Alert Missing Persons Unit Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: Badge #41870

The third season of Fox’s ‘Alert: Missing Persons Unit’ presents the most challenging case for the team in its second episode when one of them becomes the victim. The previous episode saw the MPU dealing with the disappearance of a women’s rowing team, and one of the members turned out to be the daughter of Charles McGannon. Nikki’s involvement with the Irish mobster was highlighted once again in this episode, and by the end, it seemed that perhaps she had been too close to the fire and should keep her distance from McGannon. In this episode, all the worst fears of the team come true when she is kidnapped. SPOILERS AHEAD.

A Blast From the Past Comes Knocking at Nikki’s Door

This episode of ‘Alert’ opens with a woman in prison. Raina Stefanos has served her sentence and is ready to taste freedom as she has been granted parole. One would think that the time in prison has taught her a lesson, and she will try to do better now. Instead, we find her planning her next crime as she gets everything she needs to kidnap a person. Her target turns out to be Nikki Batista. Raina tracks down Nikki, hides in her car, sedates her, burns her car at the edge of the town, and then drives away in another car with Nikki in the trunk. A few hours later, Chief Inspector Houston shows up at the officer and asks about Nikki.

He tells the team that Raina Stefanos was put in prison by Nikki, who also shot her brother to death. The siblings worked as freelancers and did whatever their employer asked of them. Catching Raina fast-tracked Nikki’s career by miles, but it also left Raina angry at her about her brother’s death. When Raina got out of prison on parole, Houston should have been notified, but someone’s complacency cost them. It is suspected that Raina might come after Nikki for revenge, and he wants to make sure she is alright. The sudden mention of her being in danger sets off all alarms, especially as everyone notices that Nikki is unusually late.

Soon enough, it is confirmed that no one has heard from Nikki in the past hour or so and that Raina has, in fact, kidnapped her. Looking into the suspect’s history, it is revealed that Raina had a girlfriend who is also out on parole. They believe that the women might have planned this together, so the team tracks down the girlfriend’s address. Sure enough, Raina is found there, but Nikki is nowhere to be seen. Before this, Raina was almost caught with Nikki in her trunk when she was stopped by a cop who noticed her broken taillight. It turned out that Nikki was the one who broke it to catch someone’s attention and get help. While Raina shot the cop (though not fatally) and ran away, Nikki managed to drop a clue that would throw more light on her situation.

Nikki’s Kidnapping Points to a Familiar Culprit

With Raina in custody, Jason and Mike interrogate her to find out where she kept Nikki. They know that she probably didn’t kill her because if she wanted to, she would have done it in the car itself and not taken the trouble to kidnap her and ride around the town with the risk of getting caught. While Mike finds himself spiraling as he worries about his wife’s safety, Jason comes up with a plan to make Raina spill all the beans. When she refuses to budge from her position, Jason tells her all the parole violations that her girlfriend has committed and how she will be sent to the darkest prison cells if Raina doesn’t tell them about Nikki.

Scared for the safety of the woman she loves, Raina confesses that she did kidnap Nikki, but it wasn’t for herself. Some time ago, a lawyer reached out to her and told her that he would get her out on parole and also give her half a million dollars and a clean passport for her and her girlfriend so they could permanently leave the country. In return, she had to do a job for his employer. She had to kidnap Nikki, and she did it gladly to get her revenge on the cop. While she claims she didn’t know who hired her, she does give Jason a clue. When she met with the man who was supposed to give Nikki to her, and he paid her, she noticed a tattoo on his wrist, which looked like a Celtic knot. Jason immediately recognizes it as Charles McGannon.

In the last episode, after Nikki and her team found McGannon’s daughter, Jason and Mike warned him to stay away from her. However, a federal agency that had been looking into McGannon approached Nikki and wanted her help putting him away for good. Having been in contact with the mobster for so long, she had been stashing evidence that would work as insurance in case something went wrong. Someone tipped off McGannon about Nikki’s collaboration with the authorities, and so he decided to get rid of her for good. Houston reveals that the agency had been keeping tabs on McGannon by putting a tracking device on his car. Through it, they track down the last suspicious location of his car, and it turns out to be in the middle of a forest.

Nikki’s Tragic Fate Shakes the MPU

Jason and Mike drive down to the location where they hope to find Nikki, but all they find is her dead body in a shallow grave. Jason is the first one to see it, as he notices her wedding ring, but her death is soon confirmed as the rest of the team arrives, and she is taken away in a body bag. Her death marks a dark day for the unit, as everyone is shocked and in disbelief about what has transpired. Mike is utterly heartbroken, but he also has revenge on his mind. With the money and connections that McGannon has, Mike doesn’t want to take the chance to let him get away with killing his wife, so he kidnaps the mobster and takes him to the same spot where Nikki’s body was found. He is on the verge of killing the man when Jason shows up and stops him from taking the law into his own hands.

Meanwhile, Kemi and Helen look into a key that they believe Nikki deliberately left behind in her car during her kidnapping. As they look into the CCTV footage of the time of her kidnapping, Kemi notices that they haven’t paid attention to where Nikki is coming from. A closer look reveals that she was coming from a place where she had a secret locker all these years. Nikki previously left a hint for the same when she used the broken taillight to get a cop’s attention and threw a receipt, which directed the team to the site of her kidnapping.

The key corresponds to that locker, inside which the team finds all the evidence that their captain had been collecting all these years. They also find a letter inside it, which she had written keeping in mind the event of her death. It is a goodbye letter to her family and loved ones, which leaves everyone in tears. The episode ends with everyone attending Nikki’s funeral and her name being engraved on the wall with the others who fell in the line of duty.