The Found Season 1 Finale Just Blew Up Everything Heading Into Season 2

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for the Found Season 1 finale, Episode 13, "Missing While Forgotten." Read at your own risk!]

The cat is out of the bag in Found! After seven months of holding her former kidnapper hostage, Gabi Mosely's (Shanola Hampton) worst nightmare has finally come true: Hugh "Sir" Evans (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), the English teacher who kept her locked up in a farmhouse for over a year when she was one of his students, has escaped from her basement — and, as far as she knows, he is nowhere to be found.

It's a jaw-dropping plot twist that powers the tense season finale of NBC's procedural thriller Found and resets the chess board for an intriguing second season, which was ordered last November.

"What's going through her mind [in that moment] is absolute chaos," creator, showrunner and executive producer Nkechi Okoro Carroll told TV Guide. "She hasn't been home in a while, so in her mind, it's like, 'Wait, how did he get out? When did he get out? What does this mean? Where could he be? Is my secret gonna get out through him?' All of that is racing through her brain at once, and it's pure panic."

Okoro Carroll continued, "I wanted to start the episode that way because I wanted us to go on a journey with Gabi. The whole season, it's always been under her control, because she knew he was in the basement. So, what happens when her life is out of control, and then she lands a high profile case? How does she handle that? And that was why I wanted to start in that way, so that we were navigating arguably one of the most important cases personally to her while also dealing with her life completely flying out of control."

Gabi's ability to compartmentalize her life is put to the ultimate test in the finale. While trying to devise a plan with her associate Dhan (Karan Oberoi) to track down Sir, Gabi receives an anonymous tip about Dashika, a missing Black girl that Mosely & Associates have been tracking for months. Gabi agrees to follow the new lead about Dashika, while Dhan takes it upon himself to find and kill Sir himself.

Although Dhan is able to find evidence of Sir leaving the country with a fake passport and M&A is able to track down Dashika (she was being held by her maternal grandmother, who wanted to protect her from her stepmother), Gabi's happiness is short-lived. Gabi discovers that Sir left the tip and erased important security camera footage to show that she still needs her former captor's help to solve cases. Gabi decides to come clean to the rest of her team members, who are left reeling from the shock and betrayal of her actions.

The fractured nature of M&A leaves each of them even more vulnerable. At the end of the finale, Gabi discovers that Sir stole poison from her cabinet to poison Lacey's (Gabrielle Walsh) dog — not unlike what he did to one of Gabi's bullies in school. But Lacey chooses to ignore Gabi's call, much to Sir's delight. Sir, in case you haven't guessed it, is now hiding in Lacey's closet!

On a recent video call, Okoro Carroll — who is also overseeing the production of new seasons of All American and All American: Homecoming — sat down to discuss the major plot twists from the Found finale and tease what viewers can expect from the next chapter of this twisted tale. (Okoro Carroll reopened the writers' room for the second season of Found last Monday.)

Gabi comes to the realization that Sir will never let her go. Until he is dead, she will never truly be free of his shackles. Why did Sir decide to escape Gabi's basement now, considering that he was still regularly gaining the upper hand in their existing arrangement?

Nkechi Okoro Carroll: Sir left because their arrangement worked when it was just him and Gabi in a bubble again. In a way, it gave him back a piece of something he had when they were in the farmhouse together. The minute she called Dhan and reintroduced him into the picture was the confirmation for Sir that their bubble had ended. He was already starting to feel that way, pretty much starting from midseason on with each case and Gabi's realization of, "This is wrong. What am I doing? This has to end, and you deserve to be in the bottom of a jail cell, in hell." Sir knew instinctively that their time together was coming to an end in some way, and that is why he was getting a little bit more desperate in these final episodes in terms of [finding] those connections between them.

Ultimately, he escapes when he does because he knows it's coming to an end, and he also thinks Gabi is in danger and doesn't realize she has been found yet. It's part of the reason why we had that moment in Episode 4 when she breaks down upstairs and he hears it downstairs and is pulling his chains and doing everything humanly possible to get to her, because there's a love there — an unhealthy, disproportionate, protector-type love that he has for her. And now, Dhan is down there, saying, "Gabi's missing, and you need to help me find her," and then runs off with his clue. Sir doesn't have access to a TV, so no one ever came back to tell him Gabi was found. And the next time anyone went downstairs, he was in the wind.

After realizing that Sir was the one who gave M&A the lead about Dashika, Gabi decides to come clean to the rest of her team about being in contact with Sir — and it's fair to say that it does not go over well with Lacey, Margaret (Kelli Williams), and Zeke (Arlen Escarpeta). How does this painful revelation set the other members of M&A back on that journey of healing that they've undergone this season?

Okoro Carroll: It sets them back in a very detrimental way — both individually and M&A as a whole. Everyone at M&A is probably guilty of a little bit of hero worship of Gabi. She came into their lives at a point where they were at their lowest and gave them the inspiration and strength to turn their trauma into purpose. M&A exists because Gabi saved their lives in emotional ways — and in Lacey's case, it was an actual, physical saving of her life. She is such a cornerstone of their mental health and healing journey.

So when that gets absolutely shattered, which we see from their reactions, even though we can't hear what's being said, that is not something that's going to be repaired quickly. It wouldn't have been something that could be repaired easily with fully healthy individuals, let alone the kinds of individuals that have experienced the trauma that these guys have experienced.

Do the others at M&A know that Gabi held Sir in her basement for the better part of the last year, or do they still think she has simply been in touch with him?

Okoro Carroll: You can assume that she's basically told them that the worst possible thing they can imagine is what came true, which is that she became someone who is the kind of monster they hunt every week. She held someone against their will, and she told them about Sir. Anything else would have probably been forgivable by this group of people. It would have warranted a conversation.

But in these final moments, you see [how] Margaret doesn't even want Gabi to touch her, [and] Lacey is out of the room. Zeke's whole touchstone with the outside world was through Gabi and M&A, and he already has trust issues when it comes to his [biological] family, and it took a lot for him to trust another family. So, yes, she's revealed the worst of it to them, and we're going into Season 2 with everyone at M&A knowing the truth about what Gabi has been hiding for the last seven months.

But not Trent (Brett Dalton)?

Okoro Carroll: Not Trent. Not yet.

We see that all of them are dealing with the fallout in their own way in the final minutes of the finale. Part of me thinks that at some point, that growing feeling of being isolated from Gabi and the rest of the team will hurt more than that initial feeling of being betrayed by Gabi. The members of M&A need each other, for better or for worse. What will it take for Gabi to regain their trust?

Okoro Carroll: All I will say is that it's going to be a journey. It's not something that's easily fixed overnight. In keeping with the message of the show over Season 1, there is no timeline on healing, there is no one right way to heal, and there should be no judgment on other people's healing processes. Now that the hurt has come at the hands of one of their own, it doesn't change the reality that we don't heal overnight, and we don't heal at the same pace. These are individuals who have had to fight so hard to overcome what has happened in their lives to be the characters that we see and love today, and it makes it all the more heartbreaking that this is a journey they're gonna have to take again. And this time, they don't have their secret weapon, which is Gabi.

Throughout the season, Gabi has been forced to reckon with what she has done and if she is any different from, like you said, the monsters that she hunts every week. Could we consider this moment, as difficult as it is, the beginning of Gabi's own healing? She probably could not have begun that process if Sir was still locked up in her basement.

Okoro Carroll: You know what? I think that is a really good way to look at it. I always used to say, from the pilot on, it's that moment where you were screaming, "We were rooting for you! We were going to be okay if you were still on your journey of healing. But, girl, you got the man in the basement?! How are we supposed to root for that?"

The journey we've all been on with Gabi this season is for her to somehow get out from under the situation she put herself in at a time when she was very broken and not thinking straight. Whatever landmines that were still planted in her from her original kidnapping got tripped by her father's death. We're still rooting for her to deal with those [issues], and there's no version of that happening while Sir is still in her basement. So, as painful as the end of the season is, sometimes you gotta cut open the wound and dig in there and clear out the infection so that the wound can start to heal. That's the way I look at that ending — we have cut open the wound.

By the end of the finale, Sir is very much in control, and there is no telling what kind of havoc he will now be able to wreak on M&A next season. How will that shift the dynamics of the show going forward?

Okoro Carroll: It's still based around Gabi and Sir; it was always a constant power play between the two of them. It was the case in the past timeline, where she's the one that's in captivity and he has her in the farmhouse. And even then we saw, "Oh, she was a fighter. She refused to lose herself in her captivity." And in the present day where it was flipped, and now he was held captive and she was the captor, Sir has not lost his sense of identity. Even as she stripped away all that was important to him, there has always been a constant battle of power. That does not change.

The only difference is now, neither of them are in captivity. Both of them are out in the world. That just means they're playing that cat-and-mouse power dynamic in a bigger playground. But that dynamic of the show is not going to change.

But I'm curious to know how you're going about maintaining the essence of the show. You've previously said that you came into this show with a clear, five-season plan, so it always seems like Sir breaking out of Gabi's basement was always an inevitability.

Okoro Carroll: The essence of the show is going to absolutely stay the same: the types of cases we solve, the fact that we are still looking for the forgotten ones, the thriller aspect between Gabi and Sir that everyone loved in Season 1, the deepening of our characters' backstories with the use of flashbacks. The biggest difference is that Gabi and Sir's playground is just bigger. And when you have a bigger playground, more people tend to get caught up in the spider webs that exist, that get built, when you're in bigger playgrounds. That is probably the most I can say about Season 2 right now.

The first full season of Found can be streamed on Peacock.