Some spoilers follow. First off, I'm giving this a 7 out 10 largely due to the remarkable performance of Jodi Comer as Ivy Moxam, an emotionally and physically scarred abduction survivor who has been missing and held captive for 13 years. Comer is outstanding in every other role I've ever seen her in and she's no less than amazing here, too. Seeing her makes this worth watching, along with having a compelling thriller/drama premise that's truly interesting. However, the whole thing overall has a lot of problems due to the writing/plotting/characterizations. Let's dive in. The series starts well, thankfully, with a bang - beginning with a wide opening shot on a sunny, quiet suburban road before zeroing in on a pleasant red front door...moments later the door is opened timidly by a bedraggled looking young woman in a baggy housedress and bare feet. She steps outside, pauses for a moment, and then sprints down the street in terror until she finds a payphone and dials the police. We learn she is Ivy Moxam, a kidnapping victim snatched off the street while she was skipping school at age 13, now 26. DNA tests confirm her identity and her family is contacted. This is where the writing on this miniseries begins to go haywire and never recovers. Enter police detectives Elliot Carne (Richard Rankin) and Lisa Merchant (Valene Kane) who decide based on zero theory to begin grilling new found Ivy like she's a terror suspect while she cowers and shakes in nothing but a paper jumpsuit given to her by the physical evidence team who have stripped, swabbed and internally examined her with not an ounce of sensitivity or even her family liaison officer present. It's unfathomable that Det Merchant immediately then takes the stance that Ivy is guilty of some crime (what would that even be at this moment?) and Det Carne seems creepily attracted to Ivy, even asking her to call him Elliot. It's a bizarre, unsettling characterization. Ivy is then released to her tearful parents, Christina (played by Natasha Little) and Angus (played by Stuart Graham). Her little sister Emma, now all grown up (Catherine Rose Morley) and Emma's fiance, Craig (Joe Layton), are also on hand for the reunion. No one wants to tell Ivy her parents' marriage has been fractured (although not formally divorced) in the 13 years she's been missing, so her dad reluctantly leaves his assistant turned mistress to move back into the family home. Nearly everyone in the house seems resentful Ivy has returned a broken woman full of nervous ticks, stunted emotional development and an aversion to being touched. Her father even whines that his own daughter won't let him near her, like it's all about him. It's annoying to see the characters worry more about what they're getting from Ivy than to be heart broken over what she must have endured to make her this way. Emma starts to rebond with her sister, only to have her fiance, who until now has been shown to be a sensitive, loving and mature man, start whining about how he's gotten less attention in the last week and storm out of the house. Why??? Would a normal man ditch his beloved fiance when she spends a few days focusing solely on the traumatized sister she thought was dead? No. It's ludicrous. Ivy then also makes contact with one of her closest childhood friends, Tim (Anuerin Brand), who turned into her first puppy love mere months before her abduction. He pined for years and years for her, suffering a great deal of emotional distress over her loss, only to get his life together just a few years ago and recently marry. He doesn't want to tell Ivy he's married because he realizes quickly he still harbors feelings for her and that she is so incredibly fragile. Of course, because the writer of this series seems to hate Ivy, she later finds out in the most hurtful and humiliating way possible, because why let this poor suffering woman have anything, right? There's also Ivy's best female friend, Eloise (Eleanor Wyld) who convinced her to ditch school on that fateful day, but never showed for the rendezvous at a local arcade because she got a last minute better offer of a day out with someone else. Strangely, no one seems to harbor any resentment towards Eloise, who has turned into an aging party girl drunk, not even Ivy or Ivy's family, which is baffling. I mean, the fact Eloise wasn't there is the reason Ivy was wandering around alone with her headphones at full volume, which gave the kidnapper his opportunity in the first place. But, nope, no one seems to care. In the midst of all this, the kidnapper, who is still at large, snatches another girl (it's never explained how police know it's Ivy's abductor behind it from the first, they just announce it) and a long dead, decomposed body is found hidden in the basement where Ivy was initially kept exclusively for years. The police jump right to holding Ivy complicit for both these things somehow (again, huh?) and at one point they even drag this heavily traumatized woman off in handcuffs to interrogate her yet again. They have to be shown, once more, that Ivy is a victim in all this incapable of being held responsible for anything over the last 13 years (this has to be proved about 100 times in the 5 episodes like the writer's favorite hobby is victim blaming). Oh, and did I mention Det Carne also breaks into the offices of the psychiatrist treating Ivy to read all her confidential therapy files? Nothing illegal, unethical or immoral about that...And when he reads how Ivy's been feeling so alone, he jumps to another conclusion that she must have formed a genuine relationship with her abductor. A police officer doesn't understand psychological trauma and lack of ability to consent in such a situation? Also, I forgot to mention, in episode 1, Ivy makes a slightly cryptic statement to her family liaison officer which clearly implies she was pregnant at some point by her abductor and the officer neither asks her to elaborate, nor mentions it to the investigative team, which is absurd. Ivy is unclear and it could easily be possible she has a child or children still with her captor and no one follows up, which is really negligent police work, am I wrong? It turns out in the last episode her kidnapper forced her to become pregnant once and she miscarried, but this is something brought to light only after she is re-kidnapped during a botched police operation meant to catch the perpetrator and her abuser is once more holding her hostage and talking to her about it, so I suppose no one in the police ever cared about it. In the conclusion the second kidnapped girl is set free unharmed and Ivy escapes once more with zero help from police. Her kidnapper perishes and she ends looking even more destroyed than ever. My final thought is, it's definitely worth a watch, but you will come away hating more than half the characters for how poorly they are written.
Thirteen
(2016)
Intriguing premise hurt by bad writing and poor plotting, but still watchable
15 April 2021
Warning: Spoilers