During the first season of NBC’s Found, viewers were introduced to Mosley & Associates. This trauma-bonded team felt like a family as they found the missing people everyone else seemed to forget about. Their backstories were filled with trauma and tragedy, yet they continued to fight the good fight as they struggled with their individual traumas every day. Somehow, their dynamic worked for them.
Then Gabi Mosley (Shanola Hampton) was forced to reveal her deep, dark secret. She had kidnapped the man who held her hostage when she was a teenager. She had Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) locked up in a cage in her basement for months. While trapped behind bars, Sir often helped Gabi solve the cases her team was investigating. It was a strange, toxic, twisted, symbiotic dynamic that ended up imploding and exploding at the same time.
At the end of the first season, Sir, aka Hugh Evans, escaped from captivity. Now, in season two, he’s out in the wild and always seems to be five steps ahead of everybody else. For this first half of the second season, the team members have had a difficult time believing in Gabi again—believing in her message and her methods. The trust is broken, and this change in dynamic has triggered each and every one of their traumas.
One of the teammates who has been affected the most is Zeke. At the beginning of the season, Sir had poisoned him, sending the agoraphobe out of his safe space. He woke up in the hospital, which definitely wasn’t his safe space. “As an actor, I was like, oh boy, how is this going to play itself out,” Arlen Escarpeta, who plays Zeke, reflected. “I had all of these questions, and our directors and our producers said, ‘Hey, just do what you do. Handle your business and let it be. Trust yourself. Trust the work that you’ve already done with season one, and let Zeke take that mask off.”
“When you’ve seen Zeke before in season one, he’s well put together. He’s got these great sweaters. He’s got his hair, he’s got some jewelry, he’s on top of his things for the most part. And that is the mask that we all wear.” However, Zeke’s mask was forcibly removed. Outside of his place, he was no longer well put together. He was terrified.
“It was fun to show what Zeke is like when that mask is off,” the American Dreams actor said. “And I look forward to many more, hopefully. And I hope that Zeke gained as much as he lost. He was very afraid. Obviously, he was very terrified to be in that place, but there should be a little bit of bravery that was gained there as well, too.”
Thanks to Gabi’s massive secret, the M&A team’s dynamic was shattered in the first half of the second season. And now they’re in rebuilding mode. Improvements are happening, but surprisingly, the re-gelling of the team has become a long, slow burn of a process. And that’s something that’s different for a broadcast network TV show. Usually, teams are broken and glued back together in one, maybe two episodes.
“What we do well on Found is we very much focus on two things,” Escarpeta explained. “You get your instant gratification; you want your regular procedural type TV. We have that. That’s there. But there’s also this long burn of figuring out and finding out what’s really going on with our main cast.
“What’s happening in their heads? How are they healing? How are they not healing? How do they feel after this next episode? What’s carrying over,” he continued. “And sometimes I think in certain shows you may not get to dig deep into your main cast till seasons later. We’re kind of doing it on the flip side, where you get to dig in right away. You get to really crack into who these people are and what makes them tick. What parts of them are broken? What parts of them need to be fixed, and how do they all fit together?”
This long, slow burn is why we’ve only learned a portion of Zeke’s backstory, that his uncle is the one who kidnapped him as a child. “Well, listen, we are not giving you fast food,” the actor said. “All in good time, all things shall be revealed.”
While this week’s Found is the show’s fall finale, there are plenty of twists, turns, and surprises to come. In fact, Escarpeta is excited for everyone to see for themselves. And he’s even more happy they get to tell the story of Gabi and Zeke and the rest of the M&A team in 22 episodes this season. The cast and crew have been filming since March, which means if they haven’t completed filming yet, they’re close to it.
However, the only thing the Belizean native could say about the rest of the season is that “it’s good.” And to whet the appetite of fans, he used a foodie metaphor. “We’ve been cooking for it for a good amount of time. So trust and believe there’s been a lot of time spent in the kitchen, and the entree that is about to be served will be well worth the wait.”
The Found fall finale premieres on NBC on Thursday, November 21 at 10/9c. Then it will be available for streaming on Peacock.
Photo Credit for Images: Matt Miller/NBC and Kwaku Alston/NBC
The fall finale of Found
