There is absolutely nothing easy or ordinary about the Batista-Grant family these days.
For one, Alert: Missing Persons Unit Season 1 Episode 7 gave us a case featuring The Walking Dead’s Emily Kinney that felt so on the news it practically BEGGED Nikki and Jason to open their eyes about Keith. But also, both Grant children revealed some game-changing secrets.
At this rate, we may need a whole episode dedicated to the family drama unfurling.
Emily Kinney pulling double duty as Shannon and Georgia, estranged twins with opposing rags versus riches experiences, was an intriguing albeit predictable case.
The hour might have been stronger with the twists and turns of the case if we hadn’t known, going into the hour based on the synopsis, that it would involve a twin.
That small detail made it relatively easy to piece together what would happen as the hour played out. It also served as a nice parallel to the primary storyline regarding Keith’s real identity.
From the second that we learned Shannon was a twin and that her sister had a privileged life compared to Shannon’s traumatic and abusive past, it was apparent how things would unfold.
It’s a common enough trope for identical twin stories where one person will go as far as to kill the other to take over their life completely. In that regard, it was akin to a Lifetime thriller but lacked some of the thrills.
The nods at how much nature can impact the course of one’s life were on full display, and the twins were the perfect test study for that.
Everything about them was the same, their appearance, musical inclinations and gifts, and even some personality traits. Georgia was set up for a life of success because of the pure luck of a nicer family adopting her.
And Shannon suffered most of her life because she was in a worse-off home with a mother who battled addiction and an abusive stepfather.
It’s a cruel twist of fate but speaks to the privilege hierarchy. Simply being wealthy and having a better education and more access led to Georgia having a far better, healthier, and more successful life.
Shannon was the woman who still had to work minor jobs to get studio time because she couldn’t afford it. She carried years worth of trauma, resentment, frustration, and anger.
She coincidentally also had the worse-off medical history, be it broken bones or diabetes (and there are fascinating studies about the correlation between social and economic class, among other factors, with this disease).
In that regard, despite her talent and capability, she was the defective twin — it didn’t matter when Georgia existed. But she also could orchestrate an elaborate plot that put her exactly in her sister’s life, thus improving her own, which is a privilege others can’t do.
No, I didn’t kill my sister. I took what was rightfully mine!
Ironically, privilege manages to be a fixated baseline with a sliding scale.
Shannon had every motivation to want her sister’s life, especially regarding their similar goal of becoming first chair of the orchestra.
Understanding how Shannon could’ve felt when she met her twin sister for the first time and wondered if they had only been switched, she’d have been in a better position making it easy to predict how this storyline played out.
The second we saw Georgia’s body in the ravine, even thinking about that note in the phone, it was apparent Shannon took her sister’s life and stepped into her shoes.
We spent the rest of the hour waiting for the MPU to catch up to that conclusion. Ideally, we hoped Nikki and Jason potentially reflecting on the insanity of this case when they were trying to pinpoint what was wrong with Sydney and make sense of her issues with Keith.
Shannon’s scathing indictment of Lydia while posing as Georgia was the moment that tipped the scales. I’m grateful they found enough probable cause to search the apartment.
Georgia wasn’t a perfect person. It was disappointing to learn that she, too, embarked on her own journey of dabbling with a different life by taking a walk on the wild side with her affair with Rory.
But from what we know, she genuinely cared about her sister until she discovered that Shannon killed Rory. And the second Shannon sensed her sister’s disapproval; she enacted her plan of stealing her life and not looking back.
Kudos to Luke for knowing from Shannon’s behavior in the car and their kiss that she wasn’t who she purported to be. Does that mean for a full day or so, they hadn’t shown affection once?
Nikki: So our missing person just became the prime suspect in a murder?
Mike: Yup.
Nikki: Who do I tell first? The grieving mom or the agonized sister?
It was crazy how he didn’t notice Shannon’s insulin pump or that she thought he’d buy into the notion that she had gotten it in the hours or day since they had been close to each other.
Mike struggling to figure out if he should even put Shannon on the Found board or not was understandable.
Some of his feelings about where he factors into Nikki and the kids’ life do as well. And Jason is someone who lacks boundaries, and it’s a necessary conversation to have.
But the whole key thing felt weird. The fact of the matter is that it’s challenging to have a routine established and suddenly expect it to change.
Jason has always been Jason. You get a sense of that often with his and Nikki’s interactions. It doesn’t feel out of the norm that he’d have a key to his old house where his kids reside and enter as he pleases.
It’s actually weirder that he had to resort to using a hideaway key that Nikki never really tries to hide instead of just giving him his own.
Sure, some things have to be worked out, but it was a conversation that either Nikki and Jason should’ve had on their own or they should’ve had with Mike as a group.
Mike’s feeling out the room to see if a conversation took place, essentially tipping Jason off that he was discussed and one was pending, was tacky.
When it comes to our children, we see what we want to see.
Nikki
And anytime Nikki approaches things about their weird dynamic as a trio, she has a way of making it seem like Mike coerced or influenced her into saying or doing something she didn’t want to, like that “my husband said” lady, which doesn’t feel true to Nikki at all.
On the one hand, it appears like she throws Mike to the wolves, and he has to shoulder all the blame as she hides behind him. On the other hand, it invalidates Mike’s feelings when it seems like she only gives in to things to appease him but not because she understands his viewpoint.
Nikki suddenly talked about schedules, and all that felt unfair when for the most part, what she and Jason have been doing thus far has worked.
More than anything, she needs to incorporate Mike more, not shift things, so Jason is less prevalent.
Mike understood this, so the moment with Jason at the end worked. But it also felt pointless. Why all that drama when not much will change and a simple talk would’ve been sufficient for everyone?
And it’s still irritating that Mike doesn’t get much interaction with the kids. After they made telling the kids about the engagement such a significant conflict, it was disappointing that it took place entirely offscreen.
Sydney’s muted reaction was mainly because the Keith situation overshadows everything else for her. And Keith seeming happy about it felt hollow because we don’t know enough to guess what reactions he’d have to these changes or Mike.
Nikki needs to better balance her reactions to Keith with those to Sydney. Yes, Sydney is a lot, and her open hostility toward Keith is something to behold. Nikki’s response to Sydney is annoying.
You told me your secret truth, now I’m going to tell you mine. You’re not the only one who left somebody behind.
Keith
They have typical mother/daughter tension. But Nikki has been trying to figure out if something is wrong with Sydney instead of trying to make sense of if there’s something more to Keith.
Why on earth would Sydney keep such a secret for so many years? Her fear that her parents would kick her out or be angry at her if they knew she “killed” her brother is valid enough, but how do you go six years keeping such a secret and then not coming out with the truth the second Keith returns?
She’s spending too much time being pissy at her parents for believing that their son is alive when she holds the key to the truth. Why resent them so much when you’re lying?
She missed her window with being honest the second he came back. Now that she’s dumped this into their laps, it’s hard to say how they’ll react.
Nikki may still be resistant, despite the case she just worked on that could give her a clue of what’s happening.
But Jason may be more receptive after the car thing. It bothered him when Keith couldn’t recall anything about the car they were working on before he disappeared.
He couldn’t recite any of the facts and figures either, and that’s the type of information that can prattle around in your head, stored away without you even realizing it.
It’s unlikely he’d forget everything about something he was passionate about for years.
His relationship with Oliver is fruitful. The drag racing incident was nerve-wracking, and those kids were awful busting that windshield like that.
It stung more when it was evident Keith didn’t have the same emotional attachment to the car and what it represented.
But Keith’s conversation with Oliver was interesting. Oliver revealed that while he escaped, he left behind the person he was supposed to run with, which must haunt him.
He escaped while their captor was with the other person, so that level of survival of the fittest probably messes with his head, and he’s likely guilty all the time about who he left behind.
It prompted Keith to open up too. While it doesn’t sound like he’ll admit who he really is or that he’s pretending, there were more like him, and he’s left someone he loves behind, too.
But I’m curious about the timeline of everything. If Sydney believes that she’s responsible for Keith’s death, and he perhaps drowned in that lake when they were out at night, when would Keith have met this impostor?
Imposter Keith has a lot of intel, as if he got it from the source directly. When could that of happened?
It was easier to theorize when we assumed that Keith got taken in the middle of the night. The Sydney portion of this, where she feels she killed her brother and the lake situation, makes it hard to pinpoint the truth.
Sydney: The reason why I put locks on my door, and I don’t call him Keith, and the reason why I resent him for being able to drive a car that my brother loved and adored is because he is not my brother.
Nikki: We know that you feel that way, but how can you possibly be so sure?
Sydney: Because I killed my brother.
Additional Notes:
- I would still love more screen time with Keith as he’s coping with the threats from his captor and the anxiety and trauma responses he exhibits on occasion.
- C and Rachel would be a cute couple, but what precisely is C struggling with that is holding him back this much? Is it just general social anxiety?
- What if Kemi’s love ritual she suggested to C worked and led him exactly to who it was supposed to: Kemi?
- We were back to excessive Kemi quirks in full form. Was Shannon just randomly playing violin in the MPU office?
- C is close to figuring out the identity of the lake boy. Kemi already said he’s starting to look familiar.
- What exactly is going on with Jason and June? A few moments in this installment, he seemed to imply that he never got over Nikki.
Over to you, Alert Fanatics. What did you think of Sydney’s bombshell revelation? Who do you think Keith left behind? Did you predict the twin twist? Sound off below!
You can watch Alert: Missing Persons Unit online here via TV Fanatic.
Jasmine Blu is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on Twitter.