I Will Find You — TV review

Sometimes a TV series catches me for the wrong reason and I force myself to watch to the end because this wrong reason captured my attention but I really should know better because I know I am going to be disappointed when I learn the reason. I Will Find You, a Netflex mystery series, is just such an animal.

First a spoiler alert. I will be revealing some of the mysteries in the show so if you intend to watch the series, which I don’t recommend, stop reading now. The good news here is that there are so many plot twists that you aren’t likely to remember them all unless you have a copy of my review available while watching. There are plot twists after plot twists after plot twists after plot twists. Bad cops who turn out to be really good cops who were acting bad for a good reason. This means I started out thinking they were good guys, then I found out they were bad guys, only to later learn that they were actually good. Are you still with me?

The problem starts at the very beginning. David Burroughs (Sam Worthington) is in prison for killing his son with a baseball bat. Awful. Bad David. He sits in prison, not taking any visitors, because he thinks he deserves it for killing his son during a black out. Rachel Mills (Britt Lower), his sister-in-law, visits him in prison despite his requests not to be visited because of how horrible a person he is. She shows him a picture of a photo she received that shows his son who has a very distinctive birth mark is very much alive. Burroughs realizes that maybe he didn’t kill his son and this sets into motion Burrough and Mill’s mission to discover the truth.

The hook that kept me watching now is firmly in place. I really want to know who would killed a small child with a baseball bat, kidnap another child and set up the child’s father for murder. There has to be a good reason for someone to do this, right? I mean killing a child to kidnap someone else’s child, that is a terrible thing to do to a kid and to Burroughs. What is it?

The next 8 episodes are so is a wild run of plot twists, a lot of them red herrings, vitally unnecessary to the actual plot but are thrown in there to keep you guessing. And there is so much to learn and then forget because they are irrelevant to the child’s murder. Things like a mob connection to the murder. The mob has absolutely nothing to do with the murdered child or to the story at all but that doesn’t stop the series from devoting several episodes to this plot line which proves to be both unnecessary and violent. The Mafia Don’s main man is killed, Burroughs is flown into Key West to meet his fate with the Mafia Don, and he learns that his best friend works for the Mafia Don.

So, it turns out, the nasty Mafia Don turns out to be just a good father interested in helping other good fathers, even good fathers who wrongfully sent his own son to prison where he is killed. The Don, who in the past swore revenge on the cops who set his son up, but decides to nothing to the police who screwed over his son even though he has captured and in his Key West home. The Don does nothing and actually is such a good sport about the whole threat thing, even though one of his top guys is killed, that he flies Burroughs back to home so he can further investigate his son’s disappearance. Even though his son still died in prison, his top guy back home is murdered because Burroughs thought the mob was involved and one the good/bad cops pulled a gun on him. Nothing on toward happens to anyone.

Are you still with me? Don’t worry, none of the Mafia Don plot twists have much to do with the actual story so you can forget them right here.

Finally there is the end. Oh boy what a fucking mess. I will just jump to the mess and won’t give you too many details because there are just too many of them and it would only serve to confuse you. To summarize — it involves troubled pregnancies, false names at fertility clinic, and the discovery that the guy who has been helping Burroughs throughout the show is actually a friendly psychopath. The psychopath, who I feel it is important to remind you, killed a small child with a baseball bat, thinks that Burrough’s son is actually his son and so with the assistance of his rich mother and her security man, they cover up his misbehavior because all the psychopath wants is to be a good father.

Yes, you heard that right. The psychopath kills one child in order to kidnap someone else’s child who the psychopath mistakenly believes is his and so he can raise this kidnapped child as his own There are many things I believe a mother might cover up for her son but I think that if my son had killed an innocent child in order to realize his parental goals, I might be a little concerned about his behavior and, dear God, why would I give him access to another small child. I shudder to think of the psychopath’s views on corporal punishment and so should the psychopath’s mother. Wouldn’t it just be easier to hire a woman to have his child? I am sure it wouldn’t be difficult to find a woman willing to bear his child for a cool million and, let’s face it, a lot less messy than covering up a murder.

To say nothing of the mother’s security man. There are plenty of other rich people who don’t have bat shit crazy sons that need security men, why fuck around with a psychopath who, I feel compelled to remind you, yet again, killed a child with a baseball bat and set up another man to take the fall for his client’s murder?

Some other minor points. Sam Worthington is an Australian and he was playing an American. His American accent was perfect but his acting was painfully stiff. It also doesn’t help that a lot of the primary male characters looked an awful lot alike — so that you spend a lot of the early episodes trying to figure out who is the grieving father, the psychopath, the wife’s new husband, and the grieving father’s best friend. I don’t ask this often but do all white men look alike? They do in this program.

The thing is what hooked me was the murder of a small child. The whole series I thought there better be a good reason for such a terrible act, only to discover that the innocent was sacrificed to fulfill a man’s ambition to be a good father. Good grief.

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