Emily Byrne disappears without a trace while hunting one of Boston's most notorious serial killers. She is declared dead in absentia, and Conrad Harlow, the prime suspect of her investigation, is successfully prosecuted for her kidnap and murder. The FBI never managed to get him on the serial killer charge, but at least they got him, right?
Well, six years later, things don't look so neat. Emily turns up alive, locked in a tank in an isolated cabin. She has barely any memory of the intervening time, but her very existence rather blows Harlow's conviction to pieces. He's soon free of prison, despite everyone's conviction that he played a role in the crime.
Emily has plenty of other issues to face, though, as the life she knew is gone. Her husband has remarried, and her son (who was an infant when she vanished) has grown up calling the other woman 'mom'. Rather more alarmingly, a corpse turns up with her DNA under the fingernails, and there is a growing pile of other evidence that she was complicit in the serial killings and her own 'disappearance'.
With the only person who unquestioningly believes in her innocence being her cantankerous , elderly father, Emily must find for a way to prove her innocence while staying ahead of the FBI and police, who now consider her a prime suspect.
Absentia is one of those 'high concept' intrigue shows which begin with a strange and confounding event or situation and then unravel the explanations behind it. The most famous example of this is likely Lost, but there are plenty of others, including a few I have reviewed, such as Blindspot.
High concept shows often struggle to follow through on their intriguing premise. These struggles can take many forms. They might fail to provide answers at all, where audiences grow frustrated with the lack of progress. They might provide answers, but audiences may find them much less interesting than the questions were. Or the answers could fall short in other ways, feeling far-fetched or implausible.
Absentia does a good job of avoiding the "no answers" trap. There is a decent sense of progress throughout the season here, with Emily discovering aspects of her kidnapping, and the dynamics of the show altering as a result. Of course it also raises new questions - going to need something to drive season 2, after all! However, it does sometimes struggle with the challenge of keeping everything seem plausible and grounded. There is a definite odour of 'conspiracy for conspiracy's sake' in some elements. Several characters' schemes seem to be baroque purely for the sake of it, rather like they're from Batman's catalogue of villains.
I must also say that I sometimes found it hard to warm to the characters, with the exception of the afore-mentioned cantankerous dad. Almost everyone in the show,. including Emily, does things that are selfish and short-sighted. While that's probably 'true to life', it goes a little too far into the 'heroes with feet of clay' direction for my tastes. I like the characters aI am supposed to root for to be little less blemished.
Overall though, if these kind of high concept mystery shows are your thing, this seems like a solid one: I'd certainly rate it above Blindspot.
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