Absentia 3: Adrenalin and Relevance

The third season of Absentia was up on Amazon Prime Video last month.  I liked it the best of the three seasons so far because, well, I like James Bond type stories more than a vanished member of the family comes home after six years of missing, even if she is a high-powered FBI agent.

The new season picks up right after the second season ended, and quickly pitches us into international espionage and subterfuge, with a searingly all-too-currently relevant theme: the bad guys want to unleash a virus upon the world, with a view towards getting rich distributing an antidote which they also have in their possession.   It turns out that Emily was missing for six years because she was kidnapped by this group, which also has other (maybe) related bio "research" at work, including (I think) developing some kind of super-warrior army they can use.

I'm putting in those provisos - "maybe," "I think" - because these connections are still not brought into completely clear focus.  But that's ok, because the action is so quick and powerful you barely have time to think about the ultimate underpinnings.   There's also an excellent development of characters, in Emily's family and beyond.  In the first two seasons, her brother played an important role.  He plays a somewhat significant role again, but not as much as Emily's father Warren and her son Flynn, very well played by Paul Freeman and Patrick McAuley.  Let's hear it for multi-generation de facto commandos!

Nick also plays a very different role in this third season, becoming the one who's kidnapped, in absentia, pursued relentlessly by Emily.  She's helped by Cal, a not completely trustworthy partner, at least not by Emily, but very effective fighting for her and alongside her.  One of my favorite scenes is how the two get the drop on a group of brutal bad guys and throw them off a hurtling train in the middle of Europe.  Stana Katic is just great as Emily, as is Patrick Heusinger as Nick and Matthew Le Nevez as Cal.

Speaking of Europe, most of the action takes place in Austria and Germany, and the combination of that and the labs filled with experimented-upon bodies adds a definite Nazi flavor to this.   I found that both appropriate and a welcome departure from ISIS or Russia being the root of the villainy.  Indeed, immigrants from the Middle East are preyed upon by the nefarious bio-tech operation, and they emerge as heroes in this story, with Rafiq (well played by Adam Hussain) working with Nick and Emily to free his mother and the other prisoners from the sinister labs.

I give Absentia 3 my highest recommendation, for its non-stop action, social relevance, human relationships, and espionage puzzles.  And back to that Bondian quality that I like: it even has a memorable villain enforcer, Dawkins, played just right by Geoff Bell.

See also Absentia: In Your Face and Worth Watching ... Absentia 2: Even More There than the First Season

 

Absentia 2: Even More There Than the First Season

Absentia showed up for its second season on Amazon Prime a few weeks ago.  I liked it even better than the first, for at least three reasons:

1.  The villain was a terrorist group rather than a serial killer.  Emily's story - she was chosen for a combination genetic/conditioning experiment to bring out her innate violence - is still paramount.  But her prime antagonist is an international group bent on lethal damage to society.

2. I liked the new characters introduced, especially at the FBI.  Rather than Emily as a former/current FBI agent against her superiors and colleagues, season 2 provides a much richer tableau of agents with all kinds of agendas.

3.  In part as a result of #2, but for other reasons as well, there are more surprises in season 2, including unexpected deaths and one huge surprise about one of the villains.   Even in the first season, most of the characters were so conflicted that they easily could have turned out to be demons.  This is accentuated in the second season, giving it a more edge-of-your-seat ambience, especially in the concluding episodes.

All in all, Absentia has carved out an unusual niche for itself, in a television field crowded with female FBI agents all over the screen.  Emily has a unique provenance with an unusual set of traits, and she slowly is becoming one of my favorite characters on television.

See also: Absentia: In Your Face and Worth Watching

Absentia: In Your Face and Worth Watching

I binged Absentia the past few days - on AXN in 2017 and now on Amazon Prime.  It starts out with a scenario we've seen before (FBI agent Emily Byrne, played Castle's Stana Katic, shows up after presumably being held hostage for six years, and declared dead), but soon takes off in vivid and less conventional ways.  Her husband Nick Durand (well played by Patrick Heusinger), also an FBI agent, has happily remarried, and the two are raising the son Durand had with Emily.  Like The OA, The Missing (season two), Thirteen, and other reappearance stories, Emily's return continues or sets off a new series of terrible crimes.

But Emily Byrne is a much more powerful character than the "victims" in those other series, with the exception of Prairie in The OA, who is powerful, but in a more mystical rather than Criminal Minds way.  Emily soon becomes both the hunter (of the person who held her captive) and the hunted (she's implicated in a string of new murders), and the narrative plays it so close to the vest that's it's not easy to tell which she is - at least, on the basis of logic - though I never lost faith in her.

And lest you think that's a spoiler, it's actually still not clear, at the very end, what she did and didn't do during her years in captivity.  Clearly, as she herself recognizes and tells her husband, she's not the same person she was before she was kidnapped.  Is it just her mind that's not quite the same, or has she acted on those dark fantasies (assuming they're fantasies not memories).

Katic does an outstanding job in this role.  The supporting case is memorable too, especially Paul Freeman as Emily's father, Neil Jackson as her brother, and Cara Theobold as Nick's new wife.  The plot is tight - I guessed some of the suspects, and was proven wrong just about every time.  Highly recommended, but not for little children.