In a way, that’s the inciting incident of the show, because it (possibly) directly leads to the release of Michael Frost (Landon Valentin), a boy who was abducted three years ago and presumed dead along with his sister Felicia. Now he’s stumbling out of the woods in Fairhaven, PA, malnourished and nearly blind from being kept in the dark so long. What really happened to Michael, and could his sister still be alive? Those are the big questions.
From here, the show introduces the various law-enforcement characters on search-and-rescue duty: Fairhaven PD Chief Ellison (Bill Camp), a detective named Nathan Pollack (Gary Carr), FBI Special Agent in Charge Alexandra Quinn (Poorna Jagannathan), and, most notably, Jonah Lynn (Liev Schreiber), Nocturne’s ostensible main character. Jonah is a former soldier who became a homicide detective, but he’s retired to the quiet town of Fairhaven. Long story short: He and his alcoholic partner, Sam Mendel (Gabe Fazio), managed to take Jurek down—but they never found the missing Frost kids and thus couldn’t make the link despite the obvious timing. Worse, Sam seemingly took his own life after failing to solve the (likely Jurek-related) disappearance of his wife, Rebecca, an event that occurred just weeks after Sam and Jonah made their big arrest.
Jonah has obviously been haunted by the loss of Sam and the unsolved Rebecca case, not to mention his promise to Michael and Felicia’s mother Ida (Chrissy Metz) that he’d find her kids, plus an entirely separate trauma: He lost his own wife and child in an accident. You know who else is dealing with a lot of baggage? Sam’s daughter, FBI Agent Saga Bauer (Zazie Beetz). Saga (what a name!) is also a sort of surrogate daughter to Jonah, and it’s obvious that the two will be working together on the Felicia Frost case before long. Much of these first two episodes is dedicated to setting that up, in addition to some side dynamics: the strange friendship between Karl and Jurek, or the tentative new buddy-cop dynamic between Jonah and Quinn.
Many of the relationships on Nocturne have a lived-in feel so far; you get the sense that these people grew up together and still care for one another, no matter how much some of them want to escape their shared past. There’s a slight dearth of warmth and humor, though, even given the dark subject matter. The aforementioned Ingelsby series allow you to bond with their protagonists almost immediately, but this show keeps some of its characters at arm’s length. Jonah is a bit too stoic and inscrutable to really love so far, for example, even if his motivations mostly seem clear (though he seems to be keeping some secret about lying in court to get Jurek put away, which is already giving me unpleasant flashbacks to recapping Cape Fear). There’s room for complexity with some of the characters, like the easily manipulated Karl and the hardened Saga, but it’s not quite there yet.
“For Such A Time As This” has a clear narrative objective: Get Saga directly involved with the case. And sure enough, by the end, she has convinced both Agent Quinn and Jonah to let her enter the RHU undercover to get close to Jurek and “find the messenger” collaborating with him. This is not a great idea, per se, especially because Michael deliriously mentioned seeing Rebecca, Saga’s missing stepmom, while in captivity. But that only makes her more invested. Her new name will be Esther Dujardin, and she’ll be drawing from her own mother to play a violent schizophrenic.
All of this sounds very promising for future weeks, though it feels a bit drawn-out: These two episodes contain a few circular conversations, like Saga taking to multiple people individually about Jonah and vice versa—or Jonah consulting multiple potential sources of information, like a bus driver who once worked at Riverside, only to turn up nothing concrete on Jurek’s communication system. Jonah’s investigation into Sally Gifford, Jurek’s day nurse who hasn’t come into work for three weeks, also raises questions without promising much payoff in the near future.
Still, there’s plenty of material to work with here, especially now that Saga is locked up with the man at least indirectly responsible for the loss of her father and stepmother. Once Nocturne tightens up the pacing a tad and gets to what it’s really about, we could have another really solid small-town crime drama on our hands—no new setting necessary.
Stray observations
- • I love Bill Camp, so I’m curious what role the chief will play. So far, he brings a nice, slightly warmer energy than most of the cast, but he’s not keen to see Jonah reopen any local wounds by chatting about Jurek Walter again.
- • Karl’s favorite song is “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons? Seriously? Hard not to laugh at that one, but not sure it was meant to be funny. I need a bit more insight into Karl’s whole deal.
- • Some more humor, if you can call it that: Quinn requests an Americano with warm oat milk on the side—I guess because she’s an out-of-touch city-dweller—and the waitress suggests “a drip with milk from a cow” instead. A very Yellowstone type joke.
- • Jurek gets nurse Gary in trouble by planting a note on him, thereby saving Karl from possible jailtime. It’s good manipulation, I suppose, but is it really enough to get Karl to keep doing his bidding? Again, I need to understand Karl better for some of these stakes to work.
- • Supposedly Saga will get back her secret micro-transmitter contained within a cross after intake, because it’s for “religious reasons.” But RHU does things their way, so it seems like a long shot. Maybe that cover story (that she set fire to a ward room with staff inside) was a little too intense.
- • Not quite sure what to make of those symbols glimpsed simultaneously by Jonah and Saga in the closing moments of episode two. I guess the symbol on the trees is just meant to indicate that Jurek and/or his associate is definitely behind the Giffords’ disappearance, and that he doesn’t mind people knowing it.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.