Apple TV and I have a complicated relationship. I like Slow Horses. A lot. I like Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and Severance. But for one of the more expensive streaming services, I barely watch the thing.
Then Prime Day sucked me back in with a $5.99-a-month deal, I never canceled, and here we are.
That makes Apple TV prime Trial by Stream territory. New shows are the crown jewel around here because I can usually tell within one episode whether something deserves another hour of my life. Occasionally I get surprised. The Rainmaker did it. Even You’re Killing Me over on Acorn managed to drag itself back from an episode I nearly shut off.
Now Last Seen gets its turn.
And when S1E1: “The Dispatcher” opened with a guy and his dogs stumbling across human remains in the woods, I wasn’t exactly optimistic.
A dog finding bones in a murder mystery? Somewhere, a television cliché just collected another royalty check.
The Mystery Isn’t Really the Hook
Fortunately, Last Seen gets much more interesting once it stops being about the bones and starts being about Ian Ridley.
Patrick Brammall, who played Andy Bouchard on Evil — another show that never should have been canceled — plays Ian, an emergency dispatcher in a small coastal town whose three-year-old daughter Maggie disappeared 11 years earlier. He’s also a former cop, a recovering alcoholic and a man who has never really moved beyond the night his daughter vanished.
His ex-wife Deb (Jessica Wren) has remarried and is expecting another child with Bill (Bert LaBonté), a local cop. Ian hasn’t even managed to give Deb the old crib she wants for the new baby. He keeps finding excuses, because the crib is still sitting in Maggie’s room alongside the files from the search for her.
That’s really where Last Seen hooked me.
Ian isn’t simply Sad Brooding Man #4,872 wandering around in muted prestige lighting. His grief has calcified into an entire way of living. He’s difficult. He’s obsessive. He can be an asshole. And once the possibility emerges that the remains in the woods could belong to a child, every bit of control he’s managed to build starts cracking.
Brammall makes it difficult not to empathize with him even when Ian is doing something spectacularly stupid.
And there are plenty of those moments.
Ian Knows Just Enough to Be Dangerous
As a former cop, Ian knows enough to start conducting his own investigation, but he’s also far too emotionally involved to conduct one rationally. When Maggie’s pajamas — the ones she was wearing the night she disappeared — turn up near the remains, Ian becomes convinced that a shady local named Mulligan must know something.
Mulligan is hiding something. It just isn’t what Ian wants it to be.
His connection to the remains involves illegal dog fighting, and he has an airtight alibi for Maggie’s kidnapping. Ian doesn’t care. He wants somebody to blame because blaming somebody is easier than going back to having absolutely nothing.
That’s an important distinction, and it’s one of the reasons the episode works. Ian isn’t presented as some renegade genius running circles around a bunch of idiot cops. Detective Isabel Peña (Zahra Newman) has every reason to be irritated when he barges into her investigation, and Ian’s former colleagues aren’t dragging their feet simply because the plot needs obstacles. The remains have barely been discovered. DNA results take time.
Ian just can’t tolerate time anymore.
He’s already lost 11 years to it.
Eleven Years of Grief Comes Crashing Back
The pilot understands that the mystery isn’t occurring separately from Ian’s grief. Everything starts colliding at once: the remains, Maggie’s pajamas, Deb’s pregnancy, his resentment toward Bill, his guilt over the night Maggie disappeared and a domestic violence call that Ian handled at work.
That call initially seems like standard emergency-dispatch material. A terrified mother named Tyra is trying to protect her child from an abusive ex, and Ian takes over when fellow dispatcher Polly (Taylor Ferguson) can’t handle it. But Ian can’t leave the situation at work. He later drives past Tyra’s house to make sure she’s okay, and after the Maggie investigation sends him spiraling, he becomes fixated on Tyra and her family.
It’s not heroic.
Ian relapses, gets drunk as f*ck and follows them to a festival keeping a tire iron ready in his car. When Tyra’s ex becomes aggressive, Ian intervenes and nearly kills him.
That’s where Last Seen could have lost me by turning Ian into the usual tortured antihero whose terrible behavior we’re supposed to excuse because he’s hurting. Instead, the episode lets him be wrong.
His AA sponsor, Donald Reid (Daniel Henshall), essentially tells him that if Ian wants to destroy his own life, that’s his business. He doesn’t have the right to destroy somebody else’s along with it.
Ian knows Donald is right.
And suddenly the crib matters.
Ian takes it to Deb’s house. He sees the funeral brochures she’s already begun collecting. He tells her he’s ready to help if the remains really are Maggie’s. For the first time, it looks as though Ian might be willing to accept that the nightmare he’s lived inside for 11 years is ending, even if it ends in the worst possible way.
The episode also finally tells us what happened the night Maggie disappeared, but smartly waits until Ian is ready to talk about it. He and Deb had gone to a festival while three-year-old Maggie stayed home with her 16-year-old half-brother. When they returned, Maggie was gone.
Ian has blamed himself ever since.
You could technically call the conversation an exposition dump. It doesn’t feel like one because there’s a reason we’re hearing it now. The pilot doesn’t hand us Ian’s tragic biography in the opening ten minutes and expect us to care. It lets us live with him first. By the time he finally talks about Maggie, the pajamas, the remains, the alcohol and the festival have ripped open everything he’d spent years trying to contain.
Even the recurring shots of the ocean work better in that context. Like seemingly every modern drama, Last Seen has that polished but muted look where even a beautiful coastline appears to have had some of the life drained out of it. Here, though, the crashing gray-blue waves almost become an extension of Ian. Everything he’s kept buried is hitting him at once.
The Mystery Just Changed
Henry Reid (Brendan Cowell), a maintenance worker we’ve seen around the police station, returns to his isolated home with his wife Jenna (Maxine Peake) and their daughter. Henry has already seemed strangely uncomfortable around Ian and Donald, although at the time there’s no obvious reason to give it much thought.
Ian, meanwhile, finally decides to throw away the bottle that’s been tempting him.
As papers from Maggie’s old case file flutter away, we see the progression of age-enhanced drawings showing what she might look like after 11 years.
The final drawing looks remarkably like Henry and Jenna’s daughter.
Well. How about that.
Suddenly the pilot isn’t asking the question I thought it was asking.
If this girl really is Maggie, then finding her doesn’t solve anything. It blows up two families.
Why does Henry have her? Does Jenna know who she really is? What’s Henry’s relationship with Donald? Earlier, Donald asked Henry why he hadn’t been invited to the girl’s birthday party, a conversation that barely registers when it happens. After that ending, it becomes a hell of a lot more interesting.
Most importantly, what happens to Maggie?
She’s spent virtually her entire life believing Henry and Jenna are her parents. Ian and Deb have spent 11 years wanting nothing more than to get their daughter back. Those two realities can’t simply be smashed together with a happy reunion and some swelling music.
It actually reminded me of a Fantasy Island episode where a man wants to reclaim the wife and child who moved on after believing he died in Vietnam. Mr. Roarke forces him to confront something much harder than getting his old life back: whether getting what he wants is really what’s best for the people he loves.
Last Seen has wandered into similar territory.
Ian thinks his story is about finding out whether his daughter died 11 years ago.
The audience now knows it may be about what happens if he gets exactly what he’s wanted all along.
That’s a much better story.
🔥 Our Verdict: Watchable
Last Seen takes a familiar missing-child mystery and makes it work by giving us someone worth following through it. Ian is grieving, angry, self-destructive and capable of making terrible decisions, but Patrick Brammall makes him impossible to dismiss. Then the final reveal turns the entire mystery sideways: finding Maggie may be the beginning of the real problem, not the end of it. I didn’t tap out, this episode didn’t get anywhere near the River of Molasses, and now I actually want Episode 2 — desperately. This one’s definitely going on the watchlist — where the pile just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
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