Absentia episode 2 review: The Conrad Harlow plot thickens
(Warning: Spoilers ahead — if you don’t want to know what happens on Absentia episode 2, stop reading now.)
In the premiere episode, we uncovered a dead body discovered with a connection to Emily’s past; at the end of episode 2, there was another dead body found. This time around, it was the serial killer supposedly at the center of everything in Conrad Harlow. All of a sudden, everything is taken up another notch.
Unfortunately, things are also not looking altogether great in terms of Emily’s supposed guilt here. She had a clear-cut motive in wanting to kill Harlow and from our vantage point, very little alibi. The only thing that is proven at the moment is that Nick Durand dropped her off at home. She could have easily left again. We don’t think that the story to date is being set up in a way in which Emily is a killer, but it’s hard to deny the number of strange occurrences taking place around her. Need we count them?
1. The visions – Emily is getting what feel like the tiniest glimpses of her past. We saw some of that during the premiere, and the reality remains the same that she doesn’t actually know what transpired with her during some of her missing time.
2. The confrontation earlier on with Harlow – Conrad had previously had Emily taken away by Tommy and the Boston PD, so there is already a precedent that is set here.
3. The look in her eyes – Conrad commented on it, suggesting that the two parties are, effectively, one in the same. It’s the last thing that Emily will ever want to admit to herself.
When it comes to the relationships of Absentia, episode 2 was really just another reminder as to how heartbreaking almost all of them really are. Emily does not have Nick anymore, and nor does she really have Flynn. He is afraid of her, and to go along with that so is Alice. Nick’s new wife is also struggling because her husband is barely at home obsessing over the case involving his previous wife. While it’s easy to label her a suspect, for now that just feels far too easy. She feels a little more in the vein of someone caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is different from Kelly Price, a supposed “witness” who could provide evidence that Emily was out and about weeks before being found. As it turns out, she was a fake — and the person responsible for transforming her into a witness may be someone with a secret at the Boston FBI.
So here’s where we are now leaving Absentia episode 2 — Conrad Harlow is dead, the FBI has a mole, Nick feels like he’s betraying both Emily and Alice at the same time, and the Byrne family dog is freaking out about something creepy in the woods. We entered this episode with questions; now, we’re leaving with even more.
CarterMatt Verdict
The only reason it’s okay to have all of these questions is because Absentia also delivered on so much. This was a fantastic episode with a lot of interesting, exciting twists — with the only issue being that it felt so short. Given that there are only ten episodes, who do we have to beg to get another five or ten minutes tacked on that run time?
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