What's unique and exciting about the second instalment
is that it's a completely different story and landscape
with a completely different set of characters.
None of us wanted to tread over the same ground as before.
The only way we would do a second one
is if we had something different to say
or a different theme to explore...
because otherwise we'd run the risk of repeating ourselves.
I think we always felt when we wrote series one,
we knew Tony and Emily's story was finished
and we knew how that ended.
But as we talked about that
we talked about other ways that might go,
and if that ending had been different.
And what does it mean if you find someone.
I think, in discussing that particular issue,
we realised there was a lot of drama in someone
who's been abducted, coming back.
The first series was fantastic in telling the story
of a family who had been pulled apart
and the desperate search for that son who had gone missing.
What's fantastic about this is, all of those elements
of a family that's going through this absolute living nightmare
are in play in this season,
but it's told from the perspective of a family
who get their child back.
And underneath it all, in the way that The Missing does,
there's a big thriller storyline to play out
and to investigate through the eyes of Julien Baptiste
as he starts to question quite what it is
that's been presented to this family.
TCHÉKY KARYO: Me, I'm retreated. I get a call.
A girl came back, and the call comes from a woman
who's an army officer in the British Army,
calling me because she knows I was working on a case,
Sophie Giroux's case,
and saying, "Look, we think that this girl who came back,
Alice Webster...
we think that Sophie Giroux and Alice Webster
are maybe two cases linked.
Could you help us with your archives
and give us some clues
that might help us?"
Alice Webster's been missing for a long time.
We hear that she's just come back
and I'm the one that has to go and tell the mother
that maybe we've found her daughter.
Then I come into contact with this man Julien Baptiste,
who's this impressive investigator from France
and who's achieved great things and solved many crimes.
But I just can't... cope with him.
I don't want to be around him. He lives by different rules.
And I don't understand him.
And I don't like grey, I like black and white,
yes, no, guilty and innocent.
I don't understand why he's all:
"But, why?" and "Who?" And "Maybe not."
I just think, "For goodness' sake!"
You know, just no patience!
So, erm... that's where it starts.
There's two sides of a coin, you know.
A child abducted, a child coming back. Season one, season two.
- Allo? Oui? - Is that Julien Baptiste?
- Yes, it is. - My name's Sergeant Eve Stone.
I'm with the Military Police, stationed at Eckhausen, Germany.
Do you know the name Alice Webster?
Er... the British girl?
She was abducted 2003, no?
Yesterday... she came back. She...
...walked right into the middle of the town square.
She mentioned a name when the paramedics asked who to call.
She said the name Sophie Giroux.
Julien Baptiste, we know from series one,
is a character who's given over to obsession.
He's determined to get to the truth of everything.
One of the important driving factors of him this series
is that ten or so years ago
he investigated a missing girl called Sophie Giroux,
and he never found her.
And some other things happened along the way.
The case wasn't handled well. He's carried that a long time.
So when Alice returns in episode one of series two,
and he learns that she was kept captive with Sophie,
at that point he realised there's a chance to make amends
for the mistakes of the past,
and perhaps solve the case
that's been haunting him all these years.
What I love about him, it's like he's a man of action,
but he's also an external processor.
He never forgets to think or to express something
about the situation.
As much as Jimmy's character was obsessed,
I understood the obsession, because as him, I'm obsessed.
He has a tumour, a brain tumour,
and he wants to finish the inquiry.
He wants to find the truth, and then he promises to his wife
who's trying to make him go to the operation,
but he says, you know,
"If I do the operation, there's a chance I die,
and if I don't do it, there's a chance I die,
so you see my problem."
He's driven by his sickness in this particular series
because it gives a sense of finality, of mortality,
of a man who's at the end of his career
and very possibly at the end of his life.
And so he's going to give everything
to finally... rid himself
of this one thing that's been obsessing him all these years.
So it's very important to explain what he does this year
and the journey he goes on.
And for him, he's got this tumour and this illness
and it's the freedom that his body's not allowing him
to do this thing that he's fighting the whole way through.
That's his journey.
- Hello? - Celia, mon amour!
Celia?
Are you calling to say that you've made a mistake
and you're getting back on that plane?
(Speaks French)
Are you?
I must do this and find the man who took those girls.
(Speaks French)
Then we don't have anything to talk about.
Celia! Please!
Unlike the family in the first instalment of The Missing,
who had really fallen apart
in the time between their child disappearing
and the time that the case re-opens in the present,
in this instalment of The Missing
the family have kept themselves together
in the 11 years since their daughter's missing.
There's a great love there.
This is a mother and a father who actually...
They think about their daughter every day, they feel great loss.
No-one can move on from this terrible thing that happened.
And yet somehow they've managed to keep it together.
They've kept it together for themselves
and kept it together for the sake of their son.
That tells me that there must have been...
there's great love there for that to have sustained.
When I first read episode one,
one of the things I was struck by
was that I'd seen stories about families who had lost...
...children before.
And I think that we're used to seeing stories about families
who fall apart when their children go missing.
Here was a story about a family
who'd held it together while their daughter was missing.
Their shared loss and hope had united them.
Although they'd been through something dreadful,
they'd stuck together because they'd shared that experience.
It's only when she comes back that their lives fall apart.
I hadn't seen a story like that before.
I thought that was a really interesting take
on the missing child story.
So our story is, there's the Webster family.
I play Sam, who's the father,
and Gemma, who's played by Keeley Hawes.
We have two children, a daughter and a son.
I'm a British soldier, an officer stationed in Germany.
Their daughter Alice, when she's 13, is snatched and taken away.
We don't know what's happened to her.
So that's how our story starts.
The family is obviously really distraught.
But we leave that story at the time of her being snatched,
and we go to 11 years later.
And we see the family now, still in Germany, same house,
and they are a family of three now.
You see them as a successful family.
Their son is about to leave home, he's looking for work.
And in the midst of this,
their daughter walks back into their life.
And it's how this family cope with the return of this girl
who's had a terrible, traumatic time.
Dad...
Look at you...
My little girl.
KEELEY HAWES: We meet this woman who's holding it together
and doing a pretty good job of it.
Suddenly their wishes come true,
and so to then say, "Actually, I'm not feeling it" is just...
It feels unnatural to her.
It goes against all of her maternal instincts.
But she knows, in her gut, that something isn't right.
They're happy that I've returned.
But I'm not behaving in the way they would expect me to behave.
So it's definitely tense.
All his dreams have come true
when Alice walks back into his life.
She's suffered terribly, but she's alive.
And I think the guilt and the shame that he had
over her being taken, he now can work on assuaging that
and sort of erasing it.
Sam is a soldier in the British Army and that gives him...
He's a character who isn't accustomed
to talking about himself or his feelings
or anything very much.
So he's a very internal character,
and seeing what this tragedy does to someone like that
who's used to going out and fixing problems
and dealing with things directly, was also interesting.
Tony and Emily in series one were very articulate
about what they felt and very analytical.
This couple are much more instinctive and reactive
and fight their way through it in a much more emotional way.
A child who was abducted comes back
after ten years or 15 years...
You think, "Wow, it's incredible, it's fantastic."
But it can also be weird.
So Alice is really complicated because she's the person
who she was when she was kidnapped.
And she's also the person that her abductor has created.
She's like the centrepiece and the catalyst
for the fall-out of the family.
Matthew is the brother.
When Alice comes back into their lives,
Matthew is there, trying to work out what's going on in his life,
how that affects them.
You get the feeling that since Alice had been stolen,
they've probably wanted to make sure
that Matthew doesn't get into the situations Alice had before.
What I find really interesting about Matthew as a character
is that he is emotionally stunted.
He was a little kid when his sister went missing.
The whole focus, the defining feature of his upbringing
is that his sister went missing
and that one can assume an awful lot of attention
was then placed on the missing child,
and he's the child who stayed.
Hey, Alice.
Is that you, midget?
Not any more.
JULIAN STEVENS: As soon as the family are reunited,
we cut forward, in this occasion,
in this season we cut forward two years.
And we find that the family are in a place
where a lot of traumatic events have happened,
where things are not quite what you would expect them to be.
And the joy is then over the next few episodes,
finding out how the family got to this place,
only two years ahead of where we first join them,
and try to unpick how the investigation
that's led by Julien Baptiste,
takes you through all the answers
to how this family got to the place they're in.
Like the first instalment of The Missing,
this story is structured around two intercutting timeframes.
We take the audience on a journey in one timeframe.
Just as we're about to find something,
we shut the door on them and take them somewhere else.
So the intention is to make the audience lean forward a bit more
and to allow us to tell stories about character
in a non-linear way
allows us to make choices that we couldn't normally do.
This time round, having the dual timelines,
the initial instinct is to go: "The person comes back,
let's go back to the moment they were taken
and see the investigation happen."
But, I think, that we felt, again,
you know, with every element
that we approached with this series,
we thought, "How can we not repeat ourselves
or make it feel the same?"
So we decided it'd be interesting to move forward,
and I think, in the first episode,
when that transition happens,
you really kind of don't expect it.
- You can't be late. - I know.
Matthew's going to go and visit Alice this afternoon.
I thought maybe we could all go.
- I'll try. - Hm...
Well, don't strain yourself.
So, Sam, when we see him in the present day,
he has great burns on his body, on his face.
He has obviously been in some sort of fire, accident,
which we come to see through the episodes.
Physically we all look very different
in the two different timelines,
and it's not like shooting anything else I've ever done.
You're constantly having to reference and go back and say,
"Where are we? What's happening?
What's just happened? What's about to happen?"
In the present day we see that Sam has a huge burn on his face
and his back.
We see that the family have been through
a life-changing experience.
In episode one, we find out that Alice is in fact now dead.
We see that Keeley is kind of cold towards her husband.
And all of these things have a source.
They're all based on things that have happened in 2014.
But there is one kind of key centrepiece moment
which is the origin of a lot of those changes.
And you know we're building up to it, because of Sam's burns,
so there has to be a fire. When you get there,
you realise it's not just the origin of Sam's burns,
it's also the origin of Matthew's guilt.
What's great about that catastrophic moment is,
it answers a lot of questions for the audience
about what they've been watching for three or four episodes.
They suddenly go, "Oh, that's what happened!"
So not only is it a wonderful spectacle,
brilliantly shot, I think,
it actually, from a story point of view,
it solves a load of issues, but it also acts as a trampoline
into a whole other area of the story, and that's good.
- And how are you sleeping? - Yeah, I'm fine.
(Drills shouted outside)
I don't know what I'm expected to do.
You're not expected to do anything, Sam.
I am, though, aren't I?
Why else would you be with the head doctor?
You want me to talk about Alice and all that.
Not unless you want to.
I shouldn't have done what I did. It was a mistake.
All this modified assessment crap is just a waste of time.
Three days a week, stuck at a desk.
I need to be back with the regiment.
That's not going to happen until I've cleared you. You know that.
I don't want to talk about her.
One of the most complicated things about The Missing
is how it covers multiple timelines.
In this piece, we go from 2003,
we go to 2014.
We have a little footstep in 2015
and we also have a large part of the story set in 2016.
That's a big range of years to cover.
One of the hardest things is to take an audience through that
in a way they understand where they are,
they're don't feel they're left behind
and they can follow the story and characters.
We filmed over a period of six months,
starting in the winter and ending in the summer
to bookend the two time years of winter 2014 and summer 2016.
So that gives you a visual grammar of snow on the ground
and sun in the sky.
And then you rely on very, very clever key members of your crew.
So our make-up designer was instrumental
in putting together looks for our characters,
which when we cut from one period to the other,
you'd be able to see a visual difference between them.
Likewise with our costume designer,
ensuring the season was played into the characters' costumes -
big, heavy jackets in the winter
and short T-shirts in the summer.
WILLOW GRYLLS: These characters have been on a different journey
in between these time periods.
So we always try to be careful to make sure
that the choices we make to differentiate between the times
are rooted in character, effectively.
Everybody has a new look, not just clothes -
anything you can do with hair, facial hair...
Anything that can be done has been done.
Everybody on this job has a hell of a job
in terms of continuity and keeping their eye on the ball.
Every single person involved.
Even from very slight differences.
For example, in the Websters' house,
there's a very subtle change of paint. It's incredibly clever,
because it changes the light and the feeling of the whole thing.
We all look slightly different.
2016 is being shot...
There's a lot more movement within the scenes.
BEN CHANAN: 2014 is predominantly...
The camera is generally more static.
There is some movement, but it's limited
and hopefully considered, and...
That's because in 2014
the characters' lives are quite rigid.
Sam is a military man. Him and his wife and his son
have an ordered life.
It's when their prayers are answered
that their lives are turned upside down
and become, erm... frayed.
And so 2016 had a much more frenetic, hand-held approach.
So the wheels have come off.
In the past timeline you see a lot of frames within frames
and it's a bit stiller.
And a bit more claustrophobic, the way it's blocked.
In the present day it's a lot more expansive
as you get out in this wide open landscape of Iraq and Kurdistan.
Mrs Webster, I said I'd call when I arrived.
Do you really think you're going to find something out there?
Well, I wouldn't have come here if I didn't.
No, I know.
Look, I want to believe you. It's just hard.
Are you still doing what I asked with the photographs?
Yeah, when I can.
If my family knew they'd think I'd lost my mind.
But, yeah, I am.
You have not lost your mind, Mrs Webster.
Do you ever feel like your family is...
slipping away from you?
All the time. You feel that way
only because we want to hold them so close.
Tchéky Karyo is coming back for this series,
which is obviously a completely new story.
That's really exciting. Tchéky is a wonderful actor.
He's creative and charming, and deeply charismatic,
and plays the guitar, though we don't see it much on screen.
So it's great to have him back.
In series one, Julien Baptiste was a huge part of that.
But in series two, he is the lead
and he... he has a personal connection with the case.
That needed Tchéky to throw himself into a role,
like he's never thrown himself into one before,
and he throws himself into roles!
So watching him in his dedication to Julien
both in 2014 and in particular in the present day
where he shaved his head,
but also, you know, watching him portray Julien
as a desperate man, who's ill,
but still fighting for the truth,
was a great pleasure.
He's utterly amazing
and so calm,
and has so much time for every actor on set.
And will always come and ask if I want a quick read-through
before we go on set.
He has a lot of breathing techniques he helps me with.
He's just a really, really nice man, really kind.
We have a lot of history with him as a viewer,
and this story is a little more complicated,
more involved in other places.
Having someone we know and whose opinion we trust,
is crucial to this story, given how many turns there are.
What are you doing here? I thought you were retired?
The receptionist had no record of Alice Webster.
And since I see no journalists, I must presume the girl's return
has been kept secret.
The last thing that girl needs is any more stress.
Of course. But there is only so long
the flow of police into this hospital can go unremarked upon.
Look, I wish nothing but peace for the girl.
I asked you to look into the Giroux case file,
not come out to Germany.
I'm only asking to speak with her.
She's... too unwell to have more people questioning her.
But she has spoken, no?
She did confirm she was held captive with Sophie Giroux.
Sophie? Where were they kept?
They were moved around.
All Alice remembers is being in the forest.
She walked hours till she found the road.
- Where, she's not sure. - Was there a yellow van
mentioned in Alice's abduction?
That was the only clue with Sophie.
Baptiste! I've said enough already!
I don't want to interfere with your investigation,
but I made the parents of Sophie Giroux a promise.
(Sighs)
There is no-one who knows that case better than I.
You looked me up, Sergeant.
You know who I am and what I've done.
Let me help.
I appreciate you coming, but it's not necessary.
Go home, Mr Baptiste.
It's rich to exchange with so many different kinds of actors.
David is a moody actor.
His inner life, you know.
Keeley always tries to be nice
and help, as her character.
I mean, that's what Gemma is.
And she's ready to help and to exchange.
Laura is very... a sparkling kind of personality.
And I love Abigail's... Her face is incredible
for the character she has to play.
She has a really amazing face, deep, special.
And she's witty also.
So it's very... I'm really lucky to have the chance
to share with all of them.
The other characters... David Morrissey plays Sam.
Jack and Harry wrote this new instalment with David in mind.
So we were absolutely thrilled
when David responded to the script in the way we hoped.
He's a phenomenal actor.
So many audiences know him from The Walking Dead,
but he's just a fantastic actor.
And in so many ways that family was at the heart of the piece,
so seeing the way that he unpicked that character
is thrilling.
I'm trying to learn from David, cos he knows what he's doing.
It's really nice to have quite a few scenes to be able to do that
and develop that relationship.
It's very exciting.
ALICE: Then he stroked my hair.
He told me he'd always be my first.
(He sniffs)
(Sobs)
In the first series we'd written, you know,
Tony, you think Jimmy Nesbitt as the lead.
In this one very much we had David Morrissey in our minds
as we wrote Sam, because he is a man's man.
He can do that cold shut-off thing,
but you can see there's a lot going on.
A very internal sort of performer. But erm...
So that was just fantastic that he wanted to do it.
We were obviously over the moon.
I really loved the first season.
I thought it was a great piece of work,
brilliantly acted by Tchéky and Jimmy Nesbitt and everyone.
I thought Ken Stott... I really loved their performances.
I thought it was brilliantly directed.
So, you know, coming back to the season,
Tchéky's one actor from the the first season,
Anastasia Hille as well, who plays his wife,
she's back in the show.
So it's been wonderful to work with him.
He's a great guy and really knows that character now.
Abigail and Jake Davies, who play my children, are amazing.
They're really amazing.
It's like they've been doing it for years.
They're wonderful to work with.
There's a lot of scenes where it's highly emotional.
It's quite exhausting, this show,
because it's very emotional all the time.
But they're on point all the time.
You do many, many takes,
and I've been amazed by both of them.
They have that stamina and that intention
and a real focus to knock it out the park all the time.
But also to work with Keeley Hawes.
I worked with Keeley when I was a lot younger.
We did Our Mutual Friend together.
Might have been one of her first jobs.
KEELEY: He played Mr Headstone and I played Lizzie Hexam.
I think he's just a wonderful actor.
I think with Keeley, who plays Gemma,
obviously she's just got a very innate warmth about her,
and the way she performs is very relatable.
And she's someone who a lot of people will connect with.
Because she's got a very interesting journey
over the series.
You know, the way she connects with her daughter
and the things she learns, and the mission she goes on
in what is the present day timeline of our story.
She has a lot to do and there's a lot of nuance there.
She's someone you connect with instantly,
and that helps hugely.
I understand... you don't want...
But the doctor said...
Well, they... they said that there were signs
that you'd had a baby.
I don't know what you're talking about.
We met a lot of people when it came to choosing the director.
It's a huge, huge job to direct eight hours by yourself
and shoot for what was 102 days in the end, was it?
It was 102 days shooting.
So it's a mammoth task for any director, really.
What we liked about Ben was that he had an energy.
He had done a really great show called Cyberbully
that was very tense. It was all in one room.
So it was an impressive thing to dramatise that
and keep that exciting.
And also, more importantly, he had a background in documentary,
which we felt with this one,
because we were going to Iraq and this German military base
and more alien places,
we wanted to make sure they felt credible
and that you could sort of feel them, as a viewer.
So he brought that, which was very exciting.
One thing that really works about The Missing as a brand
is that it feels rooted in reality.
And so to have someone with a documentary background
to have that eye to take us into the British military landscape
in Germany, or the landscape in Iraq,
felt really, really important to us.
And also, when you look at his work,
it felt he had a natural flair for thriller.
And so that was really exciting for us.
He hasn't done hours and hours of television,
so he still has that freshness and excitement
of someone who's desperate to make their mark
on the television landscape.
With this in particular, it was a Herculean task
of taking on eight hours and trying to tell a story
as multi-faceted and covering as many timelines and countries
as this one is.
He has a huge ability to hold a story in his head,
to know where each scene is preceded and what follows it,
in terms of the stories and scenes he's set to film.
He's also very generous with actors
and with the crew he surrounds himself with.
I think it's essential to have the same director
over eight episodes,
because in a way, although it's eight episodes,
the way the storyline is chopped up,
you need that relationship with someone.
You know, in episode four you'll be doing a scene
that, if it was lineal, it would only be episode two,
because it's chopped up, it's quite long.
So you need to have a relationship with the director
over those eight episodes.
I think it worked brilliantly in the first one.
I think you can see those actors really trusting the director.
And that's what we have here.
You need to be able to be with someone over these months.
It's a long shoot, this.
So, yeah, it's really important to have a relationship
with a director who you can very quickly get a shorthand with.
That's important. You don't want to have to start again
with another director and sort of,
fill them in with the blanks of what they've missed
in the first two or three episodes.
This isn't the story of the week.
It's very much... It has to be a baton being exchanged
from hand to hand right the way through the season.
It's getting increasingly more common for directors
to do the whole of a series, but it's still quite rare, I think.
You get a completely different experience.
I can only really talk about it from my experience.
It's certainly, um... It's a great thing
to be able to go with the cast
on the entirety of their journey.
To be with them at the beginning and say, "We're seeding this in.
This is going to develop and grow
and in five months' time we'll be there
when it comes to fruition..."
It's very rare to get that opportunity.
One other thing I'm really excited about
is that the last thing Jack and Harry wanted
was to repeat the same tropes as series one.
They wanted to push the audience and to keep them on their toes.
This series goes to places that you might not imagine,
and it has twists that you might not see coming.
And some of those are early on and some of them are later,
and I'm really interested to see how the audience respond.
I think one of the joys we discovered in the first series
is you can tell a characterful and relatable story,
but also find moments for drama and for high-octane adrenaline
and action that feel integral to the story.
I think the car chase in series one
made us realise you could have those moments
without them feeling forced or unnecessary.
People feel like if you have something blow up,
it'll just be good. But it won't.
If you really care for the character
and want them to achieve what they're going to achieve,
then I think, you know, proper adrenalised moments
against a backdrop of something that is quite intense and dark
can provide an interesting balance.
So whenever we write a scene with more action or adrenaline,
we always ask each other a lot whether we really need it
and whether it really earns its place.
We cut quite a few from the scripts
and even as we're editing it, we're pulling back
and trying to make sure...
The ones we have really earned their place.
And sometimes they go on too long and we'll cut them down
so they don't feel like, "Hey, here's an action sequence."
It's a sparing, fleeting moment or it's a bit more real-world.
The minute it feels like something you've seen
or it starts to feel familiar, you start to zone out and...
It just feels a bit like everything else.
We had a number of challenging sequences to shoot
on this project.
One of those was the opening of episode two,
with the suicide of Mrs Giroux,
who throws herself from the top of a Paris rooftop.
It's a hugely challenging number,
to put that kind of shoot together.
But beyond the stunts and the preparation
and the amount of work that goes into it from that side,
I think it's lovely that it's tied in to Julien's character.
Putting together a stunt sequence of that size,
an entire day's shoot with roads closed off in Brussels,
a massive safety rig
which ensured that the seamless shot of a stunt performer
falling from the roof and landing on the car below,
on the ground,
looks like one continuous shot,
all of that is pointless if it doesn't engage the audience.
If it doesn't have a resonance like the rest of the drama.
And if you don't understand why that event
has shaped Julien Baptiste for all those years,
as he continues to search for the truth of what happened
to Sophie Giroux.
So I'm pleased when we make sequences like that,
which of course are challenging and test you as a producer
and as a filmmaker.
But I'm happier when I then find myself in an edit
with a storyline which engages me emotionally,
not just some impressive visuals.
The approach to shooting action in The Missing
is to be with the characters.
It's not about having 17 camera angles.
It's about being, with a few notable exceptions,
being on their shoulder.
So you're heading towards that fire with Sam.
You're watching Mrs Giroux jump off the roof with Tchéky.
You're climbing up that hill with David and Keeley
as they try and save their daughter at the end.
And it's trying to...
keep it real and plausible
and as authentic as you can.
But principally it's about being at ground level.
It's not about...
Well, it's a budget-friendly way of shooting as well,
but it's kind of organically motivated,
it's character-motivated.
(Market hubbub)
STEVENS: For me, part of the exciting challenge of this job
was producing a show,
which is filmed in Belgium, set in Germany,
set in Iraq,
and filmed in Morocco.
It was one of the most logistically challenging jobs
I've ever taken on.
We wanted to keep it outside of England
and keep the international feel that the first series had.
Actually, the locations were borne out of the main theme
of this series,
which is the idea of freedom and riffing on themes of freedom
and the countries sort of represent that -
the sort of military base, and the rules that are set there
in this big castle-like structure.
And Iraq, going into the themes of freedom and war
and all that kind of stuff.
So it sort of bled into that, really,
as a result of the primary theme,
which is borne out of Alice
and somebody who's been imprisoned
for a long period of time.
Some of the locations we've got in Belgium, Brussels, Malmedy,
to name but a few, are amazing, fantastic,
and something that you wouldn't find at all in the UK.
And they do have their own personalities
and their own real feel, that they add to it.
I found it really interesting going to Vogelsang.
I don't think I would ever choose to come to Vogelsang,
but being brought to Vogelsang has been really interesting.
You should really be on leave by now, not stuck here.
- I'm fine, Dad. - I know.
But your sister would have killed me for not saying it.
Have you told her?
- I will... I will! - Dad!
It's my job to worry about you, not the other way around.
It's always exciting to step back into this world.
Jack and Harry's gorgeous scripts
are a kind of beautiful puzzle...
And to see that brought to life by Ben
and the phenomenal actors we've got involved.
And now coming together in the edit and broadcast,
that's always really, really exciting.
I think it's a testament to Jack and Harry's work as writers
that they're able to tell a story this complicated
and this multi-faceted across eight hours
and ensure that every time I read each one of those scripts,
the first thing I wanted to do was pick up the next one.
The same is true with each episode we've put together
in the cutting room.
I think there's a skill at writing a cliff-hanger.
It's very easy to write something
that leaves the audience shocked and surprised.
It's much harder to make sure that everything
that leads up to that moment allows you to fully engage
and fully invest in each of those characters,
so that when the unexpected happens,
it's not surprising in a bad way, but in a good way.
It's really important. There's so much good stuff on TV
that you need a reason to come back and keep watching.
When we write, we always try and think how can we end an episode
in a place that makes me want to come back
and write the next one.
Often we'll finish an episode and go,
"I want to write the next one!"
If we can get excited about that,
then hopefully the audience will too.
And how do you do that in a way that isn't cheap?
That's not, "Hey, come back, I just did something crazy"?
How do you do it in a way that's intrinsic to the story
that's helpful going forward,
and it becomes a part of the whole in a helpful way?
You certainly experiment with things
and try not to lean towards cheap shocks or rug pulls
that just feel, "You didn't see this one coming!"
There's good surprising, which is characterful and relatable,
and bad, when you wouldn't have guessed it because it's stupid.
Jack and Harry are unique writing talents.
They have proven it on a number of their shows before.
I think The Missing 2 takes it even further.
The quality of the work, the characters, size of the cast
and the spread of the story,
ensuring that every episode leaves us wanting more,
is a real skill and something that is unique to their work.
TCHÉKY: They really are able to make you go through deep things.
There is the irony and the humour.
But it is also... There is something authentic.
It's not playing with weird feelings, you know.
It's really... bright, it's intelligent.
ABIGAIL HARDINGHAM: I think Jack and Harry's writing
is so brilliant.
Yes, it's going to be affecting. It definitely is.
But I think people will come back to this series
because of, initially, how brilliant the first one is,
but will be so surprised with how different this one is.
Missing children stories have endured for centuries.
We are fascinated with missing children stories.
And I think that... we're almost as a society
we're kind of obsessed with them.
Of course they make headlines and you can understand why.
I think that what The Missing does is really explore
what the truth of being in that kind of situation,
of being a parent of a missing child might really feel like.
And I think it does it responsibly.
It can often be quite harrowing to watch.
But it's in the complexity of it
that... that we find...
...hopefully we find the truth of it.
Ripped/Corrected By mstoll