The second episode of Last Seen delivers a taut, emotional, and dual-perspective story that is a notch above standard missing-person procedurals. Where the premiere established the fractured world of Ian Ridley, this episode builds out the story, forcing characters into a space of fragile hope.
Ian, played with straight vulnerability by Patrick Brammall, has sobered up after the initial shock of the remains. Yet sobriety brings no peace. Preliminary forensics indicate the child was strangled, turning the case into an active homicide investigation and delaying any release of the body. This practical detail carries devastating weight for Ian’s ex-wife Deb, who had begun planning a funeral as a form of closure. Instead, she channels her grief into a candlelight vigil, an event that becomes the emotional and investigative centrepiece of the episode. Brammall conveys a man who has spent eleven years constructing a fragile existence around the absence of his daughter Maggie, only to have that shattered again by the possibility that she might still be alive. His investigative instincts reawaken, but they are inseparable from personal guilt and obsession. The lingering friction with his stepson Dean, who believes Ian thinks he’s at fault for Maggie’s, feels raw and unresolved, never reduced to simple blame. Ian’s single-minded focus risks alienating those closest to him, a tension that’s handled with subtlety and honesty.
The episode puts thebulk of its focus on the isolated world of Sarah, the teenage girl living on a remote farm with the parents, Henry and Jenna Reid. Chloe Jean Lourdes captures the quiet restlessness of a young person raised to fear the outside world as a “bad, godless place,” yet increasingly haunted by fragments of memory, carving the name “Mags” into a log, a sense that something essential has been withheld. The farm itself is a juxtaposition: sparse modern technology yet it has an advanced security system, and a carefully controlled existence that feels both protective and imprisoning. Maxine Peake’s Jenna is a study in meekness and despair, numbing herself with pills and migraines, while Brendan Cowell’s Henry has a controlling, almost messianic certainty that the isolation is necessary. Their dynamic never tips into caricature; instead, it feels like a closed system of belief that is beginning to crack under the pressure of Sarah’s growing curiosity.
The dual narrative structure is one of the episode’s greatest strengths. By intercutting Ian’s efforts to use the vigil as a potential trap for Maggie’s abductor with Sarah’s tentative steps toward the outside world, the episode creates a sense of converging trajectories that is both thrilling and heartbreaking. Sarah’s only connection beyond the farm is Tommy, the young son son of new neighbours, whose uncomplicated interest in her offers a glimpse of ordinary teenage life. When she seizes an opportunity to leave while Henry attends the vigil and Jenna is incapacitated, the scene that follow are taut and painfully authentic. The party she attends with Tommy becomes a pressure cooker of sensory overload, alcohol, and unwanted advances. Lourdes navigates the confusion and sudden clarity with remarkable nuance: the moment she sees a complete vigil flyer, complete with a family photograph, shatters he young existence. Recognition is not instantaneous or melodramatic; it is disorienting, incomplete, and terrifying. She was already suspecting that something about her life was wrong and now she has the proof
That recognition leads to the episode’s defining moment, the emergency call that gives the episode its title. It executed with surgical precision. A frightened teenager reaches a payphone, dials for help, and finds herself speaking to the one person whose life has been defined by her absence. Brammall’s reaction is restrained intensity: years of suppressed hope colliding with professional training and personal desperation. The call itself is brief, fragmented, and devastating in its near-miss quality. By the time Ian reaches the location, the booth is empty. The emotional impact is profound precisely because the episode has invested so carefully in both characters’ lives. you understand the weight of that missed connection from both sides.
The Call does not rush exposition or lean on easy twists. Instead, it allows character psychology to drive the momentum. Ian’s decision to withhold certain information from Deb in service of his plan feels consistent with a man who is desperate enough to do anything in the search for answers. Sarah’s gradual awakening feels earned rather than engineered, she is not brainwashed and is smart enough to realise that something about her home life is off.
Jessica Wren’s Deb is especially affecting: a woman who has managed to rebuild a version of a life while still carrying the same wound as Ian, yet who approaches grief with a different kind of pragmatism. The friction between her need for some form of ritual closure and Ian’s refusal to accept finality is handled with empathy on both sides. Neither are the villain of the piece.
What is refreshing about this series is its refusal to treat the central mystery as mere puzzle-box entertainment, it’s pretty clear what is going on. This episode is fundamentally interested in the long aftermath of loss, the ways people construct identities, beliefs, and daily routines around absence, and what happens when that absence is suddenly, tentatively challenged. Themes of isolation, control, memory, and the boundary between protection and imprisonment run through both narratives. The episode understands that for Ian, the possibility of Maggie’s survival is both salvation and a kind of renewed torment. For Sarah, the same possibility is an existential upheaval that threatens everything she has been taught about the world and herself.
By the time the episode ends on that empty booth and Ian’s devastated realisation, the series has fully committed to its duality the father’s relentless, possibly self-destructive pursuit of reunion, and the daughter’s dawning understanding that the life she has known may be a carefully constructed fiction. The Call is thoughtful, gripping and eaves you fully invested in what comes next.
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Where to watch Last Seen – Season 1, Episode 2: The Call: