacey, the other young girl he abducted and who he blames
for everything going wrong between himself and Gabi. The episode ended with Sir
in Lacey’s closest while she ignored calls from Gabi trying to warn her.
The Season 2 premiere takes
places seconds after Season 1 ended and Sir has followed through on his threat:
he attempted to poison every member of Gabi’s team and he has gone to Lacey’s
house where a violent struggle has taken place. The team has now reassembled
trying to find Lacey.
But the crisis has done
nothing to ease either the anger or feelings of betrayal. If anything they’re
far worse. Margaret (Kelli Williams, magnificent as always) is not only sickened
by Gabi’s betrayal, she knows Daan’s part in it and she loathes him as well.
When he confesses that he did so because he believed Gabi was going to kill
Sir, it does nothing to alleviate her rag and she has no use for his moral
calculus. If anything, the fact that Daan himself was held prisoner for three
years makes her think that he’s a bigger hypocrite then her. And Zeke, the
agoraphobic tech who was poisoned by Sir during the opening moments is quieter
but not less betrayed. When Dhan went to his apartment where he has secluded
himself since his abduction, he found a letter of resignation typed in his
computer. He deleted it based on the justification that he didn’t want Zeke to
make a rash decision but when Zeke heard it he was angrier than we’ve ever heard
him.
But the biggest
betrayal came from one I genuinely didn’t think was coming. Over the first
season Gabi and Trent (Brett Dalton) relationship has gone from adversarial to friendly
and nearly romantic. This couldn’t hold as long as Sir was in the basement but
I didn’t know if Gabi would tell. However in the season opener her hand was
forced when Trent sensed the division in the team and knew it was hurting the
manhunt for Sir who’d been spotted. Gabi told him – and his rage topped all the
others. Now he is questioning everything he thought he knew about Gabi and she
is in no position to defend herself because her position is indefensible. She
managed to stave him off temporarily because she believes she can still find
Lacey. But it’s clear that Trent now views Gabi with even more loathing then
before.
Perhaps the most
shocking thing of all involving Gabi is that there’s still a part of her that
can’t really tell how deep the damage she’s done is. During the season premiere
she managed to figure out clues to find how to reach Sir and rather than tell
anyone she went there on her own. Even now a part of her is still trying to
justify everything she does with Sir and no matter much she hurts everybody
around her doing so, there’s a part of her that won’t accept how much pain she’s
caused. In last night’s episode the team attempted to find a newborn who’d gone
missing from a hospital and it was essentially a disaster. Margaret’s ‘ability’
to read people was broken after everything that happened the last few days and
she made no secret telling Gabi such. When Gabi made her do a press conference –
in part because she was trying to follow a lead on Sir – and it was disastrous
for Margaret, she nevertheless chose to blame Margaret for what happened. She
then said she needed to follow the lead on Sir and Margaret had no quarter when
she made it clear the sick hold he still has on her. When Gabi tried to
interact with Trent, he utterly closed off from her and she doesn’t seem able
to understand why. When the baby was found and she tried to use her old way of
explaining why the culprits didn’t deserve punishment, Trent said icily: “You don’t
need to tell me how a monster thinks.”
At this point the only
person who doesn’t blame Gabi for what happened is Lacey’s mother. The flashbacks in Season 2
now involve Lacey as a child after the rescue and its clear she was more scarred
than Gabi was, unable to talk to her mother. But there was a good reason for
that: she saw Sir everywhere – and he was actually there. As we learned in the
horrible end moments of the first episode Sir has been following Lacey all her
life because he was sure he would lead her to Gabrielle. He claims that he isn’t
a killer and that he has no intention of killing Lacey until he gets what he
wants. But Sir is a sociopath and a psychopath and he knows how Gabi thinks. He
knows that as long as he hold a carrot in front of her, she will chase it and
right now he has the biggest one of all.
The wild card this
season is Christian Evans, Sir’s younger brother who we met for the first time
last night. Trent believes, understandably, that Christian has been helping his
brother all his life. Christian has been trying to prove his good intentions
and he went to Moseley and Associates to try and help. Margaret thought he was
helpful and genuine and he did lead them where Sir was hiding. It’s worth
noting that when Sir saw him in the footage of the press conference, he looked
genuinely afraid and upset for the first time since we met him – something that
nearly led to Lacey escaping.
But is it because Christian is his weak spot –
or is it because the apple didn’t fall far from the tree? We’ve already seen
that Sir’s mother was an abusive parent and that was a key factor in Sir
becoming who he was, even if it’s not an excuse. Christian is a grief counselor
which is a position that can be a caregiver or used to study human emotion. As
we learned last season Sir was Gabi’s teacher before he abducted her and spent
months manipulating her. Could Christian be playing a long game of his own? I
suspect that will be part of the backstory of Season 2 as well.
At the start of its
second season Found is everything it was last year and more so. It is
conceivable this situation will be resolved in the next few episodes, but there
will be no going back to the status quo. It may not even possible for the show
to do so given how much the foundation was ripped away at the end of last
season and looks no closer to being put back together. That’s one of the most
fearless things I’ve seen on network television: hell on any service in
the last few years. Even the greatest dramas in recent years have a certain
formula to them that they are willing to stick too and only change the closer they
come to the end (Succession is the most famous recent example). Found
has already torn up its foundation twice in the course of just fifteen
episodes and it very well may do so in the next few again. This may not be
groundbreaking television but it is bold and fearless. When you combine the
superb nature of the writing, directing and acting Found has all the
makings of a masterpiece.
My score: 5 stars.
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