the absence season Absentia, a thriller series starring Stana Katic of Castle, recently released its second season on Amazon Prime Video. The lead actress says that the 10-episode run of the show has a “whole new drive and perspective” that goes beyond the first season’s cliffhanger. Initially, the drama followed Emily Byrne (Katic) as she made her comeback from being abducted and held captive by one of Boston’s most notorious serial killers for more than six years.
Emily saw a vision of herself drowning someone, so at the end of the season, she had tracked out her captor and exacted her retribution, but there were still unanswered concerns about what precisely happened to her while she was in captive. Regarding what will happen next, Katic told Digital Spy, “We did finish on a bit of a revelation for Emily, even though we resolved some of the mystery.” I believe she needs to determine at the start of season two whether that was a real vision or recollection, or if it was some kind of aftereffect of being held captive for such a long time.As a result, while season one focused largely on us, the viewer, and our ability to trust Emily, season two is more concerned with the question, “Can Emily trust herself?,” allowing us to follow Emily’s psychological journey in greater detail. In the second season of Absentia, co-creator Matt Cirulnick was replaced as showrunner by Samantha Corbin-Miller (ER, Law & Order SVU) in charge of the writers’ room.
It was awesome because we had a whole new drive and perspective on where this show could go,” said Katic, explaining that the new episodes would widen the scope of the series to focus more on the supporting characters.
“We wanted to have the opportunity to not just tell the story of our protagonist, but also dive deeper into Jack (Neil Jackson), Alice (Cara Theobold), Nick (Patrick Heusinger)… and some of the new characters as well, like Natasha Little [playing Special Agent Julianne Gunnarsen] and Matthew Le Nevez [Special Agent Cal Isaac].”
Prior to Absentia, Katic’s last major TV project was the CBS crime series Castle, which generally aired 22-24 episodes per season
She claimed that because her new program has shorter seasons, there was more opportunity to plan ahead when it came to writing the script and outlining the character arcs. “Ten episodes were shot for Absentia.” We didn’t film 24. We can delve a little deeper since we can truly tell the story with a beginning, middle, and end—almost like a movie—after filming ten episodes. That added interest to the narrative. It was more than just my opportunity to play an antihero; it was also the fact that we were going to film practically an independent television picture. That was quite thrilling.
