‘Found’ Boss & Stars Tease Thrilling Final Season 1 Episodes

Found certainly left us with quite the cliffhanger to end its 2023 episodes — Gabi (Shanola Hampton) calling someone about Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), her kidnapper she’s been keeping chained in her basement — but it also left one character in perhaps a better place than she’s been.

Ever since Margaret’s (Kelli Williams) son went missing 13 years ago, she’s spent every night at the bus station where she last saw him. Her therapist took her back to that day in their latest session. Doing something like that is “incredibly intense and takes you back to the beginning and then it’s unfolding all of these truths,” and so she wanted to make sure it was given the respect it deserves, Williams told TV Insider.

Filming that was, she admitted, “fun,” in the sense that “it was very emotionally intense, but it was one of those good acting challenges. But I think that’s part of the piece of it being so scary to go back into that shame, because there’s a lot of shame, I’m sure, attached to, in her mind, her failure, how she failed as a mother. She’s obliterated everything else before that in that moment of not paying attention for just seconds, and that reality for people, it’s just so deep and horrible and just breaks my heart to think about it for the people that it actually happened to.”

Showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll made sure to praise Williams’ “phenomenal” portrayal of Margaret while discussing this arc. “What she’s doing is not healthy, but it is her coping mechanism and her pain is so raw and her heart is still so fully living outside of her body in regards to the hope of one day finding her son that it’s kind of like you want to be like, ‘Girl, no, you need to stop going. You need the help.’ But as crazy as it seems, we all want that [possibility of her finding her son] for Margaret.”

Margaret is beginning to heal a bit after her daughter came back into her life in earlier episodes this season, but that doesn’t mean she can let the bus station go yet. “Because it’s always like, ‘What if I stop just short of finding him? What if the miracle was around the corner and I stopped too soon?’ That is the beauty and the tragedy of Margaret,” Carroll said. “And so we are seeing her try to take healthier steps because she wants to be able to have a relationship with her daughter. She has other kids we haven’t introduced. It wasn’t just the one daughter.”

She continued, “the growth for her this season is she’s seeing hope in the life she has now as opposed to holding onto the past. … It’s truly one of my favorite journeys to watch unfold and for us to talk about in the writers’ room and where we plan on taking that story in Season 2, I’m just so excited to see Kelli sink her teeth into it.”

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Going forward after that Episode 11 therapy session, Margaret is “very vulnerable,” according to Williams. “If she’s opened this sort of floodgate of emotion and then subsequently other truths come out, I feel like it would feel incredibly destabilizing. Really, truly, she sort of lost her foundation, you know what I mean? So I think that it’s pretty major. She feels probably very alone in it.”

Also coming up in the final two episodes of Season 1 (the show’s already been renewed!), Carroll teased “a collision course of the storyline we tell in the flashback of Teen Gabi [A’Zaria Carter] and Sir and the present day storyline of their dynamic. Those are two speeding trains that are on a collision course over Episodes 12 and 13. And we’ll answer a lot of questions about what happened in the past and what is happening in present day. So for everyone who’s been waiting for the final pieces of the puzzle to come together to truly understand, that is exactly what is happening in the most dynamic and hair-pulling and nerve-frayed way in 12 and 13.”

For Gosselaar, those scenes in the farmhouse with Teen Gabi and Sir in the flashbacks “are sort of the kindling of the start of this monster and hard to play because I don’t understand that. Anything to do with children, it just evokes a visceral reaction to me. I have four children of my own, and so those are really uncomfortable and hard scenes for me to shoot. The ones in the basement, I’m more grounded with Shanola, but the ones in that farmhouse are very disturbing to me, are very hard to watch my fellow actor, A’Zaria Carter, who plays that role brilliantly and watching her emotions and sort of being in the same presence as her is not easy.”

Also coming up, the showrunner shared, is the team revisiting a very important case for Gabi — and the timing couldn’t be worse! It “throws everyone at M&A on their heads in the middle of their own personal crises,” she previewed. “We’re really going to see them have to balance their purpose with the explosion of their personal lives.”

Now that we know there will definitely be a second season, how will the first’s finale set it up? “It sets up even more of a thriller-esque, tumultuous experience for everyone involved,” Carroll said.

Uh-oh. Brace yourself.

Found, Season 1 Return, Tuesday, January 9, 2024 10/9c, NBC