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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Alert: Missing Persons Unit Season 2 premiere “Bus 447.”]
The Missing Persons Unit has a new season-long mystery on its hands, and it’s a combustible one. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise which member of the team won’t let it go quite that easily.
In the Alert: Missing Persons Unit Season 2 premiere, a bus full of kids was taken. The kidnappers wanted a prisoner released or they’d kill passengers. The kids were saved, but the prisoner was released—only for a bomb to go off in the car after he and his lawyer got in.
Showrunner Carla Kettner teases what’s next in that case, for the Nikki (Dania Ramirez), Jason (Scott Caan), and Mike (Ryan Broussard) triangle, and more. Plus, check out a promo for what’s to come below.
You’ve set up this mystery of who blew up the prisoner and lawyer. What can you say about that person and investigation? Is that the season-long arc for Season 2?
Carla Kettner: Yeah, it’s a season-long arc for Season 2 and the arc is going to, in the first half of the season, really be carried by Jason’s intuition that there’s something going on that he needs to get to the bottom of. And as we move deeper into the season, Nikki becomes involved, and then Mike and Kemi [Adeola Role] become involved, and by the end of the season, everything blows up. We start the season with a literal explosion and end the season with a kind of more emotional explosion as our guys resolve the mystery of what happened in Episode 1.
Wayne (Alisha-Marie Ahamed) has that history with Jason, and we heard a bit about it in the premiere, how she flew with him to Philly and then back, and then they had that moment at the end, whatever that was. What can you say about their relationship, how much more we’ll hear about their past and how that’s playing out in the present?
In the past, they were colleagues and friends. That relationship is going to grow and change over Season 2 and it’s going to be a real will-they-or-won’t-they kind of dynamic for Jason and Wayne. Because you’ve already seen the first episode, I’m guessing you notice that there’s really spectacular chemistry between the two of them, and that relationship is going to heat up and grow over the course of Season 2.
There’s the Nikki, Mike, and Jason triangle, and what I like is that this season continues what the first did so well, which is highlighting the different relationships among all three characters. It’s not a straightforward triangle. Nikki seems genuinely happy to be marrying Mike, Jason seems happy for them, and Jason and Mike together are so great. I love that partnership. But at the same time, it seems like it would be quite easy for Nikki and Jason to fall back together. So what are you playing with there?
What we’re playing with is the challenges of navigating old love versus new love, and I think that poor Nikki is in the position of managing both her ex-husband and about-to-be husband, which is such rich fodder for fun and for drama. Jealousy will emerge as we get deeper into the season, but it’s funny, this is the first time—I’ve been doing television for a long time, but I’ve never had the opportunity to explore the bond between exes who truly still like each other. So that’s been really fun for the writers to explore. All I can say is that by the end of the season, there will be wedding bells.
How much will the MPU be using C (Petey Gibson) this season? It seems like he’s taken a step back.
Yeah, I loved C’s character in the first season. C is a forensic anthropologist, which I’m super familiar with, having been an EP on Bones for years, but missing persons are alive, so we are only bringing C into the cases that involve human remains. It was a little bittersweet because Petey is a wonderful actor, but we’re going to use him for his specialty this season. We’re really trying to focus on honing in on what each of our characters’ superpowers are and C’s superpower as a forensic anthropologist truly is with human remains, so he will be in a limited number of episodes this year.
Alert: Missing Persons Unit, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Fox