Summary
You can fault the premiere of I Will Find You for all sorts of things, including wonky dialogue and some stilted performances, but like most Harlan Coben shows it’s wildly watchable and moves along at a rocket-fuelled clip.
Harlan Coben shows famously move at quite a clip, but even by those standards, the premiere of I Will Find You is positively rocket-fuelled. It’s a fine case study for everything that works about these things and everything that doesn’t. A compelling, impossible-seeming premise is established immediately, a few random-feeling plot threads are introduced, and then all hell breaks loose. The dialogue is wonky, and the performances are stilted, but the first thing you’re going to do at the end of Episode 1 is take a breath and proceed to the next, since that’s just how shows like this are designed to be consumed.
This gobble-down binge format is handy for recaps, granted, since a lot of the plot particulars are explained outright to the audience in clunky voiceover, which saves time on having to develop things organically. In the opening moments, for instance, we learn that David Burroughs is currently serving his fifth year of a life sentence for murdering his young son, Matthew. David claims to be innocent, to have been asleep down the hall when Matthew was killed, but nobody believes him, including his own family and the staff at Briggs Penitentiary, where he’s in protective custody and has refused to accept any visitors.
Naturally, it’s a random visit that kick-starts the plot. David’s sister-in-law, Rachel Mills, is an investigative journalist formerly of some renown who now teaches at Quincy College after having been fired from the Boston Globe in some manner of disgrace (to be, I assume, unpacked later). Quite by chance, insofar as anything happens by chance in Coben Land, Rachel’s college friend recently posted a picture of her and her family at Six Flags, with a kid in the background who looks distressingly like Matthew would have looked if he had survived. They even have the same birthmark on their cheeks. David, who has always maintained his innocence, starts to entertain the idea that Matthew might be alive after all, despite him having found his corpse on the night he was apparently killed. He tells Rachel to tell her sister, Cheryl, before he’s dragged away by a prison guard named Wesson and then needlessly assaulted when he asks to see the warden.
David has personal history with the warden, Philip Mackenzie, who worked in the Boston PD with David’s father, Lenny, who’s now dying of cancer (stop me if you need a breather). After speaking briefly with David about Rachel’s visit, Philip flies out to Boston to ask Lenny for the police file from the night Matthew was killed. This, he hands off to David secretly when he gets back to Maine, though it’s worth noting that while he’s in Boston, Philip, Lenny, and Philip’s son, Adam, are all being watched by a mysterious third party.
I’ve always wondered in shows like this, about an innocent man being accused of something that the outside world needs to be convinced of, why the bad guys don’t just leave things alone. It’s highly unlikely, given the evidence was strong enough to convict him in the first place, that anyone would believe David’s story. But the second Rachel visits him, an incredibly obvious attempt to silence David begins, spearheaded by Wesson. After tipping someone off that David received a visitor, he receives instructions via text to ensure that an inmate named Ross Sumner, a cannibalistic serial killer, is put on the same work detail. When Ross tries to kill him, Wesson deliberately delays the intervention, but David fights back and brutalises his attacker. None of this goes unnoticed, neither by David nor Philip.
With David having gone over the police file, I Will Find You Episode 1 provides us with a bit more information. “Matthew” was battered to death by a baseball bat in a way that left his body unidentifiable, but DNA supposedly proved the corpse was his. A neighbor claimed to have seen David burying something in the woods behind his home, and David’s history of night terrors was used to imply that he killed his son essentially in the midst of a trance. David raises all this in a second meeting with Rachel, telling her to try to identify the child who was killed if the body wasn’t Matthew’s, and to find out what compelled his neighbour, Hilde Winslow, to commit perjury. She turns to her former editor at the Globe, Jim Doherty, who tells her that Hilde’s name was changed to Harriet Winchester shortly after the trial, and she currently has a PO box in New York. She also briefly talks to Cheryl about where she is and what she’s doing, but Cheryl, who is now pregnant with a little girl and still believes David is guilty, doesn’t want to hear it.
At the end of the premiere, things get serious. Wesson shows up in David’s cell in the middle of the night and attempts to take him to the infirmary, which is really just an opportunity to try and stab him to death. David is able to run, but not before Wesson mentions having been paid off by persons as yet unknown. Another guard intervenes and knocks David out, and that same guard sees Wesson plant a shiv on him, tipping Philip off that a cover-up is underway and David can no longer be protected inside the prison. In response, Philip, with the help of Adam, facilitates David’s escape.
Thanks to Wesson, though, even this goes wrong, and the escape becomes a pretend hostage situation. David has to sell the illusion that he’s a desperate man who means Philip genuine harm, which he seems pretty happy to go along with. The police respond to the escape with hilarious efficiency, boxing David in as he tries to escape in Philip’s truck, with Philip as his pretend hostage. Somehow, news of his escape has instantly made the news, and his father, Cheryl, and Rachel all see it just as the episode ends with David putting a gun to Philip’s head.
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