It’s been 11 years since Ian Ridley lost his beloved daughter, Maggie, aka Mags, when she was a small child, and he has never forgiven himself.
Who could blame him? She didn’t die. She was taken. While death would bring closure, not knowing what happened can sometimes be worse.
Nobody wants their child to die, and dealing with a child’s death must be enormously painful, but clinging to hope that may never come is a different kind of pain.
Every phone call, every waking moment, really, would mean wondering if she’s OK. If her body will be found. If she will be found alive. It’s unimaginable.
While Ian’s ex, Debbie, has moved on, remarried, and is pregnant, Ian chose to help others on their worst days as a 000 (Aussie equivalent of 9-1-1) dispatcher.
Ian cares about the people on the other end of the line. He’d be a great addition to 9-1-1 because he doesn’t just take calls; he follows up when he feels someone is in danger. Whether this is across the board or only when children are involved because of his own experience, I don’t know.
What we do know is that he cares, and what he’s gone through has affected him dramatically.
That’s how he got wind of a seemingly unrelated incident that got his head spinning. When the remains of a small child were found in the forest, Ian was ready. His coworkers know him well enough to give him a heads-up.
After 11 years, Ian has his first lead, and he also has a new headache: Senior Sergeant Isabel Pena, who doesn’t like the idea of a former police officer, especially one who lost his small child, poking around her case.
But it’s not just a case for Ian, and how quickly she ushered him away from the location annoyed me. Nobody else noticed the dog prints, or if they did, they hadn’t processed it yet.
Maybe it’s Patrick Brammall‘s portrayal that makes it impossible for me to just let him walk away without getting more from the scene. No matter what he is in, he’s so damn compelling.
He worked utter miracles with what was supposed to be a side character on Evil, and his work with his wife on Colin from Accounts is an entirely different level. He’s charismatic and can seemingly do heavy drama, macabre dark comedy, and straight comedy.
Instead of seeing his gung-ho response to the body and the scene as going too far, I see his ex’s response as not going far enough. We all deal with trauma differently. For me, I need answers. Ian is the same.
He couldn’t sit around when that discovery was made any more than he could when he heard about a man potentially abusing a child. He needs to act. If he fell in line, he wouldn’t have found Mags’ pajamas.
But the quest to find out whodunit wasn’t the direction Last Seen was going. Ian had 48 hours to spiral before they discovered the body didn’t match, and in those 48 hours, Ian almost fell over the edge.
It’s easy to understand why Ian focused on the abusive father. Imagine having lost your child. Knowing another father could abuse the beautiful child he has would be unbearable.
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The most surprising thing about that 48-hour spiral was how he remained upright and more or less effective after drinking so much. But the drunken episode also gave us greater insight into what happened to Mags.
Ian blames himself, but he didn’t always. His son Dean was home watching Mags while Ian and Deb went out for the night. That night and its aftermath have driven him away from Dean. When Dean learned about the remains, he didn’t call his dad, but he visited Deb.
That says a lot about Ian’s last 11 years and suggests that he can drink so much because he spent the first five years after Mags’ loss drinking. His sober app showed he had been sober for six years before the remains were found.
His first move might have been to return to the bottle, but his friend Donnie hopes that he’ll remember what saved him the last time — the ocean. He’s got people who care about him, and he should be grateful.
And finally, he saw an end in sight. If the DNA tests matched, he could put it all behind him — everything but the memories of the child he loved and the family that was once his reason for existing.
But the events of Last Seen Season 1 Episode 1 were a tease that led to the introduction of Sarah, Donnie’s brother Henry’s child. Henry, who had looked awfully skeevy when they briefly discussed Ian earlier in the premiere.
Last Seen Season 1 Episode 2 dropped us into Henry’s kitchen, where his wife Jenna and daughter Sarah were cooking. They seemed like the ideal family — until, while they were watching TV, an alarm sounded, and Sarah was ushered upstairs to hide.
You don’t hide your daughter from the public if everything is hunky dory. And thus, Last Seen exploded into entirely different territory, much like we were promised in the trailer.
Something in that family wasn’t right. They weren’t just happy homesteaders who preferred to homeschool their child. They were hiding something.
The investigation fired up, too. Isabel’s eyes were fresh, and something that seemed to amount to nothing 11 years ago caught her attention — someone knocked on the door the night Dean was babysitting, under the guise of visiting the wrong house.
But what if it was the right house, and he was casing it to take Maggie?
I’m surprised that wasn’t an avenue Ian traveled repeatedly over the years. It’s too consequential. You watch enough true crime, and you know those things are rarely, if ever, a coincidence.
It’s about as much of a coincidence as the fact that Sarah has never had a friend in her life and has no understanding of the world outside of her little slice of the forest.
She’s only coming out of her shell because they got a new neighbor, and she got what could be her first friend in Tommy.
Parents don’t get that freaked out over a rainstorm when they aren’t afraid someone will spot their daughter or take her.
And you know what they say about cheaters, right? If you date a cheater, you shouldn’t be excited when they cheat on you. If you took a girl, you probably expect your child to be taken. I’m just saying!
Henry has drilled into Sarah’s head that the outside world is godless. How awful to keep someone trapped and to lie about the world at large. How is that love? It’s more like a cult with few members.
She had never left the farm. She’d been told they’re people of faith, and the outside world hates people of faith. Yep, that’s a cult.
She’s a prisoner, and her new friend called her out on it. He put the thought into her head that something isn’t quite right in her little utopia.
Discovering the body in the forest told Ian that whoever took Maggie had to have been local. There were no roads up there, so the only way to get a body up that far was to carry her.
At the same time Ian was asking Dean to revisit that night, Jenna was getting unduly upset after seeing the flier for Maggie’s prayer vigil.
Yes, imagining your child being taken is frightening, but not enough to practically bring you to your knees — unless the damage has already been done.
And Jenna proved Ian’s point about locals who would want to attend the vigil, too. It seemed like she felt she needed to be there, not that she wanted to be there. Could she want to look at the family she damaged by taking their child?
I was surprised Henry offered to go to the vigil himself. He might have thought he was going to scope out what others knew about them, but he was putting himself right into the middle of the danger he was hoping to avoid.
Because it’s not a thriller without thrills, Isabel learned that the child they found wasn’t Maggie. We’d already sussed that out, but the timing was atrocious.
I hated that Ian didn’t tell Deb what he learned and carried on with the vigil. I understood his intentions, but they were not honorable to those he cared about.
He believed that Dean would look into Henry’s eyes and know straight away that he was the man. He didn’t. Deb found out the remains were not Maggie’s, and to cool off, Ian went back to work. Thank God.
Because the entire episode didn’t ride on the vigil, after all. Tommy and his desire to show Sarah the world of partying had the biggest impact.
Henry and Jenna may have raised Sarah with very little understanding of the outside world, but she’s not stupid. She’s keenly aware of what’s going on, even if she probably buries it to survive.
She spotted the flier, and a memory boiled up inside her — seeing her name carved in a tree. The name was Mags, not Sarah.
The poor girl was so confused, remembering what she thought was her childhood and seeing it crash with the Mags of it all. So she called 000.
That her father was on the other side of the call was serendipity. Or crafted storytelling. When waves roll over the script, tying everything together in a crash.
When a confused, terrified young woman cries to her birth father and the father races off to find her, only to come up empty.
The next four episodes will find Ian on a collision course with his past and future. The daughter he lost might have been under his nose the entire time.
How will he deal with that possibility? What will he do next?
More importantly, will you stick around to find out? Join me in the comments below to discuss it!
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