Alert: Missing Persons Unit – Season 2 Episode 1 “Bus 447” Recap & Review

Bus 447

Episode 1 of Alert: Missing Persons Unit season 2 starts with students getting on a bus. We meet Andrew, who is coming to the trip in hopes of bonding with his daughter Kayla. However, she feels embarrassed by him and focuses on her best friend.

They start taking selfies to mark the start of their field. Everything seems normal until a strange man covers his face with a mask and pulls a gun. Andrew tries to fight the man and gets thrown out of the bus and into a dark tunnel.

Elsewhere, Mike and Nikki moved into a new house. Jason, Nikki, and Sidney hold their morning Zoom meeting to catch up on their personal lives. Sidney is now in college, and Jason worries she is seeing someone. She refuses to tell her parents about the mysterious guy she is seeing. 

Later, at work, Nikki meets their new boss, Inspector Hollis Braun. He is concerned about Jason’s approach to cases and Kemi’s shamanism. He argues he is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and Nikki stands up for him and Kemi. Hollis promises to keep a close eye on the team and gives Nikki the keys to their new offices. 

Upon getting there, the team gets a call from the transit authority alerting them to the disappearance of a city bus. They rush to the tunnel where it was last seen and find an injured Andrew. He quickly explains what happened and is worried about Kayla and the other people on the bus. They also learn that someone intentionally tampered with the CCTV cameras at the tunnel. 

The team immediately starts looking for the motive behind the kidnapping. They decide to find out this; they need to find out more about each passenger on the bus, but it will take too long to get authorisation from the Transit Authority. In turn, Mike asks Jason to use a different method to get the list of passengers.

Jason threatens an officer from the Transit Authority to get his log ins. Unfortunately, the man in question used cash instead of transit key cards. The team realises they can’t track the bus or the passengers since their phones are off, and Nikki issues an amber alert.

A deeper look into all passengers gives them nothing, and they wonder when the ransom demand will come through.

Nikki interviews Andrew and gets a vague description of the perpetrator. Andrew regrets getting kicked out of the bus and is scared of losing Kayla. He just lost his wife to cancer and can’t afford to lose his daughter, too.

As they continue to work on the case, the bus is reportedly sighted, and the team rushes to the scene. In the meantime, Hollis and Nikki try to reach the families of the people on the bus. Nikki sets up a room to keep them around. She then talks to a student who skipped the school trip to find out more about the victims. The kid tells her about the fake Instagram handles most kids use to fool their parents. 

Kemi finds Kayla’s fake Instagram account and finds one of the selfies Kayla took that morning. However, the perpetrator is not captured in the photos. She argues they need to find a live feed from the camera when the images were taken to see if they can find a new clue. This is when Nikki asks Jason to contact one of his guys. 

Jason pays Wayne, an old friend from Afghanistan, to help. Wayne turns out to be a woman, and she is angry at Jason for not being there when she needed him. He was supposed to testify in a hacking case on her behalf, but he never showed up.

Now, Wayne is under house arrest and can’t access the internet. She is losing her mind and jumps at the offer when Jason explains she can help with the case. Nikki is surprised when Wayne arrives at the office, and she is a woman. She questions why Jason left out this information, and he explains that Wayne helped him a lot when he first learned their son was missing. 

Meanwhile, Hollis informs the team that City Hall has received a ransom demand. The perpetrators want the police to release John Maritz. Maritz is a fixer for the rich, and he pissed some influential people off. He is currently serving his 16-year sentence for wire-tapping and racketeering. The perpetrators want him released in the next four hours, or they start killing passengers.

Nikki and Hollis update the families and assure them they are doing everything possible. The families are scared after hearing about the ransom. To calm the families down, Nikki explains her situation with Keith. 

On the other hand, Mike and Jason pay Maritz a visit, but he is, as expected, playing clueless about the situation. Jason pretends to be set off when Maritz brings up Keith and distracts Maritz’s lawyer. He places a tracker in the lawyer’s bag and asks Wayne to track it.

At the same time, Wayne hacks into Kayla’s account and finds the live feed of the last photo in her account. The team is able to get a small glimpse of the perpetrator. Kemi finds C, who is trying to meditate to deal with his anxiety. She asks him to help identify the kidnapper.

We circle back to the bus, and the kidnapper is losing it. The driver uses this chance to try and get a message of help. Sadly, the kidnapper sees this and shoots the message board. He asks the driver to drive into a secluded warehouse and moves the hostages to a different location. 

In the meantime, Nikki keeps hitting bureaucratic walls from all sides as she tries to solve the case. Finally, C comes through and identifies the kidnapper, Baz Marsh. He was convicted of murder before, but it is unlikely he planned this elaborate scheme.

Jason and Mike visit Marsh’s last known address and discover he leased a commercial property. The evidence in Marsh’s house suggests he was paid to target the bus during the school field trip. They also find a phone recording them. The scene cuts to someone ordering someone to visit their friend and then destroying the burner phone he used. 

At the same time, Kemi finds a possible location the bus might have gone to based on the evidence collected so far. Mike and Jason rush to the location and decide not to wait for backup. Unfortunately, they find an empty bus and Marsh’s dead body.

With time running out, the new kidnapper kills the driver and sends the video to the police. He demands the release of Maritz in the next thirty minutes, or he will kill Kayla. The team uses the video to find the victims’ location. Thankfully, they find the container the passengers were being held in near a train station. They are lucky to save the rest of the passengers and reunite them with their families.

Unfortunately, Hollis was getting worried and convinced the mayor to release Maritz. His lawyer picks him up, and they are about to drive off when they get killed in a car bomb. Nonetheless, the police assure the public they will find the people responsible for this elaborate prison break and murder.

The Episode Review

We hoped that Alert: Missing Person Unit would redeem itself this season, but it seems we were wrong. The kidnapping storyline makes no sense. Why would influential people go through all these efforts to kill Maritz? They could have easily hired someone inside the penitentiary to take him out. 

That aside, this episode mentioned nothing about the show’s most significant plot, Keith’s case. What happened? We are extremely curious to find out more about this case and how everyone is dealing with the bombshell revealed in the season 1 finale.

However, it looks like everyone is somehow past this, and all is good. Sidney is in college, Nikki and Mike are thriving, and Jason enjoys his single life. Maybe the show will touch on Keith’s case later in the season.

The team has a new boss, Hollis, who is causing some friction as he has issues with how Nikki runs her team. He can’t understand why Nikki allows Kemi to perform shamanism rituals during a case, and we admit we also found this distracting in the last season.

The writers pushed Kemi’s spirituality to the point of disbelief in the first season. Thankfully, we didn’t see much of her rituals in this episode. It takes away from the seriousness of the case when it is overdone. 

There is also Jason and his law-breaking approach to solving cases. Hollis has made it clear that he will be watching him. Jason continues to do wild things like bringing in a hacker, threatening to shoot an officer, and the list continues. It is only a matter of time before it catches up with him, and we will wait to see how it goes.

Don’t get us wrong, we love Jason, but maybe he should ease up a little on breaking the law. One day, it will be less helpful and more catastrophic. Overall, season 2 didn’t start strong, but we will stick around.