Summary
Vanished is keeping its cards very close to its chest in “Rosefinch”, but there’s enough mystery here to keep audiences going, supported by a game Kaley Cuoco performance.
You can tell that Vanished is keeping its cards pretty close to its chest, since after Episode 1, “Rosefinch”, I still couldn’t say with any real certainty that I know more about what’s going on than when I started. The MGM+ four-parter thrives in that mystery, that sense of a seemingly ordinary woman with a seemingly ordinary boyfriend, realising that their intertwined lives are a lot less ordinary than first suspected. But why? Well, therein lies the rub.
To be fair, I didn’t think Tom was that ordinary to begin with. The dude seemed pretty deeply suspicious to me, but maybe I’m just cynical. I’m also not Alice Monroe, jet-setting archaeologist in the romantic embrace of what she presumes to be a simple English literature professor. But a four-year relationship without any commitment, only ever meeting in hotels? Secret phone calls? A clear reluctance to commit? The red flags are piling up way before Tom disappears.
The red flags are already in place thanks to a cold open that finds Alice in a hotel in Marseilles, washing her bloody hands in the sink and then fleeing from a man who is posing as a delivery driver but seems more like an assassin, if the knife is anything to go by. But most of the premiere takes place a week prior to this, showing how Alice got to this point, which, in the most simplistic possible terms, was via train.
Alice is supposed to be smart, so the idea that she doesn’t notice anything amiss in these early stages is difficult to swallow. Tom is too aloof for his own good. They meet in France in a luxury hotel and enjoy the facilities, so to speak, and she totally buys his explanation that his new tattoo – of a rosefinch, the episode’s title – was gotten because it reminds him of her. She thinks his mysterious phone calls are to his uncle, and she’s reassured when his clandestine diary entries turn up the address of a jewellery store specialising in engagement rings. Alice thinks she has cracked it. But if that’s the case, why does Tom seem so put out by the idea of them relocating to America together?
The inciting incident of Vanished Episode 1 is Tom disappearing from a train bound for Arles, where he and Alice were slated to check into another fancy hotel. He takes a call, Alice falls asleep, and when she wakes up, he’s nowhere to be seen. Nobody knows where he went. None of the officials is any help (which will, I think, become a recurring theme.) He’s not picking up his phone. He does, however, briefly call, but all Alice can hear on the line is running water and a car door slamming shut.
I suspect we’re supposed to be filing all of these things away as clues. Alice’s chance encounter with Helene seems like a pretty big one. A man tailing her is another. But while it’s obvious to the audience that something’s amiss, nobody else seems especially concerned. The cynical Inspector Drax, whom Alice meets with at the police station, clearly assumes Tom has simply fled out of fear of commitment to Alice, given that she floated the idea of them moving in together. And besides, he can’t report him as a missing person until 48 hours have elapsed, and it has only been a couple since he vanished. These scenes of Alice trying to reason with a hostile foreign police force reminded me of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, weirdly enough. Pretty Americans tend not to fare well in Europe.
Without any official support, Alice has to look into things herself, retracing her route back down the tracks to the point where the train stopped. There, she finds an empty packet of Tom’s chewing gum of choice, and hears the burbling water that was audible on the phone. Nearby, there’s a house guarded by some dogs, and an eerie animal carcass hung in one of the outbuildings. Even this, though, isn’t enough for Drax, who seems so disinterested in Tom’s disappearance that it makes him look suspicious, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Alice.
Given that “Rosefinch” includes a bunch of flashbacks to Tom’s time working for an NGO called SOS Global, which was helping Syrian refugees in Jordan, I think it’s safe to assume that the past has something to do with the present. But it certainly isn’t clear in what way just yet. Helene is definitely connected, though. She gives Alice the only good advice anyone offers in this episode, which is to look into Tom’s recent activities. These include backtracing his earlier call from the hotel phone to “Brian”. But it goes straight through to SOS Global. She also looks through the photos on Tom’s camera and finds one of him posing with one of the NGO volunteers, a woman who just so happens to have the same rosefinch tattoo on her arm as Tom now has.
Just when you think you know someone!
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