The Missing Returns For Series Two

The Missing returns to BBC One for a second series.

The first series of the drama followed the disappearance of child Oliver Hughes and the frantic search by his father Tony (played by James Nesbitt) to find him.

For the new series, however, writers Harry and Jack Williams decided to explore a different aspect of what happens when a child goes missing. Set mostly on a British military base in Eckhausen, Germany, but reaching as far as the ISIL battlefields in Northern Iraq, the story begins when a young British woman stumbles through the streets and collapses in the town square. It is Christmas 2014. Her name is Alice Webster (Abigail Hardingham) and she has been missing for 11 years.

The series will explore how a family – and wider community – copes with her return. Told over two timelines, with the theme of freedom versus imprisonment, as well as the impact of war running throughout, the story starts in 2014 with the return of Alice, then switches to the present day to see how it has impacted the family.

Harry Williams explained: "We didn't want to recreate the same story, we wanted to do something different. Rather than losing someone, it's about finding someone, and whether that is the happy ending that everyone thinks it is."

Willow Grylls, Executive Producer, said: "The Missing isn't The Missing without its characteristic twists and turns. And quite quickly we find out that there is another girl that has also been missing, who is still out there. The intention is to make the audience lean forward a little bit more. It allows us the ability to tell stories about characters in a non-linear way and allows us to make choices that we wouldn't normally be able to."

It is Alice's possible connection to another missing girl that brings detective Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo) out of retirement and to the Webster family. Her case has been haunting him for years, so he joins the search for Alice's abductor in the hope it will lead him to the girl he couldn't find.

"As Oliver's story was coming to an end, we felt we weren't necessarily done with the character of Julien Baptiste," continued Harry. "It made us sad to say good-bye to him, and there were more stories we had to tell there."

"We knew that a man with a career that long would have skeletons in his closet, a lot of things left remaining to fix," added Jack Williams.

Karyo is joined by a new cast for the second series, including Staff Sergeant Sam Webster (David Morrissey), his wife Gemma (Keeley Hawes) and their youngest son Matthew (Jake Davies) who have coped as well as they can after their daughter disappeared, but their family unit is fractured by Alice's return.

"What's crucial about the show is that it's all about how people have changed, and one of the central questions you ask is, what's happened to them in the meantime? How did they get from there to here?" says Jack. "You look at Sam, Gemma, and Matthew, in the past, and the way they respond to the return of Alice. Then you see them in the present, and they're so fractured and on different trajectories. It just shows the different way they deal with this, in quite a stark way."

Helping to finding Alice's abductor is Military Police Officer Eve Stone (Laura Fraser). She is quick to judge but unprepared to handle the complexity of the case, and her professional involvement soon becomes tangled with her personal life. Her father, Brigadier Adrian Stone (Roger Allam), is in charge of the base, and will do anything to protect his daughter and his reputation.

The production used a variety of devices to help differentiate between the two timelines, including different hair and make-up looks and costumes, to shooting each timeline in a different season – winter for 2014 and summer for 2016 – as well as a different approach to the cinematography by director Ben Chanan.

www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre

(JP)