‘Vanished’ Episode 3 Recap – Run, Alice, Run

This might be harsh, but I’m starting to wonder how stupid Alice Monroe really is. I can accept her ignoring some obvious red flags. But the more that Vanished progresses, the more it seems like there wasn’t a single aspect of Alice’s relationship with Tom that wasn’t suspicious. As she dozes on Helene’s couch, she recalls having turned up to SOS Global’s base camp to surprise Tom and found him almost nose-to-nose with Mira. This is where Episode 3, “The Fatted Calf”, starts. With this and all Tom’s other little weirdities — to say nothing of him potentially being a human trafficker — it’s incredibly hard to buy into Alice’s current predicament without thinking that she has kind of brought this upon herself.

And yet she still thinks Helene is talking nonsense. She thinks any claims of Tom or Durand — who just tried to have her killed, lest we forget, though admittedly she doesn’t know that for certain — being human traffickers are ludicrous, especially Tom, since Helene didn’t know Tom, even though every new lead Alice uncovers proves that she didn’t either. She doesn’t seem to find it especially weird that SOS Global had several giant contracts with a company called Kalco, which by all accounts doesn’t exist. Why would that be, if something wasn’t afoot? Even if the heart of the NGO is purely philanthropic, that doesn’t necessarily mean one of its limbs isn’t rotten. Tom could have been that limb.

Alice is openly judgmental of Helene, not just of her claims, but of everything, even her diet. When they follow Durand to a port, she wants to waltz right in on the basis that they aren’t doing anything wrong by being there, not clocking the cameras or realizing how making themselves visible will give away the only advantage they have on Durand. This gets annoying quickly. When the two of them follow Durand to a surreptitious meeting with Inspector Drax, Alice suggests it might just be a coincidence (these are, lest we forget, the only two men who knew the hotel she was staying at, where an assassin was sent to kill her). When they then follow Durand to a meeting with a man who seems very much to be Tom, Alice abandons any pretense of stealth and just starts chasing him through the street on foot.

Now, we mustn’t write Vanished off entirely. I think the location shooting adds something quite tangible to this sequence; the setting feels appropriately busy and lived-in and, at least for Alice, labyrinthine. But when she finds Tom in the middle of the maze, she’s back to being a dolt again. She asks him why he didn’t tell her about “Malik”, the little boy in the sad story that Durand quite clearly cooked up to deceive her. Even seeing Tom with Mira doesn’t quite clue Alice in to the idea that the guy’s a scumbag at best, and that nothing about their relationship was ever real in the first place. Kaley Cuoco sells this moment quite well, but the writing underpinning her performance is incredibly questionable.

And since Alice is still wanted for murder in Vanished Episode 3, her theatrics draw the attention of the police, and thus, another chase begins, this time with Alice as the prey. She gets away and meets up with Helene in a dive bar, but she’s had enough by this point and would rather write the whole thing off as a bad job. The upside of Alice’s indecision and general cluelessness is that it really improves Helene as a character, since she’s the one who gets to tell Alice how stupid she is, how silly she’s being, and later, during a really very good monologue explaining how Helene’s career went down the toilet thanks to a situation almost identical to what Alice is going through now, that she’s far from the only woman in the world who has fallen foul of a dishonest man. But all this toing and froing, one foot in and another out, needs to stop. Does she want the truth or not? Helene’s a more compelling character than Alice by an order of magnitude, and this scene really proves it.

Alice does want the truth, obviously, but Helene has to show her that the truth isn’t about exposing Tom’s international womanising. It’s about something bigger. So, Helene takes Alice to what is quite clearly a brothel and tells her to show the nervous sex workers a picture of Tom. Immediately, the girls start screaming in terror. Point proven, I’d say.

At this point, things take a turn. Alice essentially morphs into someone else and forms an investigative double-act with Helene. She cuts her hair to throw off the authorities, which works so well that they can just start roaming around in the open without anyone getting suspicious (I mean, her face is still the same, no?). She’s suddenly competent at deception and subterfuge. After staring at Helene’s case board for a while, Alice comes up with the idea of locating the shipping container for which she found a receipt, and at the Port Authority, Helene pretends to choke so that Alice can search for the container in the database. It’s aboard a ship called the SS Montmartre.

As silly as this is in a lot of ways, if Alice is suddenly not stupid, that’s at least a bit more promising for the finale. At the end of Vanished Episode 3, Alice and Helene sneak aboard the vessel with a set of bolt cutters — with enough ease that it’s probably not worth thinking too much about — and discover that the container is full of trafficked people. Yikes. Let’s see how all this pans out.