How did you spend your New Year's Day? Well ours involved sitting on the sofa with leftover Christmas chocolate and watching every single episode of Harlan Coben's new series Missing You. What can we say? We're obsessed.
The new Netflix series follows the life of missing persons detective Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar) who comes across the profile of her ex-boyfriend Josh (Ashley Walters), who ghosted her 11 years ago, on a dating app. It sends her into a tailspin as she tries to work out if Josh is actually trying to contact her, and brings back memories of her father's (Lenny Henry) death 11 years ago.
Simultaneously, she's also helping a young man called Brendan (Oscar Kennedy) who believes his mum (Lisa Faulkner) is missing and has disappeared after going on holiday with Josh. Yeah, there's a lot going on.
Somehow the series manages to wrap it all up by the end of the fifth episode, with plenty of curveballs thrown our way. So if you missed a few details here or there, or simply need to read everything that happened in the finale again, here's the ending of Missing You explained.
Missing You ending explained
So Josh is alive and well?
Yep. After spending much of the season wondering what happened and why he ghosted her 11 years ago, Kat discovers Josh is alive and living in a rural home, along with his daughter and her grandfather.
She tracks him down, and at the beginning of episode five, Josh explains his daughter Sadie (whom he had after leaving Kat) set up the Facebook profile for him because she thought he was lonely, after Sadie's mum died.
Kat confronts Josh about why he left and he agrees with her that he left because he found out Kat's dad Clint was corrupt and working for Calligan (James Nesbitt) and couldn't live without not telling her.
Wait, Clint was corrupt?
Well sort of. Kat discovers Clint was working for crime boss Calligan while also working in the police. It meant he earned way more money and helped Kat to buy the property she lives in. She also discovered her dad was having an affair.
Kat then believed his work with Calligan is what got him killed, and manages to meet up with Calligan in a gallery, where he tells her he's actually not the one who killed her father.
Kat then manages to get Calligan to reveal the address of the person whom her dad was having an affair with, which leads us to...
Who killed Clint?
During episode five, Kat visits the address of the person her dad was having an affair with and is shocked to discover her dad was actually in love with a man named Parker (Cyril Nri). The pair were in a secret relationship for 14 years and loved each other dearly.
Parker informs Kat that Calligan knew about their relationship and used it to blackmail Clint in order to get him to work for him. However, after many years of blackmail, Clint had grown tired and wanted to quit working for Calligan, and so he tried to end his relationship with Parker.
On the night of his death, Clint and Parker are having a difficult conversation and embrace, which Kat's friend Aqua (Mary Malone) sees accidentally. Clint is spooked by Aqua seeing them, worried that she will tell Kat. He chases her home, while calling Stagger (Richard Armitage) to meet him at her address. Aqua eventually lets Clint into her home and the pair try and talk it out.
However, Kat then rings Aqua's phone which spooks Clint even more and he becomes aggressive as he believes Aqua has told Kat the truth. The pair fight and Aqua grabs a knife to defend herself. Josh then turns up and while trying to defend Aqua and break the fight apart he gets hold of the knife and accidentally stabs Clint.
Stagger arrives just after the stabbing, and covers up that Josh killed Clint. He arranges for Monte Leburne (Marc Warren) to take the fall instead.
This is then why Josh actually leaves as he can't live with the guilt of knowing he killed Kat's dad. However, Kat doesn't find any of this out until much later.
Why was Josh's picture on a dating profile?
Ah yes, while one half of the story has been cleared up, there's still a lot more to dig into.
Kat's renewed interest into what happened to Josh was sparked by seeing his picture pop up on a dating profile.
It turns out his dating profile, along with countless others, were set up as catfishes by a dog breeder named Titus (Steve Pemberton). Titus has a team working for him that set up these fake accounts in order to lure people in and arrange fake dates with them.
After setting up the dates, the innocent people are then kidnapped and taken to his farm where he forces them to hand over all their money before having one of the farm hands kill them. This is what happened to the missing man Rishi Migari (Rudi Dharmalingam) at the beginning of the series, who Kat is initially searching for, who we later see killed.
It's also what turns out to be happening to Brendan's mum Dana. Earlier in the series Brendan asks Kat to help him find his mum after she said she was going on holiday with a guy she had met on a dating app, who just so happened to be 'Josh'.
Of course it wasn't actually Josh, and Dana was kidnapped.
How does the series end?
While doing some investigating into his criminal activity, Titus' team alert him to Kat's early interest into Josh's fake profile and he soon deduces Kat knows the real Josh and must get rid of her to eliminate any potential threat.
He travels down to her flat with the plan to kidnap her, however, as he arrives he gets a phone call to say Dana has escaped. The timing could not be worse as that's precisely when Brendan arrives at Kat's flat. He decides to kidnap Brendan and lures him into the van, just as Dana is calling Brendan not to.
Kat sees Brendan being kidnapped and the hunt is on to save him. Kat and her team manage to track down the farm thanks to an alert from one of Titus' dog breeding customers who she claims he stalked her.
At the farm Dana releases the rest of the kidnapped people and they make their escape. However, just as they're leaving Titus sets the farm on fire and threatens to kill Brendan to get Dana to come out.
He shoots Brendan in the leg which is enough to get Dana out of hiding, however Titus can't go through with his plan to kill them as Kat arrives just in the nick of time and shoots Titus.
The final scenes of the series see Josh and Kat reunited and all seems like it's right in the world. That is until Charlie (Charlie Hamblett) calls Kat to reveal the identity of the finger prints on her father's murder weapon, which are actually Josh's.
Josh confesses what actually happened the night Clint died and while Kat is initially shocked, the series ends with the pair holding hands and the song 'Missing You' playing.
Missing You is available on Netflix now
