After everything went completely to hell on Last Seen S1E4, there really wasn’t anywhere for this story to go but straight into the wreckage.
Bill is dead. Ian is in the hospital. Jenna is bleeding out in the back of Henry’s car. Sarah has just watched the only family she’s ever known turn into something terrifying, and Deb is about to learn exactly what Ian’s obsession has cost them.
So naturally, Last Seen S1E5 slams on the brakes. And surprisingly, that’s exactly what “The Prophet” needed to do.
Instead of trying to top the insanity at the farm, Episode 5 takes us back 15 years and finally starts filling in the enormous hole at the center of this story: Who were Henry and Jenna before Maggie disappeared?
The answer doesn’t excuse what they did. It does, however, make this entire mess a hell of a lot sadder.
Henry Didn’t Become Henry Out of Nowhere
The biggest surprise is that Jenna wasn’t originally with Henry at all. She was Donnie’s girlfriend.
When Donnie brings Jenna home to his father’s isolated religious commune, she’s happy, hopeful and almost unrecognizable compared to the exhausted woman we’ve spent the season watching on that farm.
Donnie, meanwhile, is a disaster.
He’s drinking, gambling, lying and ultimately stealing from his father because what he really wants is money for a fishing boat. His return isn’t some spiritual homecoming. He needs something. And their father certainly doesn’t help.
He compares Donnie to Henry, praises Henry’s hard work while tearing Donnie down and then uses religion as another way of passing judgment. You can see exactly how these two brothers ended up screwed up in completely different directions.
Donnie reaches for a bottle whenever something hurts. Henry tries to control everything.
And there’s an interesting parallel there with Ian because Ian does the same thing Donnie does. When life becomes unbearable, alcohol is the escape hatch. It doesn’t solve anything, but for a moment, it makes whatever is happening easier to survive.
Jenna eventually has enough of Donnie’s drinking and refuses to leave the commune with him after he’s thrown out. That leaves her behind with Henry, and suddenly the life we’ve seen in the present starts making a lot more sense.
Jenna wasn’t looking for another disaster. She wanted something clean. Stable. A family. A place where she belonged.
For a while, she actually got it.
Before the Farm Became a Prison
Jenna and Henry fall in love, she gets pregnant, and Henry finally stands up to his father.
His father isn’t exactly thrilled that Henry has gotten an unmarried woman pregnant, and Henry unloads years of resentment before walking away from the commune with Jenna.
That matters.
Henry didn’t simply recreate his father’s world because he blindly believed in it. He rejected the man himself while carrying pieces of that world with him.
He and Jenna build their own isolated little life on property she inherited from an aunt. The farm struggles. Henry has to take a job in town. But Jenna believes in him.
More importantly, they’re happy.
And they have a daughter: Sarah.Yep.
The name Henry and Jenna gave Maggie belonged to their own little girl first.
The real Sarah dies in a horrible accident after climbing onto a wooden fence near the chicken coop and becoming impaled on the wire behind it.
It’s devastating.
Losing a child is something I wouldn’t wish on anybody. When my husband died unexpectedly when our son was five, I watched his mother lose her youngest child. She was in a daze for a long time and, honestly, I don’t think she ever completely accepted that he was gone.
So I could understand Jenna here.
She’s not functioning. She can’t even let Henry bury their daughter.
But Henry is grieving too, and he doesn’t really get to grieve because he’s trying to hold Jenna together while keeping their life going.
Then he washes a window at the police station and sees Maggie.
Understanding Henry Doesn’t Make What He Did Okay
This is where Last Seen gets uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
Little Maggie is sitting inside coloring while Ian is working. She’s friendly when Henry comes in and talks to her, and for a few moments you can almost see what Henry sees.
Sarah.
Not literally, obviously. But all that life and happiness he just lost is suddenly standing in front of him again.
You can understand why it overwhelms him. What you can’t understand is what happens next.
Henry sees Ian and Deb getting ready to go to a festival. He watches their house. He sees Dean distracted on the phone. And almost immediately, this grieving man has gone from seeing a little girl who reminds him of his daughter to deciding he’s going to take her.
That’s not grief anymore. That’s a choice.
And the kidnapping sequence may be the best thing in the episode. Ian and Deb are dancing at the festival. The music is going. People are having fun. Dean is laughing with his friend at home.
Meanwhile, Henry finds an open window into Maggie’s bedroom, and nobody knows that their lives are about to split in half.
Then Ian and Deb come home and discover Maggie is gone.
We already knew that, of course. We’ve known it all season.
But now it feels different because we’ve finally seen all four parents before the disappearance destroyed them.
Ian Still Hasn’t Learned a Damn Thing
Present-day Ian might be the person I’m angriest with after this episode.
He’s lying in a hospital bed after Bill was killed because Ian insisted on going to that farm, and the first thing consuming him is still getting Maggie back.
Pena tells him Deb knows Bill is dead. Ian says “fuck.” Then it’s right back to Maggie.
Dude.
Your friend is dead. Your wife has just lost someone she loves. You’re injured. Everybody around you has been dragged into this nightmare because you refuse to stop.
And Ian still cannot shift his focus.
Deb finally tells him exactly what he has become. Since Maggie disappeared, all she’s had is this man filled with rage. Bill’s death is the last line, and she never wants to see Ian again.
His response? He’s still going to get Maggie. Of course he is because he’s a selfish jerkoff.
What’s worse, he breaks into Deb’s house to get a gun, alienates Dean even further and eventually shows up at Donnie’s AA meeting pointing the gun at his face.
Did I say jerkoff? Maybe I meant asshole.
Ian is so convinced that bringing Maggie home will somehow make everything right that he can’t see how much destruction he’s causing in her name.
And that’s where he and Henry start looking disturbingly similar.
Henry destroyed one family because he believed taking Maggie would heal his. Ian is now willing to destroy whatever is left because he believes taking Maggie back will heal his.
Neither one is asking Maggie what she wants.
Sarah Already Made a Choice
That’s what makes Jenna’s part of the present-day story so important.
She’s badly injured and knows she may not make it. But she’s also the clearest-headed adult in that car.
She tells Sarah the truth that Henry can’t seem to face: what they did was wrong, and then tells her to leave. So Sarah does — for a moment.
Because when Henry returns and discovers she’s gone, he collapses. Sarah watches him from the trees — And she comes back.
That changes everything heading into the finale.
Sarah knows now that Henry and Jenna kidnapped her. She’s horrified by what happened at the farm. Jenna herself gave her permission to escape. And Sarah still chooses to return to the man who raised her.
Why wouldn’t she?
To Ian, she’s Maggie. To Henry, she’s Sarah.
To herself? That’s the question nobody seems interested in asking.
Henry and Jenna committed an unforgivable act, but they’re also the parents Sarah remembers. They’re the people who raised her and loved her for 15 years. You can’t erase that because Ian finally found the farm.
Sarah isn’t a missing little girl anymore.
She’s a young woman being torn between two lives, and everybody else is still behaving as though possession of her will determine who wins.
There isn’t going to be a winner here.
Two Fathers Heading Toward the Same Disaster
Ian’s next move is kidnapping Donnie at gunpoint and forcing him to take him wherever Henry might be going.
My guess? Back to the commune.
And if that’s where Henry is headed, Ian is about to charge armed into a closed religious community belonging to Henry’s father, where I seriously doubt anybody is going to greet him with coffee and directions.
No matter how angry Henry’s father may be with his sons, family is family.
So what exactly does Ian think he’s accomplishing?
He’s not a hero anymore. Maybe he hasn’t been one for a long time.
He’s a selfish bastard who has convinced himself that every terrible decision is justified because Maggie is at the end of it.
Henry did the same thing 15 years ago.
That’s what makes “The Prophet” such a smart follow-up to the insanity of Episode 4. It’s quieter and much more reflective, but it completely changes the shape of the story before the finale.
We understand Henry now. We understand Jenna much better. We finally see the Ian and Deb who existed before Maggie disappeared.
And somehow understanding all of them makes everything worse.
There is still one major piece missing: What happened when Henry actually brought Maggie home?
How did Jenna react when her grieving husband suddenly appeared with somebody else’s child? How did they go from mourning Sarah to raising Maggie as Sarah? Henry has claimed Ian and Deb were bad people, but nothing in this flashback supports that. Ian actually looks like a loving father before Maggie’s disappearance turns him into the angry man we’ve been watching all season.
Maybe the finale fills in that last blank.
It almost has to.
Because Ian is heading toward Henry again, Henry is presumably heading toward the world he once escaped, Jenna may be dying, and Sarah/Maggie is caught in the middle of two men who have spent 15 years making horrible decisions because they couldn’t live with losing a daughter.
This isn’t going to end well.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
“The Prophet” wisely doesn’t try to match the intensity of Last Seen S1E4. Instead, it shows us what brought everyone to that farm in the first place, and the perspective shift makes the story much more complicated.
Henry becomes understandable without becoming innocent. Ian becomes even harder to defend. Jenna finally gets the history she needed, and Sarah/Maggie emerges as the person whose feelings matter most even though almost nobody is asking what she wants.
It’s subdued, sad and clearly setting the table for the finale.
Considering where Ian is headed next, I doubt Last Seen plans to stay subdued for long.
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
