The Glass Dome episode 1 recap: Who's taken the missing girl?

The Glass Dome is a Swedish thriller on Netflix, created by bestselling crime author Camilla Läckberg.

It's a chilling story that follows a young criminologist called Lejla Ness (Léonie Vincent), who was kidnapped as a child and held prisoner in a glass dome. Here's everything that happened in episode 1...

We meet Lejla as a child. She walks into a shop and gets some cigarettes for her mum and sweets for herself. She walks home through the snow. But the door to her flat is unlocked. And then in a moment sure to make you jump out of your seat, she's suddenly grabbed by an attacker!

She wakes up trapped in a glass dome. She cries to be let out but gets no response. She studies her own reflection, and we then switch to a grown-up Lejla doing the same thing. Now living in America, she's introduced as a new resident lecturer and the title of her lecture is Unveiling the Psychology of Criminality: Exploring Motives, Patterns and Pathways. The man introducing her continues that she's researching the minds of predatory child abductors and what drives them. He says she brings a unique perspective as she herself was abducted as a child.

Lejla takes the stage and says that child abductors are not born monsters. "These people struggle wth complex emotional traumas. And one thing they all have in common is a highly unhealthy view of power and control."

Afterwards, she takes a phone call and is told Ann-Marie, her adopted mother, has died. The caller, her adopted father Valter, asks if she can come home. She books her flights.

Lejla returns to the village where she was snatched

In her car, we see Lejla driving through an icy wilderness before she reaches her destination, a remote Swedish village called Granas. She enters a house and she’s greeted warmly by Valter, her adoptive father. On the wall is a small picture of Lejla as a young girl, and she flashes back to the glass dome. Valter says he has his research on her disappearance still up on the wall, and she says shouldn’t he take it down? He replies that it’s not easy to let the case go as he didn't catch the attacker.

The pair go fishing and Valter asks if she remembers the first winter after she was adopted, and she fell into the water. He adds that there's a plan to drain the water due to the mine, and it’s something he's against. The location is spectacular.

When she looks in her bedroom mirror, she again gets a flashback to the glass dome, and she quickly pushes the mirror down. Her adopted dad gives her some stuff Anne-Marie kept about her childhood. He asks if she can say a few words at her funeral.

She looks through the stuff and the first thing she finds is an old newspaper cutting with the headline: "Missing girl found alive". There's a photo of the reunited family, and the article explains that her adopted father is a police commissioner.

Later, as she dreams, her thoughts flood back to her captivity, and she gets a vivid dream of being attacked in the present. She wakes up with a start.

In the morning, she heads into the village. She goes into a coffee shop and she acknowledges a man with a dog. She sits by the window, and another man, called Adde, says hello, and it's clear the pair knew each other a long time ago.

They talk about the funeral, and then he sits down and asks her how it’s going in America. She says it's going great, and then he talks about his family before a man knocks on the window and asks him if he's coming. The window man then comes in and, possibly in the world’s most insensitive chant, he starts singing "Girl in the box" at her! The idiot turns out to be called Jim. It’s all rather awkward, and the men leave.

Lejla drives over a bridge, and there’s a sign about explosions taking place, which is presumably to do with the draining of the river. She gets out of the car, and the explosions start. A man on the bridge hands her a leaflet about the protest over the mine.

Back at the house, Valter is voicing his frustration at the state of the funeral flowers while Lejla says hi to a man called Tomas, Valter’s brother. Valter is angry with Tomas for buying the rubbish flowers. Turns out Tomas has taken over from Valter as the police inspector. Hopefully he’s better at that than buying flowers.

Later, the funeral takes place. Lejla acknowledges another funeral goer, and we then see that person arguing with her partner, Said. Lejla looks out of the window and sees the couple continue their argument. Said drives off. In her bedroom, she talks with the woman called Louise, and Lejla reveals that she wasn't very close to her adoptive mother.

Louise says she hates living in Granas and that everyone is obsessed with the mine and they’ve egged Said’s car. Louise is furious. She then asks how America is going, and Lejla says really well. The woman’s daughter, Alicia, then walks in and catches her mum smoking. They agree to meet up the next day for a coffee.

Louise is found dead!

In the evening, Valter comes into Lejla’s bedroom and breaks down and says he's afraid that he got in the way of her and Ann-Marie. She comforts him, saying she had a mum already but she didn’t have a dad, and that’s what she wanted.

The next day, Lejla says goodbye to Valter and gets in her car. She goes to Louise’s house, and the door is open. She walks in and there's loud music playing. She walks through the vast house calling out for Louise. Something isn’t right.

She opens the bathroom door, and Louise is dead in a blood-filled bath! She screams and pulls Louise out of the bath before phoning her dad for help. She tells him Louise is dead and pleads with him to come to the house. He rushes over with Tomas.

Alicia is missing

Valter tries to go into the house, but Tomas tells Valter only the police can go inside, and he should know that. Tomas moves to the bathroom and inspects the bloody scene. Louise’s mother, we presume, Kristina, arrives, and Valter stops her from going into the house. Lejla asks where Alicia is, and Kristina says she doesn’t know. Lejla calls out her name, but there's no sign of Alicia.

The search begins in the woods for Alicia. They call out, but as darkness falls, there’s no sign of her. They continue to search with torches before eventually taking a break.
Tomas is told one of the volunteers has spotted something, and he heads over with an officer called Bjorn.

Valter talks to an old colleague at Louise’s house who says the police believe Alicia found her mother's body and ran away. She lets him look at the bloodied bathroom.
Tomas is at the entrance to the mine and tells Bjorn they need to treat Alicia's disappearance now as a crime, and they need to cordon off the scene. Lejla speaks to Said, who says if you don’t find a missing child in the first 48 hours, you have no chance.

But she says that's not always the case. Tomas arrives and asks Said to come with him. When he refuses, Tomas says either he comes or they make him come. Lejla asks what's happening, but Tomas brushes her off.

In her car, she calls Valter. He says they've found Alicia’s clothes and shoes at the mine in front of one of the entrances. "So, someone has taken her," she replies, and she believes history is repeating itself...