Missing: Dead or Alive? Season 2 Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
The Missing Persons Bureau of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department gets the call about the 3-year-old and his dog, who disappeared from his panicking mother’s home. Sergeant Vicki Rains gets the call and the squad is dispatched. As Rains and investigator J.P. Smith get information from the mother and try to calm her down, a team spreads out in the woods. Luckily, it doesn’t take long to find him.
Not every case turns out as quickly or as positively for Rains and her squad. And when they get the call about Morgan Duncan, a 27-year-old man who lives in Columbia, it sets off a two-month investigation. He disappeared from the apartment complex where he lived, and his mother, with whom he talks to daily, hadn’t heard from him for about a week. One of his mother’s big concerns is that Morgan has schizophrenia, and she worries about what might happen if he doesn’t take his meds for it.
When Rains and investigator Sherwin Ruiz go to Morgan’s apartment, they see that not only has he left behind his phone and credit cards, but also his meds. They canvass his neighbors, all of whom were friendly with Morgan, and found it strange that he was gone. Then a woman actually approaches Rains and Ruiz, and talks about Morgan in the past tense. This arouses enough suspicion in both investigators that they take down the plate of the SUV that she was standing next to.
As the investigation continues, the squad finds out that the complex, which houses a number of residents who have mental health issues, has been taken over by drug dealers, who squat in the apartments of those vulnerable residents. And three names keep coming up: a resident named James Kelly, a known drug dealer with the alias Jersey, and a friend named Eric “Easy” Greene.
Like the first season, Missing: Dead Or Alive is shot and put together to feel more like a scripted procedural than a docuseries. The only side interviews we see for Morgan Duncan’s case is an interview with two of his neighbors and an old friend, who give background on how nice of a guy Morgan is. There is some narration from Rains about why she does this work, or why she’s so determined to get closure for the families of the missing people they try to find, even if the victim ends up no longer being alive.
But, for the most part, showrunner Stuart Froude and director Alexander Irvine-Cox give the series a narrative propulsion via the scenes they shoot, whether they’re spontaneous or “spontaneous adjacent.” It’s pretty obvious that a lot of exchanges between the members of the squad and Rains or her boss, Capt. Heidi Jackson, are recreated. As we said during Season 1, these people are cops, not seasoned reality veterans, and the stiffness of some of these staged conversations is evident.
But when the series is more in fly-on-the-wall mode, like when witnesses are questioned, the scenes are really compelling. The mystery of Morgan’s disappearance stretches over the first two-and-a-half episodes of the four episode season, and we were able to get a good look at just how methodical Rains and her squad can be, while staying calm in the process of interviewing witnesses and people of interest who can get pretty hostile.
