Photo: James Stack/Netflix
Is it even possible that Missing You has given up its whole plot just two episodes in? It certainly seems like it. “With Or Without You” opens on creepy dog breeder Titus, who’s clearly got a sociopathic screw or two loose. He’s admonishing a perfectly nice couple and their kids for wanting to name their adopted dog “Stuffy,” only to then produce proof that the wife-mom is cheating with the guy next door. They do background checks before they place their dogs, you see, and now not only is that family not getting an adorable puppy, but also it’s going to be a very, very awkward car ride home from the middle of nowhere.
Fast forward 40-odd minutes, and it becomes pretty clear that Titus is a huge part of both what’s going on in Kat’s job now and what happened in the past. Per Kat’s PI friend Stacey, Josh disappeared from the face of the earth 11 years ago and only now pops up on that dating site. (Also, does Titus use Stacey’s PI services? It’s just a guess, but it’s not unfounded.) We also learn that Web Josh has been “dating” a new woman, Dana Fells, whose son Brendan now thinks she’s missing and blames Josh. We also learn that Titus and the silent other guy are extorting victims like Rishi in an effort to fleece them for tens of thousands of pounds. When the money dries up, they kill them, burn the bodies, and that’s that. (I was a little worried they were going to turn into dog food but that hasn’t happened … yet.)
That’s how sad ol’ Rishi ended up in the fire. He was willing to do whatever it took to get back to his Vanessa, but since he was reported missing and his accounts were frozen, he was useless to Titus and company any more. But was Vanessa ever really real, or was she an elaborate catfish to get Rishi out into the world, too open and ready to be snatched? I suspect the latter, and I suspect that’s how Josh disappeared/reappeared as well. Just because he’s on Melody Cupid now doesn’t mean he’s living and breathing, because if online media and Dateline NBC have taught us anything, it’s that you can’t always believe the person you think you met online is the one you’re actually communicating with if you’ve never actually met IRL.
While Kat hasn’t put together the big picture pieces yet, it’s clear that she smells a rat. She finds out from prison guard Tamsin that Stagger went to see LeBurne with Josh before he died, something Stagger makes up a dumb excuse for involving a journalistic “scoop” and wasted time. Everyone’s gaslighting her pretty hard, from her dad’s old partner to her mom, who just seems to want to move on whether LeBurne was the guy or not.
Even Kat’s friends are holding something back. As we see at the end of the episode when Stacey — still in her car, as it’s the life of a TV PI — calls someone and cryptically says, “We need to tell her.” With that intercut with flashback shots of a bloody Stagger washing his hands, it seems like there are only a few ways this whole thing could go. Perhaps Josh was cheating on Kat, and Stacey caught him. Perhaps they want her to just move on. Perhaps they know something about Stagger and prison. Either way, it seems like right now the only allies Kat really has are her two cop partners and Brendan, the skittish 19-year-old whose mom, we learn, has at the very least been captured (if not killed) by Titus. It’s all very macabre and gross, and it seems like Kat will only go further off the deep end before finding any clarity. Luckily there are only three more episodes, though, so the poor gal won’t suffer too much.
• What was the point of putting Stagger and his wife in matching silky blue robes? With the amount of baked goods they were making, it made me think that some back door was going to swing open and we were going to get dumped into a swinger’s event that they’d just stepped out of.
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