There are two people who desperately need the truth in Last Seen S1E2: “The Call,” and I’m not sure either one is prepared for what happens when they finally get it.
Sarah seems happy with the Reids. They clean vegetables from the garden together, watch movies together and appear, at least on the surface, to have built a perfectly ordinary family life.
Except nothing about Sarah’s life is ordinary.
She’s never left the farm. She isn’t in school. She’s not allowed to make friends. When somebody visits, she disappears. The outside world has essentially been turned into something she’s supposed to fear.
And somehow, the Reids have convinced her this is normal.
That’s what makes Sarah’s story more interesting than simply waiting for Ian to find his missing daughter. The girl he lost eleven years ago isn’t frozen in time waiting for him to rescue her. Sarah loves the people she believes are her parents.
I wondered about that after Last Seen S1E1: “The Dispatcher.” What happens if Ian finds Maggie and she doesn’t experience it as a rescue?
“The Call” starts making that question considerably more complicated.
Sarah’s World Is Starting to Crack
Tommy sees the problem before Sarah can fully articulate it herself. When he learns she’s never left the farm, his reaction is basically the obvious one: You’re a prisoner.
Sarah doesn’t see herself that way. Not yet.
But Tommy gives her something ridiculously ordinary — a little music player — and even that feels enormous because her world has been kept so deliberately small.
Then she sees part of the flyer for Maggie’s vigil.
Suddenly there’s something tugging at her memory. The name Mags. Scratching it into a tree when she was little. A place only about 40 minutes away.
The Reids can burn the flyer, keep her isolated and continue telling themselves they’re protecting her, but the whole charade is beginning to collapse under its own weight. And Henry seems to know it.
His behavior increasingly feels less like a father protecting his daughter and more like a man trying to contain evidence. When his brother Donald shows up, Henry can barely hide how rattled he is.
That connection feels like a ticking bomb.
Ian Is His Own Worst Enemy. Again.
Meanwhile, Ian and Deb are told that the remains found by police show evidence of strangulation, although DNA hasn’t yet confirmed that the victim is Maggie.
Ian is ready to believe it anyway.
That’s one of the things Last Seen continues to do well with him. Ian desperately wants certainty, even when certainty doesn’t exist. On “The Dispatcher” he was destroying himself over the possibility that Maggie might still be alive. Now he’s preparing to mourn her without even waiting for identification.
But then the investigation shifts.
A road connected to the search didn’t exist when Maggie disappeared, convincing Ian that whoever took her may have been local. He starts questioning Dean again about the man who came to the door the night Maggie vanished.
Ian’s trajectory changes almost instantly. If Maggie was dead, then he’d find the killer.
Except Maggie isn’t the body that was found.
Det. Pena arrives before the vigil with the DNA results, and Ian can’t process them. He’s spent eleven years living with uncertainty, finally convinced himself he was about to get an ending, and suddenly the ending disappears too.
Pena isn’t telling him Maggie is alive. She still believes Maggie is probably dead. But Ian has lost the one thing he thought he finally had: an answer.
And that’s when he starts making shitty decisions again.
He refuses to cancel the vigil because he believes the kidnapper might attend. He doesn’t tell Deb about the DNA results. He has Dean scanning the crowd for the stranger he remembers from childhood.
And then Pena tells Deb herself, fully thinking that Ian has already told her because he told her he’d tell Deb himself. Of course, we knew the minute those words came out of his mouth that he had no intention of doing that.
So, once again Ian gets caught lying to his ex-wife during what is already an emotionally brutal night and then promptly takes his anger out on Dean once she and Bill blow up.
Ian’s a mess. He knows he’s a mess. And when he decides to return to work afterward, his reasoning says everything: if he goes home, he’s going to drink.
Ian may be sober, but Last Seen isn’t pretending sobriety magically fixed the way he deals with pain.
Sarah Finally Sees the World
Sarah’s rebellion couldn’t come at a worse — or better — time.
She sneaks away with Tommy and sees things most people wouldn’t think twice about: a town, a motorcycle, strangers, a party.
For Sarah, it’s practically another planet.
She’s terrified and fascinated at the same time, which makes complete sense for someone who’s spent her entire remembered life being taught that leaving the farm is dangerous.
Then she gets drunk.
Normally, a teenage character getting hammered at a party would barely register with me. Here, it feels genuinely dangerous because Sarah has absolutely no frame of reference for any of this.
And unfortunately, a guy at the party named Doma notices.
After separating her from Tommy, he tries to take advantage of her while she’s already tipsy from champagned she shared with Tommy, giving her more alcohol, which makes her even more vulnerable than she was before. Sarah manages to get away, but not before seeing something far more destabilizing than anything at the party: The full vigil flyer.
This time she sees the photograph. Her parents. Her brother. Herself.
The memories that have been flickering around the edges suddenly start coming faster. Mags. The tree. The night she disappeared. So Sarah runs because like with Ian, all these things start crashing together.
And Then Comes the Call
This is probably the most logical thing anyone would do.
Drunk, frightened, alone and wandering through a world she’s barely experienced, Sarah finds a payphone and calls emergency dispatch. It ramps up the tension, but it’s also one of those moments that doesn’t quite make sense. If everything outside the farm is new to her, how would she know how to use a payphone — or even what the emergency number means when she sees it?
But I’ll forgive the skip in logic because she dials the number anyway, and who answers? Ian. Of all the people who could have taken that call, it’s him, not entirely a shocking turn of events.
She tells him her name is Sarah. Then she says maybe it’s Mags.
And Ian knows. Or at least he believes he knows with every fiber of his being.
After spending most of the episode preparing himself for Maggie’s death, Ian suddenly hears a young woman on the other end of the phone who may actually be his daughter.
The episode doesn’t drag the moment out unnecessarily, either. Ian figures out where she is and runs.
For once, Last Seen isn’t interested in making me wait six episodes for two storylines to almost intersect.
Ian gets finally gets there, but Sarah is gone.
Doma has been watching her so who knows what happened. Son of a bitch.
🔥Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
“The Call” is exactly what I wanted after “The Dispatcher.”
The mystery keeps moving, but more importantly, Sarah/Maggie is moving. She’s experiencing the outside world, questioning what she’s been told, recovering pieces of her memory and beginning to understand that something about her life is terribly wrong.
Ian remains a disaster, which is considerably more interesting than turning him into the heroic father who always makes the right decision. He lies to Deb. He lashes out at Dean. He nearly reaches for the certainty of Maggie’s death because uncertainty has become unbearable. And now their worlds have finally touched.
Sarah doesn’t completely know who she is yet. Ian doesn’t actually know that the caller was Maggie.
But after eleven years, father and daughter have spoken to each other. That was one hell of a phone call.
Read All Our Last Seen Season 1 Coverage
- Last Seen S1E1: The Dispatcher
- Last Seen S1E2: The Call
- Last Seen S1E3: The Lie
- Last Seen S1E4: The Truth
- Last Seen S1E5: The Prophet
- Last Seen S1E6: The Choice
