As Shanola Hampton told TV Insider, Found “will give you trauma, and then they’ve got to retraumatize you with the trauma.” Such is the case for Margaret’s (Kelli Williams) son Jamie (Parker Queenan), who was just reunited with his family — he’d been taken as a child and told his mother didn’t want him — only for (what is now) the penultimate episode of the series to end with Lena (Danielle Savre), Sir’s (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) sister, kidnapping him. (NBC canceled the drama after two seasons on Friday, just ahead of its finale on Thursday, May 15.)
“It’s a bit different this time around because this one wasn’t emotional manipulation, it was a very sort of calculated, specific kidnapping of a specific person who’s not a child anymore,” Queenan tells TV Insider. “And so the playing field is a little bit different than it used to be, and he’s got a lot of feelings toward this particular person, and he’s got a lot of feelings toward this particular situation, and he definitely has a lot of feelings toward being kidnapped a second time. So I think that without saying too much, there’s something about his relationship with being kidnapped again being something that motivates him toward taking action and finding a way potentially to get out or to try at least.”
Prior to that ending, Jamie had finally reunited with his father and sisters, after he and Margaret put off telling them he’d come home. His father, unsurprisingly, wasn’t too pleased upon hearing how long he’d been back. Queenan enjoyed filming those family reunion scenes.
“It was great. It was cool to meet my screen family, and it was really sweet. We actually really did have a good chemistry, me and my two sisters and my mom, my dad, on the set and the actual shooting of it and everything, it’s very emotional, of course,” he shares. “It’s a bit different than when he came to see Margaret because when he came to see Margaret, it was so uncertain and it really wasn’t so clear what was going on. It was more of kind of hesitant, like, okay, are you really this person? And okay, we’ll kind of accept you back in. This one is more like, no, he’s back. This is actually him and this is exactly what you think that it is. And with that, I think, there’s a lot more emotion that comes into it, and that was really cool to shoot, and that was in a weird way, a lot of fun to be able to do that.”
But that wasn’t the first time he’d seen his family since he was taken. Flashbacks to 2020 reveal that while he was out, he saw his father and his sisters. Before he could make a decision about going over to them, he saw a man following a little girl and helped her. But if he hadn’t seen that, would he have gone to his family?
“I think so. I think maybe he would’ve, because — that’s actually a tough one,” admits Queenan. “He probably would stay out there for a while. I don’t know if he’d make a decision right away. I mean, that’s a tough decision. Going back to something — that would be as tough for him as going back to Margaret, essentially everything would have to be given up, and he probably would know the implications with doing that would be leaving behind Carrie [Suehyla El-Attar Young] and this other family that he has, this other mother that he has, and it would be a big decision for him. But there certainly would be curiosity.”
He suggests: “You know how I imagine it being? It probably would be one of those things where Jamie would go back up and he’d drop something and like, ‘Oh, whoops, excuse me,’ and just see if they notice him. That’s how I think he would’ve done it. Would you guys recognize me? Kind of like, I don’t want to make the first move, but if you make the first move, then maybe this is slightly different. But he doesn’t have that opportunity obviously, because he chooses to do something different instead.”
What are you hoping to see from Jamie’s kidnapping in the Found finale? Let us know in the comments section below.
Found, Series Finale, Thursday, May 15, 10/9c, NBC