Spoilers below for anyone who hasn't watched The Missing's Season 2 finale.
With The Missing Season 2, Starz and the BBC delivered another jarring mystery the kept the series in the ranks of TV's most emotionally affecting series, and tonight's brutal finale wrapped the intense and twist-loaded season by finally connected all the sordid dots that led to the disappearance and, yes, the reappearance of the real Alice Webster. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the episode came when David Morrissey's Sam succumbed to his fatal gunshot wounds moments after realizing his daughter wasn't dead, and here's what the former Walking Dead actor told CinemaBlend about the episode.
It was an odd thing because, you know, as the actor I knew that what the writers had done served the story brilliantly well. That Sam gets to that point and he sees his daughter. And that's the end for him. I felt also that I wanted myself some catharsis for Sam. I wanted him to have longer with her. I wanted him to be with his daughter for longer. But it's a great storytelling piece of work, and I think they've done the right thing.
As The Missing viewers are well aware, Sam Webster was a complex lead character for a drama such as this, in that most viewers assumedly sympathized with him as a father whose daughter disappeared, and who mentally spiraled out of control because of that tragic event. But we never got to see a whole lot of him as a family man before things got rough, when he might have been a real top-notch guy.
Instead, he's shown in the aftermath to be a pretty terrible father to his son, Matthew, whom he blamed for Fake Alice's fake death by fire (which also burned him up pretty badly). He was also a pretty terrible husband to his wife, Gemma, by cheating on her and never believing her when she speculated that Alice could still be alive. Combine that with him being a dick to the often selfless (outside of his marriage) Julien Baptiste, and it was hard to put Sam on solid character ground most of the time.
But in the end, when he's bleeding on the forest floor after being shot by Adam Gettrick, the deviant bastard responsible for all of this and other horrifying tragedies, Sam gets one last moment of an anti-redemption when he sees Alice's face and he realizes what the last few years meant. During our talk, David Morrissey went on about the scene and how it hit Sam.
I felt the tragedy of it was really, really awful. But I think the story needed that. You know, he'd been on that journey. His last words are, 'I was wrong,' and to be able to say that is huge, that he admits that at the end. What's strange, I think, about the last three episodes: I think Sam really wants to be wrong. He just hates Baptiste so much -- he just hates this man that's come in and disrupted his life and turned his wife's head around -- that he does want Gemma to be right. He does want his daughter to be out there somewhere. He just isn't man enough, or just isn't able, to admit that fact.
So while it was definitely heartbreaking that Sam passed away in those moments, it was thankfully Gemma, whose faith in Alice's survival so rarely wavered, who gets to be there with Alice during her years rehabilitating and converting back to the outside world. No doubt the media and more will be paying attention, and Gemma is strong enough to handle it all without breaking in some way like Sam did. Sorry, David Morrissey's character.
Unfortunately, The Missing hasn't yet been renewed for Season 3, which is understandable given its low viewership on Starz; the network's choice to put the whole season up for early streaming probably plays into that, though. But it is extremely acclaimed and has solid ratings in the U.K., so we're keeping our still-shaking fingers crossed that we'll get more in the future. Until we get more news, head to our midseason premiere schedule and our summer TV guide to see what's coming to the small screen in the near future.
