Now and again you quite literally get bowled over by a new programme that comes on the telly.  You go to bed thinking about it, you wake up thinking about it and you cannot wait for the next episode to start.  This is what happened to me after I watched last night the first episode of the second series of the BBC One abduction thriller The Missing.  If you allow me to go all Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood on you for a second, it was A-MA-ZING!!

Beforehand, there was some slight hesitancy on my part about watching this second series.  Firstly, I feared it might fall victim to second series syndrome. i.e be nowhere near as good as the first.  Secondly, the first seven episodes of the first series were brilliant but the series finale badly let it down.  It was corny and I felt angered by being so letdown by the writers Harry and Jack Williams.

This first episode of series two though was absolutely tremendous.  It really was faultless television.  I loved the haunting quality of it throughout.  I loved the stylistic European art-house cinema feel to it.  The plot kept delivering twists upon twists, just as I had recovered from the last big revelation then along came another one to shock me yet again.  Half way through I became self-aware that I was watching something very special here.  Originality is why this programme appeals to me so much.

The narrative was challenging(but in a good way) to watch at times because it was told in three different time frames.  Firstly, we saw a girl get abducted eleven years ago, then the action kept going back and forth between 2014 and the present day.  The young girl abducted was a British girl called Alice Webster(Abigail Hardingham) and we saw her make this shocking reemergence in 2014, finally freed from her torture whilst staggering and collapsing in the German town of Eckhausen.

Soon we saw Alice reunited and visited in hospital by her dumbfounded family.  Keely Hawes and David Morrissey both gave fantastic performances as her parents, namely Gemma and Sam Webster.  The news of her reappearance then sparked the search for the other girl who was imprisoned with Alice called Sophie Giroux.  There was ONLY one man thought capable enough of solving this mystery, step forward the best former detective on TV right now, the magnificent Julien Baptiste(Tcheky Karyo)!

Julien Baptiste to me is like the polite French version of Dirty Harry, that famous no-holds-barred movie character played by Clint Eastwood.  He is charismatic, strong-willed and fights for justice to prevail.  In Julien’s case he spent a career in the police force searching for missing children and arresting pedophiles.  Tcheky Karyo is a sublime actor and so it was a brilliant bit of casting to cast him in this role.

In the present day we saw Julien travel to dangerous Iraq in attempt to find a man called Daniel Reed(Daniel Ezra), the person who it looks like at this stage is responsible for the kidnappings of the two girls.  It also appears like his recently dead father has something to do with it as well.  Julien at the end then left us with the biggest of bombshells.  He voiced his belief to his driver that the girl believed to have been Alice Webster, might NOT have been the real Alice Webster after all. I think my mouth stayed wide open in shock for about thirty seconds after this revelation.  WHAT A CORKER OF A TWIST, WHAT AN ENDING!!

Before this Julien had dropped another huge bombshell on us when he revealed he only had weeks left to live after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.  I am praying(even as an atheist) that this was a lie by him in order to get driven to his desired destination with only a minimal delay.  If he does die at the end of this series though then a third series of The Missing has well and truly gone for a burton, so my hunch is that this is a red herring.

The narrative was so impressively multilayered with different connecting strands that watching how it all unfolds over the coming weeks should be a real treat. Yes, it was a challenging watch at times but I do not buy the notion by some that perhaps it is too complex for its own good. We just need a much better ending to this series than we got in the first one.

A brilliant first episode with the promise of so much more brilliance still to come! 5/5.