For the show Gone, all I heard about it initially was that it was about an ex-victim who survived an abduction and was now helping find new abductees. Based on that description, it was a coin toss for my prediction, but I had to err on the downside and predict cancellation. Now that I’ve seen the first episode, the coin toss was probably the right metaphor.

The show is a bit different than I imagined. The main character is a girl named Kick…she was abducted and held by a predator for five years, and given a new name. When she’s rescued in flashback at the start of the episode, the FBI swoops in to save her, arrest the guy pretending to be her dad, and her mom runs upstairs and commits suicide. Kick isn’t the girl who was abducted anymore, or the girl from before the abduction, so she creates a new name aka Kick. Fast-forward 15 years and she’s a hard-core fighting machine. She teaches self-defense, is an expert marksman with a handgun, and practices picking locks for fun just to ensure she’s never locked in anywhere again. The old FBI agent who rescued her comes knocking, asking her to join a task force that hunts abductees, and the first case is a missing little girl. The agent thinks that Kick can help because she knows how predators think. She helps them figure out a bunch of stuff that the task team doesn’t know how to instinctively figure out on their own, and they’re off and running. Along for the ride is a young FBI agent who isn’t sure about Kick, another female FBI agent who was part of the original team that rescued Kick, and a friend of Kick’s, another abduction survivor who is also a hacker. There are lots of other people running around but mainly it’s the five of them.

Let’s see…a fast turn-around team that specializes in missing people aka people who are “gone”. Wait…wasn’t there another show about missing persons? No, not the one based on 1-800-Missing with the girl with the visions but the FBI task team that specialized in missing persons. You know, “Without a Trace”?

When the EP started, I had some high hopes. The main character, Kick, is played by Leven Rambin, and she is great. She looked familiar, but was having trouble placing her…maybe The Tomorrow People, I thought, while perusing IMDB until I saw her listed as the girlfriend Riley back in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I like her, I’d watch. Plus I like her character, some interesting threads there.

The old FBI agent is played by a very muted Chris Noth…I hated him as Mr. Big on Sex and the City, loved him back in the day on Law & Order. Doesn’t have a lot to do in the EP, but he’s a comfortable presence. Meanwhile, the young FBI agent, Bishop, is played by Danny Pino aka Scotty Valens from Cold Case that I’ve been binging. He’s usually decent, occasionally not, but again, another comfortable presence. And no hint of the sliminess / fast-shaking from the Cold Case character, so a more honorable character to like. He’s got the tortured past that every character must have, even if we don’t find out what it is in this episode. And sure, he’s likely to be a love interest for Kick over the longer term.

What I found a bit odd was that another Cold Case alumni, Tracie Thoms, aka Kat Miller plays the extra FBI agent that helped rescue Kick back in the day. She doesn’t have much to do in EP1, just like Noth, but another comfortable presence. Equally, Andy Mientus doesn’t have much to do as Kick’s fellow survivor, aka hacker James, and I didn’t recognize him from his role of villain-of-the-week on Flash (as the Pied Piper). Okay, nothing to write home about.

And the lack of anything to write home about is part of the problem. The EP was okay, but I didn’t feel there was a lot of oomph going on outside of a sparring session early on. So I was on the fence about “renewal” or not. Except there’s a small glitch in the matrix. The show came up on my radar as a supposedly new show, but it turns out it’s an OLD show. It was on in 2017-18, lasted a single season, and was *cough, cough* gone.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, easy to know how that one comes out. But the quirk in the matrix made me try to recreate the feed that gave me the show in the first place. Why would it tell me about a 2-year old show that is already gone?

I found another show, a TV series, for 2019 listed as in development. Not likely it. Another one was about a man teleporting around the earth, but it’s a movie, not a TV show. And then I found a 2018-19 show that was originally called Gone and was renamed Save Me, about a man looking for his missing daughter. None of them interest me.

So I’ll take my quirk and predict it will be cancelled (since it already was). Now I just have to decide if I’ll watch the other 11 EPs for a dead series.