Not. A. Thing.-Absentia Download Part IV
This is super dumb, but I can't resist going on. Truthfully, it's Season 2 that gets completely disgusting and disgustingly bad, but I feel a burning need to finish out Season 1 first.
So, everyone has been kidnapped or is in jail.
Well, not Emily. Because she pretty much escapes from the guys who kidnapped her for the reward money, like, 6 minutes after they kidnap her. It literally serves no purpose, except I guess she might have stayed in the storage unit with the magic batteries and listened to lots of tapes of children being tortured, instead of just the one?
Anyhoo. She escapes. Her brother is in jail for helping her. This will not really be relevant to much of anything, except, oh! A journalist named Laurie posts his bail. She's the one Emily stabbed. She tells Jack, "Believe me, I could have pressed charges!" No, dimwit. You could not have pressed charges because you snuck into the private hospital room of a deeply traumatized patient. In any case, Laurie wants an exclusive on Emily's story.
Oh! I have just remembered that Emily's therapist floats the idea at some point (I guess after Emily zip tied him and bodies with her name supposedly on them started piling up?) that Emily may have Dissociative Identity Disorder? Someone asks, "Like. Dude, wouldn't YOU for sure know that?" And the therapist is like, "Nah. Everyone's bad at their job on this show. Lol!" It's a very, very strange thing, because I think it was genuinely intended to build tension? Like, "Oh noes! Maybe Emily doesn't even KNOW she's a killer!" But there is no suspense to it at all, because we know for certain she didn't kill Creepy Guy. We know for all but certain that she didn't kill the Corrupt Agent. To shore up the tension they have Idiot Ex say that Emily used to fly into a rage when she didn't get her way. This, like everything Idiot Ex does, does not help.
There's also a point later (in the shitty, shitty episode 9) when we learn that Creepy Guy had a college girlfriend who accused him of sexual assault, then dropped the charges. Another Agent interviews the woman, and it turns out that they'd "adventurous" sexually, but this night was different and Creepy Guy had a friend. The Agent asks the girlfriend to describe the guy and she says "I NEVER SAID IT WAS A MAN."
DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNN, right? Except. No. Not. At. All. Now, please understand that other than knowing Emily was gone for 6 years this show has no comprehensible fucking timeline. How long have Idiot Ex and New Wife been married? Not a clue. How long had Emily been working the cases before her disappearance? Not a clue. But I can tell you this: Looking at Creepy Guy, he is not within a decade of Emily's age. In fact, I just looked him up. The actor is 15 years older than Stana and looks 20 years older than her. SO I'M GONNA GO OUT ON AN LIMB AND SAY JUNIOR-HIGH EMILY WASN'T SNEAKING OUT FOR SEX GAMES WITH CREEPY GUY.
(But it turns out that the Villain, a contemporary of Emily's, was. So. Yeah. Whatever.)
Ahem. Moving on.
So. New Wife and Emily's son, Flynn, have been for real kidnapped. Idiot Ex is sure Emily did it. He yells at a TV camera about it. That's how sure he is. Meanwhile, Emily is very sad under a viaduct with a cellular-enabled iPad, apparently. She's worried about Flynn, but she has the name Charles from the tape she listened to. Good thing that clonk on the head had no short-term memory effects!
Emily finds out that Charles is institutionalized. Your friendly neighborhood Chinese brother who randomly tells everyone everything tells Idiot Ex and Idiot Detective about his brother's storage unit and "the other FBI agent." You can practically smell the gears slowly grinding in Idiot Ex's head before he figures out that "other agent" == Emily. Everybody's at the mental institution, then! Charles is . . . behind a locked door? In a basement that's a maze of twisty passages, all alike? Near the tunnel thing where New Wife and Flynn are locked up? Genuinely don't have any idea.
Charles. Does NOT. like. Emily. She is "bad" and used to make people fight. (In fact, Emily has a personal flashback to beating up young Charles.) But there's really no time for this: The Idiot Duo have showed up. Idiot Ex chases Emily into the woods. He can hardly keep up with this woman who is running while gutshot. Idiot Ex is Good at No Things.
There's a standoff. Emily shoots Nick, tragically in the shoulder. Even more tragically, he is wearing a vest.
Episode 9 is a lousy blur. It's here that people really get going with the being dumb and mumbling in dark places. New Wife breathes heavily. Flynn is tortured in the tank (having chosen to sacrifice himself so New Wife won't be tortured). Flynn gets tortured again. New Wife breaks out of one room and gets Flynn out of the tank, then gets a tranq dart in her neck, failing to do anything to save Flynn. Failing to do anything, really, except burn up some time.
There is truly SO MUCH running around in dark locations. Emily asks Jack to ask Laurie to find out STUFF about the tank, because . . . well I don't really know why. Emily saw something in a fish tank in the Chinese restaurant?
Emily ordered the tank! Jack saw the purchase order-because yes, Jack, people who held someone captive for six years would not have the supervillain genius to give a false name. Emily knows she didn't order it, so she goes to where it was supposedly delivered, and maybe (this is another moment where everything is so fucking dark, I can't tell about some presumably important plot point) she finds a picture of the cabin where she was tortured, making this the most fucking roundabout show in the history of roundabout shows. The Idiot Duo show up at the same place, having been through their own torturous path. Idiot Ex learns that Creepy Guy cannot have killed all of the people they just dug up so ACCOMPLICE DEFINITE. Idiot Ex sees the creepy mask that Emily has described in a shop window across the street. In a truly mystifying leap of logic, the mask leads him to assume that Emily, in fact, mentored Creepy Guy, rather than being his partner!
Now. We're all gonna hold up for a second, because WHAT? She's been killing people for 15 years, but the life was lonely, so she hooked up with Creepy Guy to do Killing 2.0? This. Makes. No. Sense. WHAT ARE YOU ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT, WILLIS?
Anyway, Emily nopes it the fuck out of wherever the hell that is and heads for the cabin. For some truly demented reason, she calls the Idiot Ex to request his presence.
Emily gets a tranq dart in the neck. She wakes up in the room with New Wife and no Flynn. This is the worst of all possible worlds. The masked person has given Emily a TV, but it only gets the Crazy Channel. It turns out that the Villain was tortured by Dead Pacemaker Guy because DPG was trying to make superkillers or something, so he was looking for a child with Emily's violent profile and HISTORY OF TRAUMA (we know literally nothing about Emily's upbringing pre-adoption, so, THIS IS FORESHADOWING), but Emily was tired of sitting politely in a chair waiting for would-be adoptive parents to wake up and smell the Emily, so she switched a single piece of paper-THAT IS CORRECT, A SINGLE PIECE OF PAPER THAT APPARENTLY HAS NO KIND OF IDENTIFIERS ON IT-from the Villain's folder to her own. BOOM! Emily the unadoptable gets adopted.
Have you guessed who the villain is? IT IS LAURIE! THE JOURNALIST! (Who got stabbed, remember? And who told Jack that Emily bought the tank, which was a VERY SUBTLE AND SUPERVILLIANY MOVE.)
The Villain tries to get Emily to kill New Wife. Emily declines for unknown reasons. There is a lot of very confusing talk in here about who killed whom when. Villain and Creepy Guy killed Dead Pacemaker Guy. I don't have a clue who the others buried near DPG were. More importantly, I honestly don't know if I am supposed to know that Emily killed the guy who had her DNA under his nails? Or if I'm now supposed to think she killed Creepy Guy (when we know she did not?). Laurie says Emily killed them both. That she killed DNA guy "Right in that room." But, again, we know for certain Emily didn't kill Creepy Guy, and we find out here that Laurie's alibi is Emily's-she was watching Emily watch New Wife. In summary: I neither know nor care who killed anyone.
Idiot Ex shows up and it's time, once again, to run around in the fucking dark. Eventually, they find Flynn. Idiot Ex gets him out of the tank before he drowns, because he has to be good for something, I suppose. There's more running around in the dark. Eventually, they are running around outside.
Idiot Ex tells New Wife to take the kid and get gone, because, you know, the Villain is still running around. New Wife initially goes, then turns around FOR NO EARTHLY REASON. New Wife-you have less than no skills. Literally go the fuck away.
This is the second time Idiot Ex gets shot in the chest. It is the second time he fails to die. He does, however, lie in the woods contributing exactly nothing to the proceedings. Stana, stabbed in the freaking kidney, has to drown the Villain, then go look for his dumb, useless ass.
We are left with more than 25% of this 38-minute episode for the world's dumbest, least earned denouement.
The new SAC declares Emily clear of all charges.
The shoulder-shot moron is still in the hospital. Stana is not despite, as previously mentioned, having been STABBED IN THE KIDNEY. The two of them have this pal-y wal-y WE DID HAVE SOME HIJINKS, DIDN'T WE?!? conversation. To call it emotionally tone deaf is an insult to emotional tone deafness.
And then there's a party at Idiot Ex's place for Flynn's birthday. And Idiot Detective is there for some unfathomable reason. And he and Emily . . . I suppose it's meant to be flirting? It's nauseating. And he is bad at it.
And then the dishwasher gives Emily a panic attack and she imagines a murder she could not have committed. THE END.
(Except not the end, because it's Season 2 that really has me disgusted and enraged.)