About 8 or 9 years ago, I fell into despair for a while, and now I can't remember the specific incentive. One night, my hands suddenly trembled, and I couldn't hold a glass of water. My mother gave me a heart-saving pill and stuffed it. A few days later, I repeated it when I taught the students. This kind of experience is unfamiliar and ridiculous to me, who has always boasted of good physical fitness. After seriously considering the possibility of suddenly falling to the ground and not waking up for a few seconds, what caused me to panic was: what should I do if I leave a pile of junk behind me? So I said to my best friend, send her a copy of the text on the computer, and make her promise that if this happens, I will destroy all the remaining handwriting in my life. She wasn't local, and when I emailed her, I laughed hysterically.
But after getting out of the haze, it quickly faded away. Look
I am a hopeless perfectionist, I firmly believe that the world must be rational, and that human beings must be rational. Even if life experience repeatedly denies all this, I always try to build a "normal" order around it. In fact, the sad thing is that I am not the only one, we are all like planetary fragments, in so-called orbits, running round and round, and calling this "life". One day, due to a collision or foreign capture, it was suddenly deviated from the normal track, and even turned into a meteor and fell into the sky, and another appearance of "life" was indiscriminately presented in front of others.
Basically, you're right to think of it as a "off the rails" story. The most common is: a middle-class family, following the rules, no waves, one day, a family member, father, mother, or child suddenly disappeared. FBI agents swarmed up, launched background checks, went to companies and homes, rummaged through boxes, questioned everyone who was close to him/her and even met on the street, tracked his/her computer, accounts, emails, credit cards, drawn a timeline, and reconstructed the victim. The trajectory of life, especially all the activities before the disappearance, it turns out that in modern society, surveillance cameras are everywhere, every small expense and every small action you make will be recorded, and any "abnormal" clues will be extracted. And deduce all kinds of possibilities... Your life is pieced together bit by bit in a way that was unimaginable before, and it is bleakly exposed to everyone's eyes.
A small company clerk may be a fanatical terrorist; a well-behaved child may be the victim of school violence; a humble businessman may be the murderer of his sister who wants to live a different life; a conscientious A husband, who may be a pedophile, homosexual, or transgender; a sexy wife who may collude with a kidnapper and result in her husband's life; The surface of the "perfect" life peeled off like cracked soil, revealing the appearance of riddled holes underneath. It turns out that we don't know ourselves, and we don't know the people we love and the closest people, day after day, living in a lie. Disappearance means a variety of possibilities, escape, kidnapping, being killed... Some missing persons will never come back, and some missing persons are rescued at a critical moment. Can they continue to return to life in lies after that? "We will never go back", I often think of this sentence in "Eighteen Spring".
You can imagine the plot is dark, but
S408 is a special episode because its narrative angle is not the detective, but the family of the missing person. It's still a middle-class white family where parents wake up in the middle of the night to find out that their children haven't returned home. They watched the FBI enter the house, search every hidden corner, wives and husbands were separated, answering all kinds of embarrassing questions (most cases of missing children are related to parents, parents are the first suspects), detectives are mysteriously busy, they are helpless They waited, exchanging desperate looks, each recalling the past, and not believing that they had no idea about the child's life - he might have been involved in drug dealing and gambling. They started blaming each other, and the faint dissatisfaction that had been accumulated in my heart for a long time suddenly came out... Life was completely messed up. Time passed, more and more desperate, angry at the detective. Suddenly called to identify the corpse again, facing the bloody face, the father bent down and vomited, and the mother summoned the courage to search for the birthmark to confirm that it was not her own child. So wait, keep waiting. The detective continued to work, and the father had nothing to say and asked how the child died. Martin said he was beaten to death after being drunk by his father. Father (horrified? Not quite) looked straight at him, as if to ask for advice carefully, and seemed to say to himself: How is that possible? how is this possible? A mysterious visitor appears, and the truth emerges. The son argues with the suspect for the girl who was violated, and is arrested and held hostage. So I went to the scene by car, and I still had to wait in horror from a distance... Finally, Martin put down the walkie-talkie and said with relief: The child was rescued. Rush into the hospital, meet again...
At the end, the perspective turns back to Malone and the others. Martin is pleased with the happy ending, Malone said, don't be too happy, just received a report that someone is missing somewhere. So they set off again, leaving stretched, tired backs behind. The narrative tone of this episode is deliberately low and flat, and the dramatic scene of rescuing the hostages at the end is also blurred. The various sufferings in the waiting process are so trivial and real, and it also makes people understand the meaning of Malone's work better, which is really touching.
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