Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Absentia’ On Amazon Prime, Where An FBI Agent Reappears After Being Gone For Six Years

What happens if you come back to a world that assumed you died years ago? That’s the premise of Absentia, a new Amazon thriller that first aired overseas last year. Can Castle star Stana Katic pull off the complicated starring role?

ABSENTIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A home movie of a happy young couple playing in the snow with their puppy and toddler son. There’s no sound, except for an ominous, rising orchestral tone.

The Gist: After we see such a happy picture, we flash to scenes of the woman in that couple being beaten within an inch of her life. Then she’s dumped in a tank, where she wakes up to see it filling with water.

The woman is Emily Byrne (Stana Katic), an FBI agent who was investigating a serial killer. After evidence comes up linking that killer, Conrad Harlow (Richard Brake) to Emily’s death, she’s declared dead in absentia, and Harlow is given a life sentence. Her husband, fellow agent Nick Durand (Patrick Heusinger), demands to know where Harlow buried the body.

Flash forward six years: Durand remarried, and his new wife Alice (Cara Theobold) has bonded so well with Emily and Nick’s son Flynn (Patrick McAuley), Flynn doesn’t even want to visit his mother’s grave anymore, saying “You’re my real mother.”

Then Nick gets a call from someone who sounds like Harlow, telling him that Emily is still alive. The FBI finds the tank under an abandoned cabin; a lock on a timer opens and they pull Emily out.

Of course, after six years of torture and imprisonment, Emily returns to a world she doesn’t recognize, a son who doesn’t want her to exist, and a disabling case of PTSD. But she’s determined to find out who imprisoned her; if it’s not Harlow, then Nick determines it’s a human trafficker who she pursued in one of her early cases. In the meantime, a body washes up in a river, with all the signs of being killed with the same MO Harlow used to use (the eyelids are removed).

Our Take: Absentia is a weird hybrid of a cable prestige drama and a standard-grade cop show. Initially developed by Sony for its international AXN network, it aired on that network in 2017, only now coming to the US via Amazon. Even though it takes place in Boston, it’s shot in Bulgaria, making for a vaguely otherworldy atmosphere, like it’s here but not here.

It also shows Katic, an executive producer of this limited series, displaying a much wider acting range than she ever showed on Castle, making Emily so emotionally damaged by her harrowing experience that she can’t grasp how long she was captive and how much changed while she was gone. Watching her wrap her mind around the fact that she was considered to be dead for six years is one of the treats of this series.

But other elements just fall flat, including the seemingly pat investigation into who actually abducted her, the way Nick and his family reacts to her return, and Emily’s insistence on participating in the investigation despite how mentally compromised he is. Those seem to be convenient plot contrivances in a network procedural, not something that should be married to this story of a woman who has to deal with literally coming back from the dead.

Sex and Skin: An obligatory strip club scene, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: After chasing down a lead and finding out where a deal is going down, Emily insists on coming to the bust. Only one problem: the body that was found was the trafficker, and the skin found under his nails matches Emily’s DNA. Oops?

Sleeper Star: We know that Neil Jackson, as Emily’s recovering addict brother Jack, will be more involved down the line, so we’ll pick him for this category.

Most Pilot-y Line: “You’re not the one who was taken. You’re the one who is fucking someone else,” Emily says to Nick, who is trying to convince her that the human trafficker is the one that took her. Give the guy a break, Emily; he thought you were dead!

Our Call: SKIP IT. While Katic’s performance as the damaged Emily is intriguing, there’s nothing else about Absentia that feels distinctive or worth following for ten episodes.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Absentia on Amazon Prime