FOUND Post-Mortem: Nkechi Okoro Carroll Breaks Down Gabi’s New World Order

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season premiere of FOUND.]

FOUND ended its first season with Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) on the run with a kidnapped Lacey (Gabrielle Walsh)—and Gabi’s (Shanola Hampton) carefully constructed facade crumbling around her.

In the season 2 premiere, “Missing While Bait,” Gabi was forced to confess to Trent (Brett Dalton) that Lacey’s abduction was retaliation for holding him as her prisoner. 

“Sir took Lacey as payback for what I did, for what I have been doing for the last nine months,” she explained.

“It has always been the plan to end [season 1] with [Sir] getting out,” FOUND creator Nkechi Okoro Carroll tells Give Me My Remote. “We all knew that if we do this, we have to come out guns blazing in season 2. My co-showrunners and I, we talked about it a lot, so by the time I got into the writers’ room with the writers, it was kind of like, ‘Here’s what we’re doing. The first five episodes are gangbusters, and then we could taper it off a little bit and then get through our midseason point, which is the end of the chapter. But then we never let our foot off the gas.’”

“But in the writers’ room, they kept coming up with stuff and I was like, ‘Okay, we’re just going to keep our foot on the gas [for all of chapter 1]? Oh, we’re going into chapter 2 with our foot on the gas?’” she continues. “Everyone’s been so great, and the cast has brought it, too, which just inspired us to be like, ‘Okay, we actually don’t need to slow down at all. This is an opportunity.’ And we just kept it going.”

With Gabi’s secret now out to everyone who is close to her, it also meant that the familial dynamic of M&A would have to change. 

“We had this beautiful group of people in season 1, who Gabi had such a phenomenal impact on their life, right?” Carroll says. “She taught them how to turn their trauma into purpose, and how to make that into a superpower. It was such a nontraditional family, that even as the writers, we aspired to be part of—even though we, as the writers, knew something about Gabi the team didn’t know.” 

“Now, part of that authentic, non-traditional family dynamic is what do you do when a family member you love, that truthfully you credit with keeping you alive, has done something unforgivable?” she continues. “And that was just a huge journey we were all interested in taking because each of our characters take it in a very different way, depending on where their mind is, what their life experience has been… Are you someone who forms attachments very quickly but if they break, it’s really hard to reform that? Or are you someone who it’s hard to form attachments, but once you do, it’s done? There’s nothing you can do they won’t forgive you for.”

In the aftermath of this reveal, it will impact even the “normal” cases M&A investigates this season.

“[There are moments] they’re downloading, bouncing [theories] off each other—it’s almost like they go into that autopilot,” Carroll teases. “And then they get a speed bump because all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, this isn’t the M&A of old.’ They’ve got hurdles they have to get over. And it’s popping up at inopportune times in the middle of the cases. [It has] just made it more exciting for us to tell those stories. It’s like sitting down to Christmas dinner with your family…’Okay, we’re not going to be able to get through this meal without dealing with this.’ That’s what M&A finds themselves dealing with.”

The writers also had a tricky task in season 2: Find a way to have Gabi interact with Sir, despite him being on the run. In the premiere, Gabi had a vision of Sir; later, the duo connected over the phone. 

How they collide later in the season “is not formulaic,” Carroll promises. “It is a point in the writers’ room to be very organic with the diversity of interactions, [between] when the interactions happen and how they happen.” 

“And what I would say is, God bless my writers’ room,” she continues. “Because they met the challenge of me being like, ‘Part of the magic of the show is their connection. So how do we make it happen? How do we come up with smart ways to keep this Gabi and Sir tension we love so much [alive]?’…I’m excited to see fans’ reactions to a couple of these moments.”

FOUND, Season Premiere, Thursday, October 3, 10/9c, NBC

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