Miss you

Chain reaction

Season 1

Episode 5

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

Photo: Vishal Sharma/Netflix

There’s something very satisfying about a five or six episode suspenseful British crime drama. Each episode is simply captivating and action-packed, and since the police in the UK don’t carry guns, not every episode ends in a ridiculous shootout. It feels like deeply personal shit, and because half the actors are always incredibly talented, but also the person you saw in that one thing, you can really get lost in the performances.

So Harlen Coben didn’t plan to do it Miss you Since the Netflix adaptation was this quiet British crime drama when he wrote the novel, with Kat Donovan as a tough NYC detective, it managed to turn the novel into something more. It has become a meditation on British racial drama, what it means to be queer and of a different generation, or even what life is like in a small police department in a big city. As a book, Miss you was pretty good. As a series Miss you is even better.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t parts that weren’t perfect. I still don’t know Why Titus did everything he did, including why one of these creepy henchmen was recruited or how they managed to stick around. Where did all the money go? Why didn’t Debra just call the police instead of repeatedly confronting Brendan after he was kidnapped? And what happened to the dogs? Won’t someone think about the dogs?!?!

Still, it was pretty cool to see suburban mom Debra take an ax to the idiots who wronged her and threatened her son. (You just don’t get that kind of thing when there are guns everywhere.) Even watching Titus fiddle with shotgun shells while trying to juggle Kat and Debra’s threats was riveting. I don’t think Titus & Co. would just burn the whole thing down, including the living hostages, although they could just kill them Then Burn it down, but can you even have a crime drama without some sort of harebrained over-explanation that leads to the villain’s downfall? Titus just played around with his food a little too long and got caught, so to speak.

But while all of the Titus stuff was compelling and satisfying (apart from why it takes paramedics literally hours to transport Brendan, who was shot in the leg, to the hospital), it’s the finale’s other twists that make it even more interesting. For example, we learn through Calligan that Parker lives in some kind of public housing, and when Kat goes there – boom! — Parker is a guy. On top of that, he’s a guy who recognizes Kat immediately, has obviously lived with Clint, and would give anything to spend just one more second with him. They were together for 14 years, and while it’s clear that their relationship was by no means perfect, with lots of secrets and concealments and denials, it was still hers and that was enough. Kat lost her father, but as it turns out, she never really knew him fully. Parker, on the other hand, seems to have known everything about Clint, and when he was killed, Parker actually lost the love of his life.

And Clint’s death became even more complicated when we learned that both Josh and Aqua were involved. Aqua because she saw Clint and Parker together and basically threatened to out them to Kat, and Josh because he walked in on Clint beating up Aqua because he was too afraid of losing everything, to really think about what’s at stake. It’s a terrible, cruel situation and you feel really terrible for both Clint and Aqua, but when push came to shove, Clint was the one who couldn’t handle his shit, who took things too far, and who took the knife in his hand that Josh accidentally turned away from him. It’s absurd that Stagger takes Clint’s last statement about protecting Kat to the extreme, making another guy take the fall and lie to her for over a decade, but I guess the bond with the police runs deep. I still don’t believe Stagger isn’t on Calligan’s payroll, but I guess we’ll never know.

At the end of the episode, Kat finds out from Josh, who describes what happened. Kat was understandably shaking, not just because Josh killed her damn father, but because he’d been lying to her all week, even though she said she could ask him anything. (I guess she never asked if Josh knew who killed her father…) In the end, Kat seems to come to terms with what Josh did and realizes that her father was not only deeply flawed, but also very dead is, while her relationship with Josh – and even what might happen in the future – is still very much alive. She chooses options and optimism over revenge and hate, and even though everything is completely fucked up, getting back together with the guy who disappeared on your run 11 years ago after he killed your father and then you still seems like the right thing to do lying has to do.

• This is no offense to Ashley Walters, who plays Josh, but based on the headshots and torso photos we’ve seen of Josh, I kind of thought he’d be taller. He reads six foot or six, when in reality he looks like he is six foot.

• There was a second where you see Clint giving Stagger that dog and I thought the whole show was going to turn into a weird revenge thing about Clint not taking proper care of the dog , which he bought from Titus, but unfortunately that’s not the point.