Baptiste 2.1: Souls on the Edge

Baptiste is back for a second season on PBS, starring Tchéky Karyo as Julien Baptiste, the quirky genius of an investigator who has a dogged, uncanny talent in finding missing people, as amply demonstrated in two seasons of the prior series aptly entitled The Missing.

The first Baptiste season saw him applying his talent with a weakened brain, which turned out more than sharp enough to do what was needed.  The new season shows Julien in top shape, beginning to help a woman (Emma Chambers, played by Killing Eve's Fiona Shaw) whose husband and two sons have suddenly and unaccountably gone missing -- and Julien in not such good shape, a year later, when Emma, also not in such good shape, in a wheelchair, comes to see him to plead for his help.  Julien has long hair, which actually looks pretty good, but he's unkempt and almost dissolute.

So, in addition to where are the missing sons -- we learn before the episode concludes that the husband was murdered -- the big questions are how did Emma wind up in that wheelchair and why is Julien in such ragged condition?  The veering back and forth between the present and a year earlier works well, and adds to the harrowing quality of the narrative.

Actually, all of Julien Baptiste's attempts to find the missing have been harrowing, but there's something especially desperate, souls on the edge of the precipice, in this second or fourth season, depending on how you're counting.   This keenness makes me only keener to see what the next five episodes have in store for us.  If I have a chance, I'll try to report back here with a review of each episode.  

See also Baptiste 1: Logic, Passion, and Unflappability ... The Missing 1: Worth Finding and The Missing 2: Unforgettable

Baptiste 1: Logic, Passion, and Unflappability

If you loved Julien Baptiste and his talent for finding missing children in the two seasons of The Missing (reviewed by me here and here), you'll love him in the spinoff he has on PBS, under his own name, Baptiste.

The second season of The Missing ended with Baptiste struggling to solve the missing-girl case with a tumor in his brain.  He solves the case, brilliantly.  But his future as a consulting detective is far from clear.  In Baptiste, we learn that "he's not the man" he was, but gets pulled into a another missing girl case, which soon becomes much more than that, as Baptiste finds himself battling some European mega-gang that threatens not only him but his family.

And it turns out that, despite his protestations, he's every bit as sharp as he needs to be.  And he needs to be sharp indeed, as the case develops, and everyone involved including members of his family and other police become suspect.  Tchéky Karyo is just perfect in the lead role, cementing Baptiste's place as an all-time logical, compassionate, usually unflappable, unique detective.

Tom Hollander, who made an excellent contribution to The Night Manager and many other series, puts in another memorable performance in Baptiste as Edward Stratton who until almost the very end walks a fine line between villain and hero.   And he's not the only character who may be playing both sides, offering a never-ending challenge to Baptiste's considerable powers of deduction.

Most of the action takes place in Amsterdam, where the world-renown Red Light District, aka der Wallen, provides an ideal backdrop for Baptiste's and the good guys' battle against the flesh-dealing gang, whose propensity for swiftly killing anyone who gets in their way seems almost preternatural.  Among the police, Europol's Genevieve, well played by Jessica Raine, was my favorite.

There's always been a Sherlock Holmesian quality to Julien Baptiste.  If that's your cup of tea, don't miss this.

See also The Missing 1: Worth Finding and The Missing 2: Unforgettable

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.

The Missing Season 2: Unforgettable

My wife and I just binge-watched The Missing Season 2 on Starz, and we both thought it was as perfect, heart-rending, and brilliantly plotted as a missing children story can be.   I cleverly titled my review of the first season "The Missing: Worth Finding," but the second is so superb on all levels that it beggars clever description.   (Of course I tried anyway with "unforgettable".)

I'll try to hint at some of the essentials here without revealing anything crucial in this carefully constructed, beautifully rendered, complex story with at least a dozen moving parts.  Alice shows up unexpectedly near her home after having gone missing 11 years earlier, but something's not quite right.  This in itself is not uncommon in these kinds of narratives, but there's nothing supernatural involved, and nothing common, either,  in the intricate tale that unfolds.   The main environment is a British military base in contemporary Germany, and people at all stages of command and former command propel the story, along with Alice's family.

But the character who propels this the most is Julien Baptiste, back from the first season with an uncanny sense of who's lying, and indefatigable in pursuing missing children and if at all possible reuniting them with their parents.  He failed to do this some years earlier for Sophie in France, and when Alice mentions Sophie, this is more than enough to get Baptiste tenaciously on the case.

Julien's task is complicated not only by the villain - who in his own sick way is almost as intelligent and calculating as Julien - but by just about everyone in the story, unwilling to believe what's right in front of their eyes, and/or too willing to believe other things that should not be believed, at the same time. And Julien has problems of his own, not of the villain's or anyone else's making.

The cards in this story are held very close to the chest, with just enough revealed - a quick shot in a scene, a word barely heard - that you can generate your own hypotheses, which are not likely to be right, at least not too early on in the story.   But if you keep your eyes and ears and mind open, you can figure out at least some big parts of this jigsaw, and, trust me, you'll be moved to tears at the end, for more than one reason. Testament not only to the nonstop, powerhouse story, but the superb acting by Tchéky Karyo as Julien, David Morrissey as Alice's father, Keeley Hawes as Alice's mother, and in fact every single person on screen.

See also The Missing Season 1: Worth Finding

The Missing Season 1: Worth Finding

Checking in with a review of The Missing, which I saw over a couple of nights on Starz On Demand earlier this week.   It's much in the new tradition of The Killing, Secrets and Lies,  Broadchurch, and its American remake Gracepoint - which is to say, excellent in its portrayal of the impact of the crime on the victim's family and people in the town, a place with no shortage of plausible suspects - and in some ways The Missing is even better.

The special power of The Missing in contrast to those other crime shows no doubt stems from the fact that the crime at hand is a kidnapping not a murder - or, a missing boy who we learn pretty early on survived his being taken - which makes the parents much more active in pursuit of their child and hence the kidnapper than the parents of the murder victim in the other series.  Indeed, whereas the police are the central characters in the other series, the father - Tony Hughes - takes that role in The Missing, and is given a riveting performance by James Nesbitt.   Tony is most assisted by Julien Baptiste - a retired French detective brought back to the case after he retired from it and the police when the initial investigation in 2006 turned up nothing, and now believes there's a chance of finding the missing boy, Ollie.  Julien is a class act and a memorable detective - wonderfully played by Tchéky Karyo - who more than anyone other than Tony (including Tony's wife Emily, well played by Francis O'Connor last seen as Mr. Selfridge's wife) believes Ollie may be still alive and can be found. But even he comes to believe that Ollie was killed, which leaves Tony alone in his belief, pursuing his son in the face of all reason, except he turns out to be right.

The press are portrayed as villains in just about all of the other series - not the killers or kidnappers, but getting in the way of the police at every turn - and in The Missing, the free lance reporter, looking for a lift in his career, is almost as despicable as the kidnapper.   But he's fortunately as vulnerable to blackmail as the people he's been threatening and manipulating for information, and near the end provides some crucial clues.

I guessed who the kidnapper was - a combination of being around and not being brought in for any questioning always raises my suspicions - but the ultimate question is not who was responsible for Ollie's kidnapping, but will Tony, now totally alone again in his pursuit of his son, ever find him. The ending is ambiguous, but, I think, hopeful.  If I'm interpreting what's on the screen correctly, Tony has tracked Ollie down to the Eastern European place where he now lives.   We know that the boy is Ollie, because he has drawn the same picture that Ollie drew before he was kidnapped.   When Tony shows the boy, now almost a teenager, the picture, the boy doesn't respond.   But I think the most likely explanation is that Ollie needs some time to process this.   Or, even if this boy is not Ollie, someone drew the picture in the snow, so Tony can't be too far off.  Why he and we are deprived of seeing him reunited with his boy is a good question.  Probably the creators of the show thought an outright happy ending would be too easy or trite.

But in any case, even without an unambiguously happy ending, The Missing concludes its first season on a more positive note than the other series, and that's a plus in my book.  It's coming back for a second season - with a new case - and I'll definitely be watching.



different kinds of crimes