Don't Bother with Stana Katic's 'Absentia' on Netflix

This Thanksgiving, I found myself intentionally avoiding the fifth season of Stranger Things because I’m not ready to succumb to the hype. And what better way to put off the first four episodes of Stranger Things than by starting a new-to-me three-season (30-episode) show that just popped up on the Netflix Top Ten?

I only made it through the first season, and even that was too much.

I assumed Absentia was a Canadian or Australian series that never got an American release and had just surfaced through the streaming algorithm. I love stumbling upon an undiscovered gem. But no: Absentia was released in 2018 on Prime Video and distributed internationally by an arm of Sony Pictures. I still can’t figure out its country of origin, but it was filmed in Bulgaria, which makes for a bizarre stand-in for Boston, where the series is set.

The show stars Stana Katic (Castle), and who doesn’t love Stana Katic (besides Nathan Fillion)? I haven’t seen her in years. Absentia may be why.

Despite the murky palette and the cheap production values, the pilot is genuinely intriguing. Katic plays FBI Agent Emily Byrne, who, in the premiere’s opening minutes, is beaten, tortured, and nearly drowned in a tank that rapidly fills with water. Seconds before she dies, the tank opens and she’s released. When she resurfaces, she discovers she’s been missing for six years, remembers almost nothing of her captivity, and returns to find that her husband, Special Agent Nick Durand (Patrick Heusinger), has remarried Alice (Cara Theobold). They’re now raising Emily’s son, Flynn.

Emily immediately starts investigating her own abduction, targeting the man convicted of her murder, Conrad Harlow (Richard Brake), who’s also tied to several unsolved killings involving victims whose eyelids were removed. Spoiler: by the end of episode two, Harlow is dead, and Emily becomes the prime suspect. The police begin to suspect she was the serial killer during her six-year disappearance. There’s even evidence suggesting she may have orchestrated her own abduction as cover for a killing spree. The series quickly becomes a The Fugitive-style chase: the feds —sometimes including her husband — try to arrest her while she stays on the run, attempting to solve her own case.

Intriguing, right? For two, maybe three episodes, the fast-moving plot outpaces the wooden acting, clumsy writing, and shoddy production. But eventually Absentia drowns in its own ridiculousness, and, worse, its sheer tedium. It devolves into a red-herring procedural, each episode pointing toward a new suspect with piles of incriminating evidence, only to discard them without addressing any of that evidence.

For instance, Emily discovers snuff videos of women being tortured on the computer of her alcoholic surgeon brother, Jack (Neil Jackson). She becomes convinced he’s behind everything. Later, he’s abruptly ruled out, and his only explanation for hundreds of snuff clips is, “Those are private!” He then becomes her ally again, and we’re expected to ignore his hard drive full of horrifying footage.

Mostly, though, the show suffocates under filler: endless chasing, running, driving, false leads, and random hallucinations. It’s trash. And I truly cannot emphasize how bad the acting is, even Stana Katic’s at times. After the propulsive opening, the whole thing crawls toward a season-one finale that’s ridiculous, out of left field, and deeply unsatisfying. It was so bad that instead of continuing to season two, I finally gave in and turned on Stranger Things.