“Gone” Will Be Gone Soon but Plot Twists Save It from Being Just Another Police Consultant Show

In previous reviews, I lamented the fact that apparently TV police departments are incapable of solving crimes without hiring outside consultants, detectives, mystery authors, fake psychics, magicians, and actors to help them. I can’t say that I know any police officers or detectives personally but I seriously doubt that the job of “consultant to the police department” is as common as it is on TV. I seriously doubt it exists at all or if it does only in the very rarest of cases.

Gone” is the latest in this way too large genre. It tells the story of an FBI unit that handles missing person cases. The unit is led by FBI agent Frank Novak played by Chris Noth. However the main character is a young woman named Kick Lannigan who survived being abducted and held for five years as a child. Agent Novak was the agent who had rescued her years ago. After a long recovery from her ordeal she became a martial arts expert and self-defense instructor. She is also an expert marksman. Novak recruits her to help in a child abduction case because she understands the mind of abductors having lived under one of them and survived. Her friend James is a computer hacker and also a survivor of a child abduction. He comes along to join the team not as a volunteer but under the threat of being arrested for some of his hacks. They are also accompanied by a guy named Bishop who is a former soldier that Novak has recruited for the team however his past remains a bit of a mystery.

Kick is played by Levein Rambin who has had small parts in TV shows “The Path” and “True Detective” as well as one of the contestants in “The Hunger Games“. She is an attractive, athletic actress who looks at home in many of the fight scenes throughout the series. She seems to be well cast in the part. Chris Noth was most recently seen in “The Good Wife” as Julianna Margulies‘ cheating husband but is most known as “Mr. Big” in “Sex and the City” and as Mike Logan in “Law & Order: Criminal Intent“. Agent Bishop is played by Danny Pino who is most recently seen as drug cartel leader Miguel Galindo in “Mayans MC“. Kelly Rutherford known for her roles in the Gossip Girl and Melrose Place also recurs as Paula Lannigan, Kick’s mother who has become a famous author and TV commentator capitalizing on her fame from her daughter’s abduction.

The show was produced by NBC Universal International as a joint production of French and German television networks. It has played in France, Germany, Australia and the UK in 2017 and 2018. The US rights were purchased by WGN America and it premiered a few weeks ago. It ran for only one season of 12 episodes. So don’t get too attached to it. After these 12 that’s it.

I’ve seen three episodes so far and I’m enjoying it enough to keep watching. The plots are reasonably interesting and have some very unexpected plot twists. In some respects these unexpected turns are sort of like “Law & Order” where the guilty party is never the first person they suspect. But the twists are a little more complex and a little more surprising then that.

The action sequences and fight scenes are fun and well done. The mystery of the various characters backgrounds doesn’t get in the way of the storytelling as it does in some shows. One assumes as the show develops we will learn more of their background. What are the details of James’s abduction? What is the mystery behind Bishop’s story and how he met Frank?

As in all police consultant shows you have to suspend your disbelief a bit to think that an outsider with no formal police training can really contribute to these investigations better than the best the FBI has to offer. Even if you buy the premise that Kick’s knowledge of child abductors is useful to the team, not all the cases deal with abduction of a child. They handle adult missing persons cases as well. Are we going to buy the idea that her experience is relevant there as well? The team flies around the country from case to case in a private jet that is way bigger than necessary. It would be one thing if they flew around in a little Learjet but this thing looks like a hollowed out jumbo jet with a couple of computer consoles, some fancy furniture, and a bunch of unnecessary floorspace. Maybe they just couldn’t afford the difficulty of filming inside a small airplane so they built some huge set. Other than those problems, the show works for me. It may be that after 12 episodes I will be glad that “Gone” is gone but for now it’s holding my interest and I will give it a strong rating of “I’m watching it“.

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