Abandoned Review – This realistic mystery makes for a wild, winding TV ride | television

DDid you know your surname when you were five years old? The more I thought about it, the harder it became to answer the question. Most of us would be lucky enough that it wouldn’t matter – parents or guardians were always willing to take care of those details. But for Ramon, Elvira, and Ricard, this was a very real problem. Their family name was a mystery. Over the course of four episodes, this compelling documentary series shows and tells us what this absence really means.

The three brothers were found by a station guard while wandering around the Estació de França area of ​​Barcelona in 1984. They had no luggage or identification. The eldest (Ramon) was five years old. They were led there by a man they knew only as Dennis. He left, ostensibly to buy them sweets, and never returned. No adult came forward to claim them, so they found themselves in the Spanish child welfare system.

At this point, the mystery deepens. As one caregiver recalled, the children who came into her orbit were usually clearly neglected, undernourished, or otherwise deprived. This trio was the opposite: healthy, well-dressed, and articulate for their age. However, it was also a closed book in terms of concrete information. This was more suspicious. As Ramon later suggested: “I think our parents indoctrinated us so we wouldn’t share information.”

When the children met adoptive parents Louis and Marissa, they finally got lucky. Not only were they able to stay together, but they were soon legally adopted and enjoyed a happy, loving childhood. But questions about their background remained, and when Elvira was in the process of starting a family of her own, she took a DNA test and decided to start exploring the results.

The series seems a bit choppy at times. A wave of emotion, confusion, startling new information, threads and blind alleys, all jostling for space. This chaos is likely a directorial choice – after all, the events do not unfold in a linear fashion, but instead get bogged down in a deluge of incomplete but powerful memories. As the eldest son, Ramon was key to this process. He hunted his subconscious and shapes from his past began to take shape. Toy store with a crocodile in the window. Garden with fountain. An elderly woman in a bad mood, dressed in black. A large cup of warm milk. These things make the story seem strangely universal: we all have these kinds of connections—vague, bordering on random, but strangely specific and meaningful to us. However, Ramon also remembers picking up a gun, firing it, and seeing sparks dancing on the stone steps where the bullet struck. This is somewhat less universal. But, as hinted before, there must be a reason why these children find themselves alone at the railway station.

Were their parents involved in organized crime? As it turns out, it’s not that simple. Elvira assembles a team of volunteer investigators and genealogists, at which point the narrative’s momentum threatens to give way under a constant wave of public records, emails, and WhatsApp messages. But it never happens, partly because the story at its core is so unique, involving several European countries, a post office robbery, a stolen identity, and a gang calling themselves the Golden Bandits of Andalusia. But it is mainly due to the warmth provided by the bond between siblings and the flow of revelations that begin to make sense of their lives. Soon, through grainy but charming images, we meet the parents: Ramon Sr. and Rosario, Bonnie and Clyde in real life, but in over their heads and seemingly paying a heavy price.

At times, Abandoned feels like a true crime series. There’s a certain open ending to it: as was the case with series like Make a Murderer, it’s easy to imagine meeting this family again, as new truths have emerged as a result of the show’s existence. While many of the journalists involved (including Giles Tremlett of The Guardian, who was part of the investigations) generally suspected the deaths of Ramon Sr. and Rosario, the case was never officially closed.

In any case, it is clear that the indomitable Elvira has no intention of stopping. Ultimately, what the series makes evocatively clear is that the quest itself is the goal. Linking places with photographs and dates with half-forgotten memories is in itself a reflexive and clarifying process. The three siblings lost something profound in 1984 and are now engaged in an ongoing process of retrieval. Seeing them messing around while recreating their childhood photos on the playground illustrates their motivations. They make memories that they can actually remember. They construct identities. “I wanted to know if they loved me,” Elvira says. The trio will probably never learn all about their parents and their precise motives for leaving them nameless at the railway station. But they won’t stop trying.