In her dogged pursuit of a serial killer, an FBI agent is kidnapped and declared dead in absentia. Six years later, she’s found alive, battered, and with no memories of the time she spent in captivity. Over the course of the first season of Absentia, she suspects nearly everyone she knows of her abduction and breaks almost every rule to try and prove her suspicions are true. Will her inability to let go of her own case lead to justice? Or will it alienate her from the people she loves — and put her behind bars?

Created by Gaia Violo (Star Trek: Starfleet Academy) and Matthew Cirulnick (Rambo: Last Blood), the psychological crime drama ran for three seasons, which are streaming on Netflix now. The series stars Stana Katic (Castle), Patrick Heusinger (Frances Ha), Cara Theobold (Crazyhead), and Richard Brake (Barbarian). Keep reading to find out what happened in Absentia Season 1 before diving into Seasons 2 and 3. 

Who’s in the cast of Absentia? 

Find out who stars in the series in this guide.

What happens in Absentia Season 1? 

Six years after FBI Special Agent Emily Byrne (Stana Katic) disappears and is presumed dead, two very strange things happen in Boston. First, the body of an unidentified man washes up on a pier with its eyelids cut off — the signature of the serial killer Emily was hunting when she went missing. No one on the squad has seen this specific variety of mutilation in years. And second, Special Agent Nick Durand (Patrick Heusinger), Emily’s husband who remarried two years after her death, gets a call in the middle of the night from Conrad Harlow (Richard Brake), the man locked up for Emily’s murder: Nick, he says, has one hour to save Emily’s life. The agent calls in FBI reinforcements and rushes to the location he’s given, pulling a drowning Emily from a locked tank that she’s been sealed inside. She’s physically weak, with signs of torture on her body, but she remembers Nick and immediately asks for their son. 

At first it seems like a miracle that Emily’s back — especially to Nick; Emily’s brother, Jack (Neil Jackson); and her father, Warren (Paul Freeman). However, there are others who remain suspicious of her return. Emily’s son, Flynn (Patrick McAuley), has no interest in getting to know a woman he doesn’t remember, especially when the situation is upsetting his stepmom, Alice (Cara Theobold). And Tommy Gibbs (Angel Bonanni), the Boston PD detective working the case of the man whose body was found at the pier, begins to wonder if in fact Emily is the suspect he should be after. The man is eventually identified as a sex trafficker, Robert Semerov (Alexander Georgiev), who was named in Emily’s old case files. Even more disconcerting, her DNA is under his fingernails, which suggests that the two were in a violent struggle before his death. 

Meanwhile, Harlow’s sentence is vacated thanks to Emily turning up alive. After he’s freed, a distraught and traumatized Emily confronts Harlow after breaking into his home, only to be caught and arrested by Boston PD. The next morning, Harlow’s found dead in his pool. When Emily realizes she’s a suspect in not one but two murders, she runs — and she’s determined to solve the case and prove her innocence before a killer gets away again.

Who’s framing Emily?

Emily’s still convinced that Harlow is the original killer, and that he must’ve been working with an accomplice while in prison to keep her captive. That same accomplice, she wagers, is likely responsible for the two deaths since her disappearance that are being pinned on her. When she and Nick dig through Semerov’s recent history, they realize he was paying off a Fed. Looks like there’s a dirty agent in the midst — which, if Emily had discovered that six years ago, could explain why she was kidnapped. So she zeroes in on her former boss, Special Agent Adam Radford (Ralph Ineson), and breaks into his home to see if she can find any clues. 

When Emily discovers an old notebook filled with macabre sketches of bleeding eyes (the serial killer’s M.O.), she kidnaps Adam in order to torture a confession out of him. Adam admits to taking bribes from organized crime, but insists he’s not the killer’s accomplice. He was drawing the killer’s signature over and over again from his obsession with finding Emily, out of distress: He never wants to go through losing a fellow agent like her ever again. When Emily’s about to let him go, Nick and Tommy — who’ve been trying to stop her before she does anything dangerous or illegal — show up at the scene. The second Emily runs, shots are fired from a dark corridor, killing Adam. Nick and Tommy assume the shooter is Emily, but Emily knows Harlow’s accomplice was there, waiting in the shadows.

The sketches of the bleeding eyes trigger buried memories for Emily, so her next stop is her new therapist, Dr. Daniel Vega (Bruno Bichir). After zip-tying Daniel to his office chair to ensure he doesn’t call the police, Emily asks him to walk her through some memory exercises. In doing them, she recalls where she’s seen the symbol before — carved into a white tree in a forest she used to play in as a child. After the session, Emily sprints off to Nottingham Park, a place where she and other kids from her orphanage frequented before she was adopted by Warren. When she gets there, she makes a horrific discovery: Under the carving is a body, which appears to have been there for decades. This person was killed long before the killer started leaving his calling card on victims. She hears Nick and Tommy chasing through the woods after her, and grabs the only thing that might help her identify the body — a pacemaker — and flees.

Emily’s next stop is her brother Jack’s place. Despite having a falling-out over Jack breaking his sobriety, Emily goes to him for help. As a former doctor and a current medical sales tech, Jack has access to systems that will ID the pacemaker. But her brother’s not home, so Emily goes through his laptop trying to find his passwords only to discover a cache of hidden files — disturbing pornographic videos of women being tortured, much like Emily herself was at the hands of her kidnapper for years on end. Emily begins to wonder if she even knows her brother at all — has Jack’s alcoholism and the trauma over losing his sister pushed his mental state to the point where he’d kidnap, torture, and kill? Emily tracks him down at a hotel, where he’s in bed with a woman, then tails the woman to the strip club where she works. There, things get messy. Security opens fire, shooting Emily in the stomach. With what she thinks is her dying breath, Emily calls her brother for help, not knowing if he’ll leave her to die. But Jack shows up, takes Emily to a hotel, and performs basic field surgery on her that saves her life. 

When she wakes, he helps her track the pacemaker to its deceased owner: Dr. Lu-Fang Shen (Kok-Hwa Lie), the psychologist who worked at the orphanage where Emily grew up. Emily visits the doctor’s brother to get the keys to a storage facility with all of Dr. Shen’s research. When Emily visits the facility, she discovers years of tape recordings that detail experiments on children. In an effort to make controllable killers, Dr. Shen made the children choose which among them would step into a locked tank as it filled completely with water — the same exact situation in which Emily was found. Emily starts to piece together that, if anything, Harlow was the accomplice, not the other way around. And now Emily knows who she’s looking for — someone like her, who survived similar torture. Thankfully, that someone wants to be found and has started leaving Emily pointed clues, which culminate in a confrontation between the two.

Do Emily and Nick get back together?

Throughout the course of the season, there’s an immense amount of tension between Emily and Nick. Nick goes back and forth between wanting to help exonerate Emily and being unable to look away from the mounting pile of evidence that mark her as a murderer. While they do sleep together once, it serves mostly as a goodbye — and a distraction. When Nick falls asleep, Emily runs off to find the second killer on her own. 

The final nail in the coffin of Emily and Nick’s relationship comes at the end of the season, when Flynn and Alice are kidnapped. They wake up in the same scenario Emily did six years ago — in an underground bunker, where a masked man performs the tank experiment repeatedly on Emily’s son and his stepmother. Nick, believing Emily’s the one responsible, goes off the rails and chases her, guns blazing. But Emily knows this is a trap set specifically for her by someone from her past, and she walks into it willingly in order to save her son. 

Is Emily the second serial killer? 

No, Emily’s not the second serial killer, despite what Nick and the rest of the investigators eventually suspect. When Emily finds the underground bunker where Flynn and Alice are being held, she’s immediately gassed and wakes up in a room with a body. It’s Alice, alive but barely conscious. The killer gives Emily a choice. She can save Flynn, but only if she kills Alice, which will show the world who Emily truly is: a monster. 

Who’s framing Emily? 

Emily tries to stall for time by engaging with the killer because she knows Nick and the Feds are hot on her trail. She has no other cards to play, unarmed in a locked room. Why does the killer think she’s a monster? What could Emily have possibly done that warranted six years of her life being stolen? The killer asks her to remember the very first life she took. That’s when Emily realizes … she did take someone’s life, just not in the way people suspect. 

Emily recalls her time in the orphanage, when she was passed over again and again for adoption because of her behavioral problems. Desperate for a family, Emily snuck into the facility’s office one night and switched her psychological profile with that of her friend, Logan Brandt (Lydia Leonard), who was marked as an ideal candidate for adoption. By switching those files, Emily stole Logan’s life. Emily left the orphanage with Warren, and Dr. Shen chose Logan as a perfect test subject for his experiments, succeeding in turning Logan into a killer. Logan killed Dr. Shen back then and, as an adult, teamed up with Harlow, a fellow serial killer, using his wealth to help to enact her decades-long revenge. 

Do Alice and Flynn survive?

Yes, Alice and Flynn survive, thanks to Emily and Nick. Though Emily considers giving into the ultimatum and killing Alice to save Flynn, she’s stopped at the last second by her own morality and Nick’s sudden appearance. With clear evidence in front of him that Emily’s not the killer, Nick and Emily rescue Alice and search through the bunker for Flynn, who is once again trapped in the tank as it’s flooding. Nick and Emily work together to break Flynn out of the tank and then all four make a run for safety.

Who’s actually the killer? 

There are two serial killers in the show: Logan and Harlow. All the bodies found before Emily’s disappearance (the case she was working on) were Harlow’s victims, but Logan’s the one who kills Semerov. She cut off his eyelids, a ritual that she copied from Harlow, to implicate Emily as his accomplice. It’s Logan and Harlow who’ve been scheming together for these past six years toward Logan’s goal to pin Emily as the true monster. 

How does Absentia Season 1 end? 

Emily and Logan hunt each other through the woods as Alice, Nick, and Flynn escape. Though Logan knows these woods well, giving her the upper hand, Emily’s determined to end this once and for all. In the final confrontation, after they both lose their guns and wrestle each other on the ground, Emily drowns Logan in a shallow puddle. After all is said and done, the Boston branch of the FBI clears Emily’s name of all the murders blamed on her throughout the season. 

Emily seems delighted to finally get a chance to return to her normal life. She’s making progress with Flynn, who’s finally warming up to her. She and Alice have buried the hatchet after Emily helped save her life. Nick and Emily are over-over and attempting to be good co-parents. Emily’s also apologized to Jack for invading his privacy and accusing him of being her abductor. Hell, she’s even considering returning to the FBI. Life is good for her and, in the final scene of the season, she’s surrounded by her loved ones at a party. But as the episode ends, she’s caught off guard by a traumatic flashback — she’s back at Harlow’s place, stabbing him to death. It’s true that Emily was never Harlow’s accomplice, but six years spent with Logan means there might be a killer in her yet.

Where can I watch Absentia Seasons 2 and 3? 

Stream the second and third seasons on Netflix now. 

Will there be a fourth season of Absentia?

No, the series ended with Season 3. The series finale premiered on Amazon Prime in 2020. 

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