After tiptoeing around the mystery regarding Keith’s abduction through the last eight episodes, “Alert Mission: Persons Unit” finally delivers the answer in a somewhat messy, underwhelming finale and pulls off a twist so bizarre that it feels like a cop-out. In the previous episode, we saw Keith’s identity verified, although not before Jason acted maniacally while threatening ‘Keith’ due to confusion. The Bautista-Grant family finally gets reunited as Sidney also accepts “Keith” as her brother. Keith lets the others know that he is finally ready to talk about his abductor. The finale shows a harrowing scenario regarding Keith’s abduction by jampacking two episodes and nearly three distinct narratives into one, causing a lack of coherence.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens In ‘Alert: Missing Persons Unit’ Episode 9?
As the episode begins, we meet the victim of the episode, Briana Williams, a bride-to-be who gets strangled by an unknown assailant on her wedding day and gets abducted. Among other suspicions, the MPU team thinks that Briana might have gotten cold feet and deliberately escaped from the wedding. The MPU brings her fiancé, Trevor, to the HQ for further investigation, who, despite knowing Briana for merely months, is quite adamant that she would never do such a thing. From his account, we get to know that Briana is a high school teacher who used to do charity work for at-risk youth and had previously got a second job at a bar to make ends meet. Upon inquiring at the bar, they are informed that Briana had left her job six months ago. Kemi pulls up Briana’s sketchy financial record, which indicates that she earned a significant amount of money within a very brief period of time. Upon exploring, it turned out that Briana was secretly a camgirl.
The team speculates whether Briana’s occupation attracted problematic or persuasive individuals who kidnapped her. The subscribers to Briana’s account had the option to communicate directly with her for a certain amount. They searched among numerous blocked users, and another camgirl revealed that Briana was being harassed by a local subscriber who repeatedly demanded something from Briana that belonged to him. The group focuses their search on a certain Henry Starkey, who had paid a hefty amount to Briana. Kemi goes to interrogate an elderly, married man named Henry in private, although Henry later says that his wife Gloria knew about this and tried to help him in the best way possible, despite being infuriated. It turns out that Henry didn’t even meet Briana, and all his chat responses were answered by Briana’s AI bot. Using this angle, and after going through some of Briana’s emails, Mike finds out that the software geek who helped Briana by promoting her website and using AI bots made a good profit thanks to Briana’s popularity. This cashflow would stop abruptly after Briana decided to quit her career as a camgirl after her engagement and marriage was finalized. The tech support was displeased at this decision and berated Briana in her emails a number of times.
After being summoned, the techie, a teenage girl named Sam, appears for interrogation, and she mentions suspicious activity on Briana’s camgirl account. The team gives her a clean sheet, and Mike notices that the exact amount of money that Henry had spent has been debited from Briana’s account. Kemi and Mike guess correctly that Henry’s wife, Gloria, must have been behind all of this. Although, they are a bit late as viewers are shown in a scuffle, Gloria accidentally knocked a captive Briana unconscious and forced Henry to help her to get rid of her body. As the elderly couple goes to bury the body, Briana wakes up and attempts to escape. Henry and Gloria argue over their course of action, and Gloria accidentally shoots Henry and gives Briana a chase. Mike and Jason arrive in the nick of time to stop Gloria from harming others or herself. She confesses that to get her and Henry’s retirement fund back (which Henry blew on Briana’s camgirl account), she undertook this psychotic mission.
Who Abducted Keith? Is The Real Keith Dead?
Meanwhile, as the continuation of the previous episode, ‘Keith’ agrees to share information regarding his abductor. Keith narrates that his abductor, a middle-aged female, kept him and another boy named Max (who arrived a few months before Keith’s escape) in the basement cells of a house located in some remote place. The woman used to collect Keith’s blood, but Keith was unaware of her purpose of doing so. Jason and Nikki get riled up to catch this perp, and Mike fears that their getting involved will add a personal angle to the story, which might make it difficult to make a case in court and, in turn, can ensure the abductor’s escape even after getting caught. Nikki begrudgingly accepts Mike taking lead of the case
Searching the coinciding missing report cases, Mike identifies a homeless teenager as the missing person in question, named Joseph Maxwell. Being a homeless orphan living near the border areas, his case was overlooked by the local PD. Mike summons the person who filed the report a couple of years ago, a homeless teenager named Cory Evers, who used to be Max’s friend. Getting to know about Max’s Bluetooth GPS tag in his shoes, Jason seeks the help of one of his techie genius friends to create a network using phones attached to drones and utilize that as a GPS detector by scanning the wilderness. Jason and Nikki move to the detected log cabin despite Mike’s warnings and find the remains of a teenager, presumably Max’s. Later, as C and Rachel go to the cabin to identify the body, the Cadaver dogs sniff out five more bodies buried nearby the cabin. The forensics establish a connection with the remains to a common medical center, and Keith identifies one of the surgeons, Beth Colt, to be the perp. None of the found bodies matches Max’s profile, which leads to the team considering a slim chance of Max’s surviving still.
Upon further investigation, the team finds out that Beth’s son Noah suffers from a disease that results in multi-system organ failure. Her honest efforts to aid her son didn’t work, and it is speculated that she abducted teenagers to harvest their organs for her son. Following the medical supplier, Jason and Nikki are able to apprehend Beth, but after being ambushed by her, Nikki gets knocked unconscious and abducted. At Beth’s household, taking a chance on her being distracted, Nikki helps Max escape to safety. Jason, Mike, and Kemi race against time to save Nikki and decide to check the updates on the dialysis machines (assuming Beth will be operating on them) in close proximity to where Beth’s car was last seen. As Nikki makes her way through the room where Noah is kept, she gets the shock of her life as she sees the shrunken corpse of Noah lying there attached to medical apparatus. Beth restrains her once again and almost starts operating when Jason enters the room and arrests her. Keith identifies her as being his abductor.
Just as everything starts seeming to settle back to normalcy, Keith is shown getting struck by an oncoming car. A woman steps out of the vehicle and forcefully abducts him as Jason and Nikki watch on in disbelief. They interrogate Beth once again to confirm whether this has been done by any of her accomplices and show Keith’s photo to her, to which she replies that she’d never seen this person. Almost at the same time, Sidney checks Keith’s journal and gets the initials of the person who abducted her. The team busts through the house as Nikki and Jason find out about Keith abductor being a jailbird named Evelyn. However, Evelyn arrives and claims Keith to be an imposter whose real identity is Lucas, her own son. Before Jason and Nikki can wrap their heads around this sense of betrayal, though, Katherine mistakenly shoots Lucas to death!
Mike interrogates Beth once again and gets to know that the boy who escaped is Oliver. After questioning Oliver, it is revealed that Lucas used his story to sell his ruse properly and perhaps also to save the captives. The family, accompanied by Kemi and Mike, prays for the departed Keith and Lucas.
Thoughts
C, the techie wizard, lets Rachel know about the reason for his absence, i.e., being transgender. Rachel accepts him, and they kiss. The central case of the finale was at times laughably bad, and it was not really necessary given how many loose ends the writers already had to tie. Gloria withdrew the exact same amount of money Henry had spent, and if not for that, they probably wouldn’t have been caught. The series also seems to be weirdly obsessed with antagonistic, deranged female characters, as this was probably the fourth or fifth instance of the same.
After a season-long buildup of anticipation, the season finale makes a mess of events by trying to be unnecessarily complicated. The initial assumptions of “Keith” being an imposter were right all along, and as we speculated, he trained himself very well, right from taking pages from his journal to swapping his DNA to convincing everyone in the family. By pure coincidence, Keith was saved in the last episode, where the DNA match could have uncovered the real Keith. Lucas being an imposter is very closely tied to the seventh episode of the series, which deals with the case of Shannon Steerman. Although Lucas’ deception deserves no forgiveness, the kid wanted a loving family and a place to belong—something his abusive mother could never provide. By the end, he somewhat redeems himself with the help of Oliver when he reveals the case of Beth. Speaking of Beth, another psychotic mother who preserves the corpse of her beloved son, mistaking it to be alive, doesn’t feel necessary, and the season could have ended on a better note without something sensational like this.
