‘Found’: Shanola Hampton Explains Why Gabi Needed That Last Scene With Dhan

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Found Season 1 Episode 12, “Missing While Eccentric.”]

Gabi’s (Shanola Hampton) secret is officially out there — to one person, at least — on Found.

The last episode of 2023 ended with her calling someone to talk about Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), the man who kidnapped her as a teen and whom she’s been holding captive in her basement, and the penultimate installment of the season reveals that that person was Dhan (Karan Oberoi). It turns out that Gabi had turned to him after her father’s death, and Dhan was the one to find Sir for her and lure him to the farmhouse, where she was waiting. However, Dhan never asked what she did next; he assumed she was going to turn him in and, when she didn’t, that she did what any of them would when coming face-to-face with their own personal devil: kill him.

“Isn’t it funny how Dhan can wrap his mind around if she was [a killer] and did and not the actual kidnapping and holding him captive? I just find that to be such an interesting tidbit when they’re fighting back and forth,” Hampton tells TV Insider.

Steve Swisher/NBC

As Dhan explains to Gabi, he could understand putting a bullet in Sir’s head for what he did, but by kidnapping him, she’s become “the exact monster we hunt every day! You know I was held in a cage in the ground; you know what they did to me. That you would do the same thing—” Gabi tells him that when her father died, something in her broke, and she wasn’t in her right mind when she did what she did. But now, she needs it to be over, and that’s why she called him. “I won’t” do what Gabi can’t, Dhan insists. “I’m not the same person I was a year ago, the one who would’ve done it and asked no questions. I’m different, better, because of you, because of M&A. Now I realize it was all fake.” She urges him not to “let [her] mistakes destroy [his] progress, [his] growth.”

What follows is a great scene with Sir in the basement, talking to Dhan, sitting upstairs in front of the open door, with the focus on the latter’s reaction as the kidnapper taunts him with the fact that he’s helped Gabi with cases and “the big bad wolf of Mosley & Associates is their savior.”

To say Dhan doesn’t take this well would be an understatement. However, all bets are off when things go horribly wrong while trying to find the missing person of the week. “You tainted the one thing helping all of us, helping me heal. You gave him purpose, you gave him proximity to you, you gave him redemption for god’s sake,” Dhan tells Gabi before splitting off from her … only for her to then be kidnapped. And to find her, Dhan turns to Sir.

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Once Gabi’s safe and back at M&A, Dhan admits what he did, and by doing so, he now gets why she went to him with their cases (even though he still doesn’t think that makes it right). But to truly start healing, Gabi knows she needs to tell the others — and she hopes that Dhan can start healing again after her apology. He promises to never leave her again and to support her every step of the way.

That acceptance from Dhan “felt authentic to him,” Hampton notes. “Once fear kicks in, Gabi gets kidnapped, and he realizes he just loves her so much, it made it make sense, right?”

Their last scene in this episode was one of her favorite to film in the season. “That was such a tender, wonderful moment, and Karan is just such a wonderful actor,” she shares. And Gabi “absolutely” needed to hear he wouldn’t leave her again, especially with “the abandonment she already has. Her mom’s died, then she gets kidnapped. Then her dad… That was her fear the whole time. So yes, she needed to hear that he’s there and she knows it because what Dhan says is truth. It’s an oath.”

But now we’re heading into the finale, and considering showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll told us, “it sets up even more of a thriller-esque, tumultuous experience for everyone involved”? Uh-oh.

Found, Season 1 Finale, Tuesday, January 16, 10/9c, NBC