‘Found’: What Was Cut From That Pivotal Finale Scene

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Found Season 1 finale “Missing While Forgotten.”]

The truth comes out in the Found Season 1 finale — and the way it does makes it even more painful than we expected.

The episode begins with Gabi (Shanola Hampton) discovering that Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) has escaped her basement, where she had her kidnapper chained up, and she and Dhan (Karan Oberoi) realize he must still think she’s missing. Though she wants to immediately tell the rest of Mosley & Associates — especially Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh), whom Sir had also kidnapped as a kid — a priority case requires them to keep everyone’s focus on that missing person.

But once that case is over and after Gabi realizes that Sir, still out there, will never stop hunting her, she tells Lacey, Margaret (Kelli Williams), and Zeke (Arlen Escarpeta). All we see is her joining them in the conference room and their heartbreaking reactions before one by one, they leave her to cry, with Dhan staying by her. The last we see of Gabi in that scene is her sitting on the floor, but Hampton tells TV Insider what you would have seen if it hadn’t ended there.

“It’s so heartbreaking. I will tell you that broke my heart for Gabi. What got edited out is by the end of that, if the camera had stayed with Gabi longer, the audience would’ve seen her end up in the fetal position, that’s how bad it was,” she shares. “She just lost everything in that moment because the associates at M&A are the only family that she has. So when they walk out the door, that’s it for her. There’s no one left except for Dhan. Thank God for him.”

Matt Miller/NBC

But she loves how the “beautifully tragic scene” came out. “I love that you don’t hear the words. Even though as an actor, I said words, I said a whole monologue explaining all the things,” Hampton reveals. “Something was written. It was never going to be heard, but just so you could really feel the impact of coming clean, we did write it and I did say stuff, but all the audience would see are the reactions.”

The scene is more powerful because we don’t hear those words, and that’s why they did it that way, executive producer Nkechi Okoro Carroll explains. “We spent an entire episode with her rationalizing her decisions to Dhan that I didn’t feel we needed to hear that again. I felt what was most important was how each character was internalizing essentially the worst, most unimaginable thing, and I just felt it was more powerful to almost be on the outside as if we were intruding on a conversation and we were intruding on a very intimate moment,” she says.

She also praises “the gift” of the cast “because you can’t do that with everybody … to see them just process that without having to hear the words and let your imagination take you to their pain. It just felt like the right moment to us.”

As for those words that we didn’t hear, they were on paper — just not in the original script. “I was like, ‘I don’t want the studio or network to want it. I feel it’s so powerful this way,'” Carroll says.

Now that the secret’s out — to everyone except Trent (Brett Dalton) — there is a weight off Gabi. Though she started out so strong and in control at the beginning of the season, that began to unravel throughout. “It all made sense until it didn’t. And when something doesn’t make sense, it will eat at you,” says Hampton. “It was breaking her, and around her, she’s watching all these other people heal, yet she’s still in the same funk and being dragged down. It is so much better to tell the truth and to have that off and everybody move in truth, whatever the response is for her than to be living in that lie, in that hell.”

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

But now that they know, Gabi has to wait to see how each processes what she’s been doing. “It’s going to be an uphill battle if [any of them trust her again], because once you’ve broken trust, there is no way to go back from that,” according to Hampton. “There is no way for them to recover the same way. There is another way to build, but you’ll never be the same. And she knows that. So she also knows healing has no time. That’s the whole motto there at their association. So she will give whatever time it takes for them to heal, to grow, to forgive, to not forgive.”

Adds Carroll, “this is the worst possible case, right? It is the thing that has been the source of trauma for you your whole life, and then this person that you hero worship is essentially saying, ‘I, too, did that.’ It’s probably the biggest betrayal all of them could feel and therefore we’re going to have to deal with that and pick up the pieces from that.”

As for who might come around the fastest, Hampton suggests Margaret (and based on what Williams previously told us, that will likely take some time). Well, the good news is we know there will be a second season (of 22 episodes!) of Found. The bad news? Something tells us the premiere’s going to hurt.

Found, Season 2, TBA, NBC