Summary
Missing You expands its villain contingent in Episode 2, showing us the margins of a criminal enterprise but remaining tight-lipped about how everything fits together.
All good mysteries need a bad guy, a killer, a weirdo, someone to imperil the leads and create conflict. Episode 2 of Missing You, titled “With or Without You” after the U2 song, does the job of introducing our resident villain – one of them, at least – and he’s absolutely ridiculous.
Is this a bad thing? Not really. Like I said, you need a villain. You probably don’t need one this moustache-twirlingly, cartoonishly villainous, but a bit of jeopardy goes a long way, and it’s clear even at this stage that the operation this guy is sitting at the head of is connected to everything we’ve seen thus far.
Meanwhile, a new wrinkle is introduced for Kat in the form of another missing person with an even more explicit connection to her private life. If you’re wondering how Missing You can possibly tie all this together in a sensible way, don’t worry, I was too. But we’ll get there in subsequent episodes.
Farmvillain
Anyway, let’s talk about the bad guy. “With or Without You” begins by immediately revealing who has Rishi – a demented farmer type named Titus, who would seem like a normal bloke if it wasn’t for the fact that he seems to take great pleasure in ruining people’s lives and seems to have a fairly extensive system of kidnapping and extortion going on. Rishi is one of several captives, all wearing orange jumpsuits, and he’s trying to get £25,000 out of him by threatening the love of his life, Vanessa.
Titus is introduced interacting with a couple who are trying to adopt one of his dogs, but he proves they’re not suitable owners for his pedigree chums by digging up some dirt in their personal lives. It’s intended to let us know that the guy has a surprising amount of resources, but it also matters in a minor way later on, so I’m mentioning it here for posterity.
Later, Titus discovers that Rishi’s accounts are frozen so he orders his tractor-driving right-hand man Reynaldo to off him. Rishi almost escapes but ends up smacked to death with a shovel and cremated. Amongst the belongings burned is a pretty yellow dress that’ll be relevant in a minute. Episode 2 of Missing You doesn’t reveal exactly how all this is connected but this scene, which occurs towards the very end of the episode, is the strongest clue that both of Kat’s missing persons ended up on Titus’s farm.
Titus in Missing You | Image via Netflix
Brendan and Dana Fells
Kat is being followed by a guy who presents himself to her as Brendan. Brendan’s mother, Dana Fells, has apparently gone missing, and only Kat can find her. Brendan knows far more than he should about Kat and when she goes home that evening she finds him in her flat. After giving chase, he reveals that his mother ran away with Josh, who she met through the Melody Cupid app. This is also how Brendan found out about Kat.
Missing You gives Brendan far too much IT aptitude for anything he does to feel reasonable. He’s a tech whizz the same way Charlie is – he just knows information because he’s read the script and pretends he got it via a computer. But the important details here are that Josh was serially dating through the Melody Cupid app, which according to Stacey seems to be the only evidence that Josh has ever existed, so it’s clear that the app itself is of particular importance.
Anyway, during a bit of flirty banter Nia and Charlie look up the CCTV footage from an ATM in Parkchester where Brendan claims his mother made a withdrawal on the day she disappeared. She’s wearing what is quite clearly the same dress that Titus’s goon burned with Rishi’s body. So, those two plots are connected. But how?
Stagger Is Hiding Something
Kat wants to reopen her father’s case and investigate Calligan, but Stagger, who is blatantly involved, denies the request. Even if he wasn’t played by the perennially shady Richard Armitage, it’d be obvious that Stagger is keeping some secrets.
To prove this, the prison officer, Tamsin, asks through Stacey to meet with Kat to reveal some more information. Josh was accompanied to the prison to visit Monte Leburne – which we learned about in the premiere – by Stagger. Why?
Kat confronts Stagger at the leaving do of one of their colleagues, Terry Khol, but he readily admits to taking Josh to visit Leburne. Josh was a journalist and Stagger claims his boss was trying to leverage his personal connection to the case for a big investigative scoop. This, Stagger theorizes, might be why Josh left so soon afterward – guilt.
I’m not buying it, and Missing You clearly doesn’t want us to, since in a late montage we see Stagger look at himself in the mirror and have a flashback to him frantically cleaning some bloody clothes. We also see Stacey make a call and say, “We need to tell her.” Tell who? Tell what?
At the very end of Missing You Episode 2, we see Calligan at Leburne’s funeral. It looks like a particularly dangerous chap is about to get involved.
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