Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Found season 2, episode 9.
After taking a hiatus for the holidays, Found returned to NBC on January 16 with one of its most eventful installments to date. Season 2, episode 9, “Missing While Targeted,” leaves Dhan’s fate uncertain after he is shot in the aftermath of a case. However, the security expert isn’t the only main character whose life is hanging in the balance. The winter premiere ends with Sir holding Trent at gunpoint and Gabi hearing a bang from outside the house.
When speaking with ScreenRant, showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll explains why both major events occurred in the same episode. She shares that there needed to be real consequences for Sir being on the loose, as he has now touched every member of Mosely & Associates. Additionally, it was important to show that Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s character is not the only threat. Okoro Carroll wants to remind viewers that Gabi’s team is not superhuman, and their cases are inherently dangerous. Check out her full response below:
ScreenRant: Dhan gets shot, and we also hear a gun go off during Trent and Sir’s standoff. What made you decide to put both cliffhangers in the same episode?
Nkechi Okoro Carroll: When we started in the writers’ room, we didn’t have our airing schedule yet. So I was like, “Well, shoot. Any of these episodes could end up being our winter finale and our winter premiere.” So literally, that’s why every episode just kind of goes like gangbusters [laughs]. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m like, “We’re just writing every episode like it’s a mid-season finale.” And so the storyline dictated those two things coming to a head in the same episode, and it ended up being our winter premiere, which is great. Given the journey that Gabi is on this season and this search for atonement and feeling like she needs to pay for, not only what she did to Sir, but the havoc she’s wreaked in everyone’s lives as a result of it.
Sir has pretty much touched every member of M&A and those closest to her in some way, shape, or form now that he’s just out wild and loose, just out there unhinged. There needed to be real consequences to that. There needed to be real escalation to that, and that’s kind of what we built to in the school with Gabi and Sir, and the case that he brings her attention to that has sort of a very personal connection to Trent. And that will have repercussions through the whole back half of the season. So that had to sort of culminate in a “Sir isn’t a man of inactive words.” If he promises something, he’s going to deliver on it. And so that sort of spoke to why that cliffhanger had to happen that way, where the only way for these two men to meet had to be like that.
It had to be gunpoint to gunpoint, two mirror images of each other sort of “law and order” versus “lives by his own rules,” because in his mind what he’s doing isn’t wrong. In his mind, he’s saving people from their lives, from Sir’s perspective. And so he’s sort of the opposite of what Trent is. It felt like they could only meet in that kind of standoff. And then for Dhan’s, the build of that is the reminder that these cases they work on are dangerous. They are regular citizens. They are not cops. They didn’t go to special training to be these sort of vigilantes of sorts.
They have things in their background that make them good for the job, but at the end of the day, they have chosen to turn their trauma into purpose. They have chosen to give of themselves without the superhero-Iron-Man-suit and all the things. They’re just regular humans out there trying to save lives and that comes with an inherent danger. It felt like it was the right time to also remind the audience of that because if Gabi is sort of facing the toughest moments of her life, what does that look like if her team are not at their best? If her team are sort of breaking apart and falling apart by the wayside? That was how everything built to where it did for that moment in the episode.
This is a developing story. Check back soon for more!
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Found season 2 airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.