In
October I reported that I considered the second TV series Missing important because it tackled the problem of child abduction
for sexual purposes in a serious manner although it was dramatic fiction
designed to entertain a wide evening audience at 9pm. The series has now ended
and confirmed my expectation that it would one of several significant
programmes during 2016. At the end of October I had written – “I remember well
the first series of the British American Missing
with James Nesbitt seeking to recover an abducted boy so I decided to watch the
second series which commenced on October 12 with the 3rd episode on
October 26th. I am covering some of the work of James Nesbitt when writing
about the latest series of Cold Feet after an absence of over a decade.
As
with Ivy in Thirteen, a daughter Alice, aged 11 years who disappeared while her
father, an army officer was stationed in Germany in 2002, dramatically
reappears when she walks out of a forest 12 years later and where it emerges
she has held with another girl Sophie Giraux, a crime investigated by a French
Police detective Julien Baptiste. He had promised to do everything to find the
child but without success, he had failed to prevent Mrs Giraux committing
suicide from a building in the presence of her husband who understandably has
never forgiven Baptise for his failure, something which Bapriste has also
failed to do.
Alice
is disorientated and in bare feet when she is discovered and from the outset
there are questions about her and her story. The father is played by the
established actor David Morrissey who has had a long and outstanding stage, TV
and film career and plays an officer no longer on active duty because of incident
which has left him disfigured from burns. While he is immediately convinced the
girl is Alice, his partner is not convinced.
As with Ivy the father and the victim want to return to their home but
her behaviour is intended to alert us that something is not right. She
persuades her brother to lock her in the garden shed at night she cannot cope
with the normality of heated room, soft bed and family sleeping times. I
briefly had a similar experience after months of hard bed in a cell with a
light always on so a check could have been at intervals throughout the night.
It also brings back the hours I spent as child kept in room and told to be
silent while visitors from the homeland of my birth and care mothers were in
their home and were not to know of existence.
With
help in which the Amy can join forces with the German police the place in which
for a time the two girls are believed to have been held together in a WWII
bunker. There is a private meeting at one point between Alice and the
commanding senior officer and from their conversation it is possible to say
that he was somehow involved with the disappearance. A receipt discovered at
the bunker leads them to a local butcher whose wife had served in the army with
history yet to be revealed but where the commanding officer appears to have
some hold over her. Alice identifies the butcher from a series of photos. The
man is arrested and subsequently convicted and imprisoned.
The
French Detective retired and suffering from terminal cancer abandons his wife
determined to fulfil his promise to Mrs Giroux and her husband and persuades
the parents to allow him to talk to Alice and given the similarity between the
two girls when they were abducted he begins to question which girl has
reappeared, doubts which the mother has already tried to voice. He speaks to
the girl in French but she appears not to understand. He suggests to the mother
a DNA test which Alice overhears. Baptiste contacts Mr Giroux to persuade him
to go with him to Germany. Understandably he refuses. Alice kills herself by setting fire to the
garden shed with herself inside.
The
series switches between 2002, 2014 and the present when the son appears to have
become embittered and right wing carries out a request from Alice to visit the
man she accused in prison and say sorry on her behalf. Baptiste is in Iraq in
search of an army officer who he had met at the time of the original
disappearance and who has joined one of the warring groups. He persuades a journalist with connections to
take up into an area of conflict and on their way from a deserted village where there was evidence the army
officer had been present they are taken by the Peshmerga soldiers and brought
to their frontline where they meet up with the army officer who although
appears to know something refuses to help. Back in Germany the mother comes
across a video which appears to show her daughter, alive “
Rather
than continue to describe what happens as the story unfolded episode by episode
I am going to explain what became a difficult story to understand because of
the device of constantly switching between different time periods. The
following is a test of how much of the series and plot I understood, remember
and cared about
Whereas
in the first series everything was focussed around the role of David Nesbitt,
the role of Captain Sam Webster, played by David Morrissey, it is the Detective.
Julien Baptise, played by Tcheky Karyo who is the hero of story alongside
Keeley Hawes as Mrs Gemma Webster who must cope with a guilt-ridden son and cheating
and fire disfigured husband.
I
believe the way to explain and unravel the story and its wider significance is
to begin with the villain, a paedophile, that is someone unable to have a
relationship with an adult woman and the only way to satisfy his need for sex
and for a family is to obtain, abduct and rape female children. We do not learn the full extent of past
actions of Major Adam Ettrick. Press Officer based with British army stationed
in Germany, but as Julien suspects he has raped and abducted girls throughout
his life. Julian’s investigations take
him to post invasion Iraq as the British army is about to leave and he uncovers
that Gettrick was a young officer who appears to have gone A.W.L and two other
officers, the subsequent Garrison head in Germany, Brigadier Adrian Stone and
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Reed, find out where he had headed and go to bring
back. They find him imprisoned in a
local compound because he has raped a child who has escaped. In freeing their colleague, they kill his
captor and believing no one else is in the compound set it on fire killing a
younger sister asleep upstairs despite
being warned of her presence by her brother.
Not only do all three cover up the event
but so does their commanding officer at the time and this is where the
story is unbelievable who happens to have become the wife of the
local butcher in the town close to where the garrison is based when the
daughter Alice appears to re-emerge despite this knowledge and her continuing
connections she stands by when her husband is framed, prosecuted and
imprisoned for the abduction of Alice when first a receipt is found in the
former Wold War II bunker in the nearby
forest and then Alice identifies him as her captor before her own assumed suicide.
The
reality is that Gettrick has separately abducted three children, Alice, an earlier
girl Sophie Giroux and one other whose back story is not disclosed. Baptise
investigated the disappearance of Sophie and his failure to find out what
happened to her leads to her mother committing suicide when Baptiste fails to
persuade her not to jump of the roof and she dies before her husband who
understandably blames Baptiste and then rejects the request to travel with him
to Germany when Baptiste believes that in fact Alice is Sophie. He right because now a woman with a daughter
in effect acting as the wife of Ettrick at his homes in Germany and isolated in
hillside forest in Switzerland, she developed appendicitis and needs medical
care.
The
idea is that she should get help as Alice and then disappear but the plan is
thwarted when first her mother and then Baptiste challenges. The Webster’s have
a shed in their garden and before the operation Sophie pretends she cannot cope
with sleeping in a bed because of being imprisoned sleeps first on the floor
and then in the garden shed persuading her brother to lock her in. After the
successful operation for the appendix she returns to the Household but again
persuades her brother to lock her in shed where it appears she sets on fire and
kills herself unable to face the reality of being home and being doubted. The
family are distraught, the son blames himself and is disowned by his father.
His father blames his wife and commences an affair with the daughter of the Brigadier
Stone (he has retired, developed severe contemporary memory loss with psychosis
and is placed in a home when his daughter who works for the army alongside Ettrick
cannot cope anymore. She has also become pregnant by Sam Webster and leaving his
wife and commencing new family is very much on the cards when Baptise reappears
believing his has the basis for uncovering the truth of what happened and at
that point convinced it is Sophie who has died and Alice is alive somewhere.
He
discovers that the wife of the man convicted for the abduction of Alice served
in Iraq commanding Stone and Reed and eventually persuades her to tell him her
part of the story. This leads to Baptiste discovering that Reed had paid
regular sums to someone in Iraq and this is found to be the brother of the
sister who perished in the fire. Reed is found to have committed suicide but
contact with a prostitute friend of Reed leads to establishing the man had been
murdered and we learn that the murder was committed by Ettrick and that Stone
had knowledge in helping the clear up.
While
the army and German police prevent the involvement of Baptiste placing
obstacles, he gains the assistance of a young police officer who acting on
initiative without Baptise visits Ettrick and comes across the man’s daughter with
Sophie. Because it is evident that the officer has grasped aspects of the
situation Ettrick murders the officer and hides the body and goes on the run to
his secret home in Switzerland where we have come to know Sophie is now based
and he leaves the shuttered German home with their daughter and we only later
learn with Alice hidden in the boot. Wait a minute if Alice and Sophie are
alive who was the murdered remains in garden shed? This a third girl brought
dead to shed and exchanged for Sophie (as Alice) and with Stone having a hand
in switching DNA samples to that of Alice from this third girl.
When
Sophie as Alice in the home she discloses that she and this third girl had a
moment of freedom on an adventure park day out. I cannot remember how a
photograph of this event comes into the possession of Mrs Webster but there is
also a video and she goes to the park to see if anyone recognises the girls and
they also work out there is a third girl in the outing. As the net close Baptiste
and the Webster’s break into to the home of Ettrick and discover his dungeon
there and can trace him to a town in Switzerland when after a fruitless day of
searching they are at a restaurant bar where the waiter recognises Sophie when
she visited and he remembers her leaving across a bridge which leads to a
pathway through wood to the hillside home, where Ettrick, Sophie and their
daughter live openly but with Alice kept locked and a prisoner. They go in
search and although calling for backup they continue without waiting. Ettrick spots their arrival and shoots and
badly wounds Sam Webster, but who lives long enough to see the rescue of his
daughter.
Sophie
Giroux’s also finds that his daughter is alive but she after nearly committing
suicide like her mother is persuaded by Baptiste not do so. She is in custody
and no doubt facing some prison because of her complicity but is unable to face
her father but he is introduced to his granddaughter who responds.
The
brother of Alice guilty ridden, rejected by his father who in turn he rejects because
of knowing about the affairs with Stones daughter has become a right-wing skin
head. He visits the man convicted of the abduction in prison because Sophie had
asked him and say sorry. He also beats up Stone at the residential home on over
hearing about his complicity and about which Baptise is arrested and then
released. He now founds that he killed no one and that his sister is alive and
unbelievably resilient to her years of ordeal.
It
is not clear how much Stone is faking it
or has become insane through illness but
his daughter who I found another of the unpleasant and stupid characters in the
story, wilfully obstructive in protective prepared to have an affair with Sam
knowing the distress of his wife finally faces the truth, confronts her father
and realises it is too late for him to face
justice for his crimes, as guilty of the
murder as a soldier and of rape and
abduction and sent an innocent man to jail. Quite righty this man ignores
his traitorous and cowardly wife on release from prison to find her waiting for
him at the roadside wife, another who deserves to burn in earthly mental hell for
an appropriate length of time.
Mrs
Webster has her daughter back and her son although it looks as if she is going
to befriend her husband’s mistress. I cannot remember if she is having or
terminating Sam child’s which if she does he or she must adjust to the crimes
of his grandfather and mother’s stupidity so I cannot see friendship with Mrs
Webster lasting, despite losing and then getting her husband back, so to speak,
before his death.
And
what of my hero, a man in desperate need of an operation for a brain tumour
which is his only hope of survival but where survival is questionable. He is
driven to solve the mystery before accepting his fate at the hands of the
medical profession and the risk of secondary infection. He has risked his marriage
as well as his continuing survival in the search for truth. The series ends
without us knowing.
In
real life, there is need to give those who wilfully cover up or stand by a fair
hearing before passing judgement and if guilty deciding on an appropriate
punishment. Accepting acting under
orders, families under threat or blackmailed are aspects needing to taken into
account when deciding on punishment.
The
importance of this fiction is the focus that while allowance must be given to
those who give their lives, risk life changing physical and mental health on the
line on our collective behalf deserve special consideration there can be no
blank cheque or get out of jail card was the Blair administration arranged in
relation to bringing peace to mainland UK on the situation in Ireland. It was
good to see the new Prime Minister appear to resist the pressure from with the services,
members her own party and from some on Opposition benches to insists that the
truth must be explored as in fairness has she and the new Home Secretary insisted
should remain the situation in relation to one aspect of historical abuse.
However how far she will be able to resist pressures having caved in on
austerity and the pressure from the global capitalists will become apparent
over the coming weeks and months. The issue is tied in with a volatile political
situation with a swing to right which the far right is exploiting and he issue
of the future of European Economic Community and our relationship with the rest
of Europe.
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