(Credit: Netflix)

Absentia may not be a Netflix original series, but its arrival on the streaming giant has made quite a buzz everywhere.

Starring Stana Katic and Matthew Le Nevez, the Amazon Prime Video series revolves around a failed pursuit of a serial killer, which resulted in the abduction of an FBI agent, who was later declared dead in absentia.

Six years after the incident, the FBI agent is discovered alive but severely injured with no memories of the period of her kidnapping. In the first season of Absentia, everyone is a suspect to her. So, she bends and breaks every rule to try to substantiate her conjectures.

But whether her reckless investment in her own case brings justice or leaves her more alienated is a question the first season has answers to. Hence, before going forward with the second and third seasons, let’s revisit the ending of the debut season.

What happens in the instalment?

Absentia picks up six years after the shocking disappearance of FBI Special Agent Emily Byrne, who has been declared dead. Two unsettling incidents take place around the same time: a body washes up on shore with its eyelids sliced off, a trademark move of the serial killer Emily was chasing at the time of her disappearance. Secondly, her husband, Nick Durand, also a Special Agent, receives a call from Conrad Harlow, the man behind bars for Emily’s murder, in the middle of the night to say that he has exactly an hour to save her life.

Nick calls for backup from the FBI and speeds to the location he is given. He rescues Emily from a sinking tank, locked from the outside and sealed from the inside. The signs of torture were clear on her body, and she looked completely battered. However, she hasn’t forgotten Nick, nor their son.

Initially, Emily’s return feels nothing less than a miracle to her father, brother, and ex-husband. But her son, Flynn, isn’t exactly excited to get to know someone whom he has no memory of, especially when the entire situation is uncomfortable for his stepmother, Alice. Meanwhile, Tommy Gibbs, the Boston PD detective working on the case of the man who washed up with his eyelids cut off, begins to wonder if Emily is actually the suspect he should chase.

The man on the pier is eventually identified as a sex trafficker, Robert Semerov, whose name is mentioned in Emily’s old case files. Furthermore, her DNA was found under her fingernails, which basically hints that Emily and Robert had a violent face-off before he died. On the other hand, Harlow’s sentence is voided in the aftermath of Emily being found alive.

After his release, Emily shows up at Harlow’s by breaking into his home, only to end up arrested by the Boston PD. But the next morning, he’s found dead, leaving Emily a suspect in not one but two murders. So, she’s now on the run, determined to uncover the truth behind the murders.

Who’s framing Emily?

Emily still believes that Harlow is the actual culprit who was working with an accomplice from prison to keep her captive. Consequently, she thinks that the same accomplice is most likely to be behind the two murders for which she is being framed. She and Nick thoroughly go through Semerov’s history, which leads to the revelation that he was paying off a Fed. This suggests that there could be a double-playing agent in the mix who might have the answers to her kidnapping. She breaks into the home of her former boss to find any clues that can help her with the case.

After stumbling across an old notebook scribbled with grotesque sketches of bleeding eyes, Emily kidnaps Adam to force a confession out of him. While he confesses to taking bribes from organised crime, he claims he’s not the accomplice she’s looking for. The reason behind his frantic drawings is rooted in his obsession with finding Emily, according to Adam.

But right when he’s about to let him go, Nick and Tommy arrive at the scene. Bullets are fired the second Emily takes flight, leaving Tommy and Nick to suspect she’s the shooter, which results in Adam’s death. However, Emily knows that the accomplice was around the entire time, waiting for the perfect moment.

The sketches trigger Emily’s forgotten memories, leading her to her new therapist, Dr Daniel. She ties him to a chair to ensure he doesn’t end up calling the cops and asks for some memory exercises that could jog up some findings of her past. While doing the exercises, she realised she had seen the symbol before as a child, which was carved into a white tree in a forest. So, she heads towards Nottingham Park after the session, a place she and the kids from her orphanage often went to.

When she reaches there, she finds a body under the carving. The victim seemed to have been murdered long before the killer began leaving the cards at the scene of his crimes. But as she hears Nick and Tommy closing in on her through the woods, Emily takes the one thing from the body that could help in its identification – the pacemaker, and escapes.

She reaches her brother, Jack’s, place to seek help, as he’s a former doctor and a medical sales tech who could easily ID the pacemaker. However, the only problem is that he’s not at home, which leaves Emily to dig through his laptop. The attempts at cracking the passcode lead to a horrific finding when she discovers a cache of hidden files consisting of unsettling pornographic videos of women being tormented, just like she was tortured by the kidnapper for years.

She begins to reflect on whether Jack’s alcoholism and grief over losing his sister could have reached such extremes that he would kidnap, torment, and kill. So, she tracks him down at a hotel where he’s accompanied by a woman who works at a strip club. When she follows her there, the security fires bullets into her stomach. She calls for Jack, still unsure if he’d help, but he does, by taking her into a hotel and performing basic field surgery.

Upon waking up, Jack also helps her ID the pacemaker, which belongs to the psychologist in the orphanage where Emily grew up before being adopted. When she reaches the location, she finds years of footage recordings that detail the experiments performed on children. In an attempt to make controllable killers, Dr Shen let children choose who among them would step into a locked tank when it filled with water. This was also how Emily was found.

She realises that Harlow was indeed the accomplice, and all she needs to do is find another survivor. And thankfully, the survivor also wants to be found.

Do Emily and Nick end up together?

The tension between Emily and Nick is palpable throughout the season. However, the latter is torn between his desire to help her and the mounting evidences that suggest she’s a potential murderer. They sleep together once, but it is more of a goodbye and a distraction because the moment he falls asleep, she begins tailing the second killer alone.

The final straw in their relationship is Flynn and Alice’s kidnapping at the end of the season. They find themselves in the same position as Emily was in six years ago, where a masked man keeps experimenting on Emily’s son and his stepmother. Nick’s conviction that Emily’s the one responsible leaves him on her tail with guns, of course. But Emily believes this is a setup by someone from her past, and she walks right into it to save her son.

Is Emily the second killer?

No. Emily’s not the second serial killer, even though Nick and most investigators think so. She manages to track the underground bunker in which Flynn and Alice are held captive, only to end up gassed. She wakes up in a room with a body, and it’s Alice, who’s alive but barely in her senses. The killer puts Emily in a tough spot, telling her that the only way to save Flynn is to kill Alice, which will prove she’s a monster.

But who’s framing Emily?

Emily tries to buy more time by engaging with the killer, knowing that Nick and the other agents are tailing her. She has no other option right now because she’s unarmed in a locked room, right in front of a notorious serial killer. But why does the killer think Emily is a monster? What can she not recall?

When pressed further, the killer asks Emily to recall the first life she took. She recounts that she did take someone’s life, but not in the way people think she has. She revisits her time in the orphanage, when she was repeatedly rejected or passed over due to her behavioural issues. But Emily wanted a family, and the desperation led her to take a drastic step. She snuck into the facility’s office and swapped her psychological profile with Logan Brand, who was certified to be an ideal child for adoption.

With that, she stole the life Logan could have lived. Warren took Emily in, and Dr Shen chose Logan to be her perfect test subject, which turned him into a killer. She first killed Dr Shen, and after turning an adult, she joined forces with Harlow to complete her cycle of revenge.

Do Flynn and Alice make it out alive?

Thankfully, Flynn and Alice survive with Nick and Emily’s help. While she did consider killing Alice to save Flynn, she was stopped by her conscience and Nick’s last-minute appearance. They rescue Alice and search for the bunker in which Flynn is trapped, which is also sinking. Together, they break Flynn out, and the four exit to safety.

Who’s the actual killer?

Well, in Absentia, there are two killers: Logan and Harlow. The cases that piled up before Emily’s disappearance were Harlow’s doings, but Logan is behind the murder of Semerov.

How does the first season of Absentia end?

Emily and Logan chase each other in the towering forests as Alice, Nick, and Flynn run to safety. While Logan has the upper hand because of the setting, Emily is not ready to back down. In the end, they both lose their guns and start wrestling each other on the ground. But Emily finally has the last laugh, managing to drown Logan in a shallow puddle.

The FBI clears Emily’s name from the suspect list of all the murders for which she was blamed. This is her shot at returning normalcy, and with Flynn opening up, she’s getting there. Alice and Emily are also warming up after the latter saved her life. As for Nick and Emily? They’re trying their hands at peaceful co-parenting. She has also apologised to Jack and has been considering returning to the FBI.

In the last scenes, she’s surrounded by everyone she holds close. But then a flashback comes, which shows her back at Harlow’s place, stabbing him to death. Although, indeed, Emily was not Harlow’s accomplice, it still makes one wonder if spending six years with Logan has sown some seeds of monstrosity within her.