New Zealand crime thriller The Gone returns for a second season – with more missing Irish tourists.
This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here.
Theo Richter is standing in a hut deep in the New Zealand bush, staring out the window. An animal skeleton lies next to his feet, the building peppered with bullet holes. The Irish detective points out a blood stain on a window frame to his colleague Diana Huia. “Looks like the only way out,” he growls out the window, even though the detectives came in two different doors. The camera pulls back to reveal acres of native bush in front of them. “She’s out there,” Richter broods, no doubt adding every New Zealand tree to his list of internal demons.
Welcome back to the murderous new season of The Gone, the award-winning Irish-New Zealand crime thriller that returned to TVNZ this week. In 2023, The Gone won five gongs at the NZTV Awards, including best drama, and screened in Aotearoa, Ireland and the UK. The first season followed the investigation into two Irish tourists who went missing from the fictional New Zealand town of Mount Affinity, a case that echoed another local unsolved crime from 17 years earlier.
This season? More Irish visitors go missing. Which is why Detective Richter (Grey’s Anatomy’s Richard Flood) hasn’t left the country yet, having arrived in season one to assist DS Huia (Acushla-Tara Kupe) with finding the young tourists. The search for Sinead and Ronan also drew the interest of Irish investigative journalist Aileen Ryan, who, as the new season begins, has herself gone missing after arranging to meet a contact about the unsolved “goat man” murders from years ago.
The first episode of season two delivers the same slow, moody murder mystery that feels like a cross between One Lane Bridge and The Brokenwood Mysteries. The heavy atmosphere is captured in beautiful, sweeping shots of a landscape covered in dense forest and low, looming clouds, and the pace remains unhurried. The dialogue can be a little clunky, but Kupe gives another strong performance as Diana, and is once again surrounded by a talented supporting cast that includes Vanessa Rare, Miriama Smith, Michelle Fairey and Matt Whelan.
On the face of it, The Gone is a standard crime drama that follows two detectives as they piece together an unusual disappearance. One is a brooding but brilliant loner who’s hiding many secrets, the other a cop returning home to confront the ghosts of her past. The troubled detective has become a cliched trope in crime drama – think Broadchurch, Rebus, True Detective, Strike, Unforgotten – and The Gone’s lead characters tread a familiar path worn with sadness, secrets and long stares into the distance.
But what elevates The Gone are the unique New Zealand stories woven throughout. This is a rural community where hurt runs generations deep, and storylines about big business acquiring Māori land and the legacy of colonialism make the show feel current and relevant. The trouble is that these secondary storylines are more interesting than the disappearances the show hinges on, and the characters involved – like Buster (Wayne Hapi) and Rare’s Wiki – are more complex and richly-drawn than the detectives at the helm of the show.
In fact, I found myself wishing that The Gone could ditch the Irish connection altogether, and simply be a thriller about a young Māori detective returning to her home town. This kind of multi-country production is becoming more common as television gets harder to fund, but the collaboration waters down The Gone from being a dynamic, challenging thriller that tells stories only we can tell. In a world where troubled detectives are a dime a dozen, is The Gone selling itself short?
The Gone screens on Tuesdays on TVNZ1 at 8.30pm and streams on TVNZ+.
