The last hour of “Last Seen” opens with Deb (Jessica Wren) walking through the farmhouse where her daughter grew up, past the artwork Sarah (Chloe Jean Lourdes) made and into the bedroom that was hers for eleven years. It is the right place to start, because the question sitting in that room is the one the show has been circling since the phone call in episode two. “The Choice” arrived on Apple TV on Wednesday, October 7th, and closed the six-episode season. It asks whether a girl raised by her kidnappers wants to be rescued at all, and the answer it gives is not the one the genre usually hands out.
Kris Mrksa, who built the series out of Ryan David Jahn’s novel “The Dispatcher”, wrote the finale, and Christian Schwochow directed it, as he did all six episodes. This review is written from the recaps that followed the release and from interviews with the cast and Mrksa, not from a screener, and where the write-ups disagreed on a detail, we left it out. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Last Seen” season one, including the finale.
It asks whether a girl raised by her kidnappers wants to be rescued at all, and the answer it gives is not the one the genre usually hands out.”
Henry Reid (Brendan Cowell) drives toward his father’s compound with his wife, Jenna (Maxine Peake), bleeding from a gunshot wound in the back seat. He keeps telling Sarah that his father is a healer while she begs him to find a hospital. Ian Ridley (Patrick Brammall) is behind them with a wound of his own, holding Henry’s brother Donald (Daniel Henshall) at gunpoint to make him lead the way. The two cars meet at a gas station, and Henry gets Sarah back into his car before Ian can reach her. Later Donald patches Ian up and tells him where Henry is headed, and Ian leaves him by the road.
The best scene in that stretch has no guns in it, just Donald working on the wound while Ian makes the case the show had let the Reids avoid all season, that their own loss never gave them the right to take somebody else’s child, and that even if he gets her back, the years are gone. It is the closest the series comes to stating its argument out loud, and everything that follows tests whether Ian believes it.
Gareth Reid (Colin Friels) is not the prophet Henry left behind. The authorities broke up the compound years ago, only Gareth and a few loyal men are still there, and when Gareth checks on Jenna, the healer has nothing to offer but the news that she is already dead. Sarah turns on Henry for promising her that Jenna would be fine. He tells his father that an addict is coming to take his granddaughter. Then, at last, he tells Sarah the truth: that he took her because he believed God told him to, and that the bones found in the woods belonged to the Reids’ own daughter, the first Sarah, buried away from the farm so Jenna would not have to see.
For Mrksa, Jenna’s death was the easier call. “Probably Jenna was going to die because that was the price that Henry was going to have to pay for what he’s done,” he told TV Insider. He called the death of Deb’s husband, Bill (Bert La Bonté), in episode four “the first disastrous consequence” of the two men’s “extreme actions,” and Jenna’s the second. It is a cold piece of plotting, and an honest one, since Henry took a child to heal his wife’s grief and loses his wife trying to keep the child.
With Gareth, Henry and the last of the men holding rifles, Sarah slips out to warn Ian, which keeps him from being shot as he arrives, and the two of them take cover in a barn. There he tells her none of this is her fault and shows her an old family photo. When he leaves her to go back out, Gareth grabs Sarah in a chokehold and uses her to draw Ian into the open, and Henry shoots his own father dead. It is the one moment in six episodes where Henry puts Sarah ahead of himself, and the show does not let it buy him much.
Ian gets behind Henry, knocks him to the ground and stands over him with a gun. Brammall told Collider there is no question about what came next. “Yeah, he would have killed him, for sure. As he says, ‘I’ve been dreaming about this for so long,'” he said. Sarah stops him, telling Ian that she has just lost her mother, that she will not lose her father too, and that her name is Sarah. She tells him she does not know him, says she wishes she could have met his family, and walks away with Henry. Mrksa told TV Insider that in a traditional show of this kind, Ian’s “claim” on her “would be bulletproof,” and that her refusal is “a massive slap in the face for him.”
They make it as far as a police roadblock. Sarah asks Henry to give himself up, and instead he tells her she is going to be great, gets out of the car with his rifle, and the police shoot him in front of her. Cowell told both TV Insider and Collider that he added that last line himself. “Henry didn’t say anything. He just said, ‘Get under the windshield,'” he told Collider, while Brammall told TV Insider that Henry is “exposing her to another trauma and loss of another parent.”
This is the part of the finale we are least sure about. Mrksa said the writers argued over Henry’s fate too, admitting “it could have gone either way.” Killing him is the one choice in the hour that feels like the genre taking the wheel back, because a dead kidnapper spares the show prison visits, a trial, and the far harder question of what Sarah owes a living man who stole her. Keeping Henry alive would have been messier to write, and it might have been the braver ending, though Cowell’s added line does a lot to earn the version we got.
After a stint in state care, Sarah is placed with Deb, meets her brother Dean (Tobias Muhafidin) and the new baby, and goes with Deb to Bill’s memorial. Ian is there too, sober, at the edge of the family he spent eleven years trying to put back together, and neither Deb nor Sarah can quite face him. The repair the finale allows him is with Dean, the son he blamed for years, who tells him the rest will take time. The last images are Sarah at the piano and Ian swimming out into the ocean.
Lourdes told TV Insider she played the piano scene as if Sarah were “holding a bit of a personal vigil for her parents,” because to everybody else, Henry and Jenna are the villains. Mrksa admitted the music was meant to say more, since Ian was supposed to listen to “The Well-Tempered Clavier” during his nightly ritual with the bottle, so the piece Sarah plays would quietly tie her to him, and that setup was lost. “That didn’t get through to the final version of the show, I’m sorry to say, but that was the intention,” he said. It is a small loss, but the ending leans on a connection the audience was never shown.
Apple TV has not renewed “Last Seen.” Mrksa told TV Insider that a second season is being discussed in “very early days,” and that it would center on Ian and Sarah, because “that relationship would have to be the focus of anything we do moving forward.” “Apple’s got my number. I’m very happy to talk,” Brammall said, and Peake put it plainly. “Everyone forgets about Sarah,” she said. The six episodes we have end on a girl at a piano who chose her own name, and that is a complete story. A second season seems possible, but it would have to be hers, or it should not be made.
What Do You Think? Was Sarah right to stop Ian and leave with Henry, knowing what he had done to her family? Should the show have let Henry live to face a trial instead of the roadblock? And does “Last Seen” need a second season, or is a girl at a piano the right place to stop?
See you on the next binge!
