Missing You Recap: People Are Unreliable

Despicable dog breeder Titus might be an asshole, but he says something in Missing You’s fourth episode, “Don’t You Forget About Me,” that rings pretty true. (In the world of the show, at least.) It’s during the scene when he’s trying to bleed Debra even drier financially, and it’s the bit he says about how “true love is a myth, and people are unreliable.”

While you could argue with the first part — is there such a thing as “true” love, is there one single love for each person, what does “true love” even mean, and so on — the second part is indisputable. People are, in fact, unreliable. That doesn’t mean every single person you know is inevitably going to let you down, but rather that, by and large, people can’t really help but be a little flighty. We can’t help it. We want to believe that some hot girl we met online is into us or that our financial broker doesn’t work out of his mom’s dank garage. We want to trust that our friends haven’t been baldly lying to us for years. And we want to believe that we can trust our parents, bosses, and law enforcement.

But we’re all still human, right? And while Missing You is just a fictional drama based on a novel, it’s still based on some kernel of truth. Sure, people have been downright lying to Kat, but they did it because they were trying to protect her. They did it to save themselves, and they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. Or they did it because maybe they truly believed that’s what happened, whether it did or not. Even the characters in Missing You that are “good,” like Charlie and Kat, still keep things to themselves if it doesn’t serve their narrative or the image they present (i.e., dating a co-worker or that you’re sneaking in to see your dad’s supposed killer). While people are, as a whole, generally very good, we’re also still an unreliable bunch, and that’s what makes us so damn frustrating.

That’s certainly what makes Missing You so frustrating, particularly if you’re onboard Team Kat. If there’s a person in her life who hasn’t spent literal decades lying to her, then we haven’t met them. Her father was a corrupt cop who ran around on his wife, and her mother knew about all of it. Aqua is somehow so obsessed with Josh (or maybe Josh’s safety?) that she attacked some 19-year-old kid who even questioned his existence. And mob boss Calligan, while certainly guilty of some very dirty things, actually seems to be fairly straightforward — and fairly innocent when it comes to the death of Clint Donovan.

And Josh, of course, is alive. He’s been living somewhere far, far off the grid with his dad and his daughter. (Though, is that his dad? Wouldn’t Kat recognize him? Maybe it’s the girl’s mom’s dad.) He’s got 25,000 paid subscribers to his newsletter, where he spouts gems like “being in nature is the best caffeine,” and someone must not want to find him that badly because it really wasn’t that hard for Kat to do it in just about a day.

We’re supposed to believe someone does want to find Josh that badly, though. Not Calligan, because Leslie was literally on Josh’s property to nab Kat, so that doesn’t play — so it’s got to be someone else. Stagger? Titus? Both? I lean toward the former since, as Kat’s auntie says at one point about the force back in the day, “those men, for most of them, working at a place like that fed the worst part of their rotten souls.” Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that feeling of strength and self-preservation has to be hard to shake, especially when it’s been really embedded in someone’s soul for years and years.

It’s also got to be hard to walk away from whatever Titus & Co. have been up to, even if things are getting a little hairy in terms of frozen Swiss bank accounts and everything else. Smart people would just close up shop, move on, and start again, but instead, they’re trying to disappear Kat from her urban apartment since, apparently, they’ve been able to just kill at will for some time now without anyone really noticing. How are seemingly a dozen people missing at any given time before being eventually killed, and all of England hasn’t noticed? Maybe we are really just that wrapped up in our own shit.

If Debra has her way, hopefully she won’t be one of them. While she managed to escape the bumbling hired hand who took way, way too much time to choose a knife while she stood there (also, he had a gun last episode, so just use that?), Titus’s land appears to be absolutely massive, and all the dudes are out now trying to hunt her down. I feel pretty confident that ol’ Debra will make it out and back home to her son and his trust fund, but we saw how it went for Rishi, so you never know.

There’s just one episode of Missing You left, though, so we won’t have to wait too long to see how it all pans out. (Or, really, wait at all since it’s dumped on Netflix all at once.) While the drama will undoubtedly revolve around who did what to who, and who’s going to jail for murder and all that, I’m just as interested in where everyone goes from here. Can Kat trust her family or friends — or Josh? — ever again, or is she destined to become one of Manchester PD’s most vengeful loners. She’s going to need a lot of therapy either way.

Missing Notes

• James Nesbitt really is excellent as Calligan. We knew basically nothing about Calligan other than that he was a scary mob boss who had a gross claw-hammer story in his past, and in just one scene Nesbitt managed to make me want a whole Calligan spinoff series.