Found Season 1 Episode 6 Review: Missing While Addicted

Everyone seems to have something to hide on Found Season 1 Episode 6, “Missing While Addicted.”

The case of the week is exactly as it sounds. Gabi and her team are tasked with finding a dying woman’s son, David, who is known for disappearing for long periods. He’s an addict, and everyone assumes pretty quickly that he’s off somewhere getting high.  

Dhan, who is generally the most hesitant and least emotionally available member of the team, doesn’t think it’s worth it to try to find him at first. Ultimately, this case is deeply personal for him, and his walls get broken down a little more.

This is something Found continues to do well: fleshing out its characters one by one while showing their own connections to the cases. Because these characters all have baggage — that’s the entire premise. Gabi’s team is made up of people with complicated traumas of their own. 

For Dhan, the addiction piece hits close to home. As they search for the missing man, Dhan goes undercover as an addict to check out a sober living facility, and though it’s subtle, it’s clear that it’s breaking him to do so. Yet we don’t really learn why until he makes the connection Gabi has been hoping he’d make since the start of the series.

He opens up to Zeke — a scene that’s made that much more powerful by the way they communicate over the big screen — about his past and the friend he lost. It’s a genuine moment of connection and friendship that’s joyful to watch. 

Once again, the case of the week gets a happy ending — sort of. The client, Rachel, wanted to find her son before she died, knowing that she’d be dying soon. And thanks to some insight from Sir, Gabi realizes they’ve been looking at the case all wrong. David’s circumstance makes him the perfect kidnapping victim.

It turns out his cousin has been holding him all along, his reasoning to cover up the real reason for David’s sister’s death when they were younger. It’s particularly chilling because he shows psychopathic behavior. Eleanor notes that the reason she didn’t pick up on signals from her early on was because he showed no signs of remorse.

This case is also unique compared to others in that the team gets fired — by Lucas — halfway through their investigation. The question then becomes, at what point do they quit?

Gabi argues they should continue because Rachel is their client, not Lucas. But Lucas takes things a step further and puts out a restraining order. They’d have all gotten in serious trouble with the law if they hadn’t been right about David’s kidnapper.

And while they were right and did save David from his cousin, allowing him to say his goodbyes to his mother and absolve her of guilt she’d been carrying for years, this also showed reckless behavior from Gabi.

That’s not the only line that gets crossed, either. She uses Trent in a way that feels like a deep betrayal and that may wind up costing him his job. Stealing that thumb drive to locate his CI may have helped with the case, but it crosses a line in a way we haven’t seen Gabi do before.

Both Margaret and Lacy pick up on the fact that Gabi seems to be hiding something. She’s being reckless, and Lacy knows she’s been lying for a while. Gabi’s connection to this case and her willingness to cross boundaries and go rogue is based on the fact that she didn’t get to say goodbye to her dying father. And she puts that blame entirely on Sir.

Yet, between flashbacks and some current conversations, we learn more about Sir’s motives and a little more context about Gabi’s kidnapping. Gabi’s father had flaws as a parent, and how teen Gabi worried over him changing his tires and putting on gloves in the cold, snowy weather suggests a problematic relationship.

It also seems Sir knew plenty about Gabi and her father before he took her. And he believed then, and continues to believe, that he was doing something good for Gabi. That he was her savior, in a way.

This remains the most fascinating part of the series. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of how complex a character Sir is. Somehow, the audience is even given reason to feel sympathy for him — but only a little. There are so many interesting layers to what he did and how he treated her then, in addition to his intelligence and understanding of kidnapping. 

As for Gabi, it’s a study in trauma and how everything that happened then affects her decisions now. It even plays into her emotional vulnerability, or lack thereof, with Trent. 

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Found airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on NBC.

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