I remember, a mere month ago, when I surprised even myself by finding the first half of “Wednesday” season two a bit more…. enjoyable? Buoyant? Than the first. Sure, the season, like so many of Netflix’s recent output, was split into two—a convenient gambit to help obsessive streaming subscribers keep their membership for an extra month, rather than binge and purge their accounts—but those first four episodes at least offered a bit more for the extended Addams family to do, introduced some neat supporting characters (like Steve Buscemi‘s sniveling headmaster Barry Dort), and offered the promise of more Jenna Ortega as the plucky, bloodthirsty detective take on Wednesday Addams that showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have gifted us with.
But with the second half now out and about, I can safely say the season, as a whole, feels like a damp squib. In its zeal to make each half of the season feel like its own complete arc, Part I saw fit to close out so many of its more interesting dangling plot threads, and close out some of its biggest bids at stunt casting (bye bye, Thandiwe Newton; sayonara, Christina Ricci). What’s left in Part Two, unfortunately, is, barring one episode, a snoozefest of languid pacing, obnoxious lore changes, and the kind of awkward pacing that leaves the show pinballing between spooky (complimentary) and ooky (derogatory).
The half-season begins with Wednesday in a kind of faux-afterlife dreamstate, after dreambot-slash-Hyde Tyler (Hunter Doohan) threw her out of the window at Willow Hill Asylum, following his murder of Ricci’s Laurel and his subsequent escape. There, she’s greeted by a familiar face from last season: Season 1 villain Larissa Weems (Gwendoline Christie), former principal of Nevermore and primary antagonist. Turns out she’s “13th cousins” with Wednesday, so by blood relation she’s the girl’s new spirit guide, serving both as angel/devil on the shoulder and—for all you second-screen girlies out there—a nice, clean delivery system for ‘previously on’ exposition. With her help, Wednesday hopes to regain her psychic powers and solve the lingering mystery of werewolf bestie Enid’s (Emma Myers) prophesied demise. (To say nothing of the new mysteries that escalate this season, like the true identity of Pugsley’s [Isaac Ordonez] zombified corpse Slurp.)
But despite Part Two trying a sort of hard reset, bringing background mysteries to the forefront while closing the book on so many of Part One’s threads, “Wednesday” still struggles to feel cohesive. Perhaps that’s down to the still-sprawling cast of characters that still can’t quite find things to do; Billie Piper‘s music teacher feels wasted outside of a few bits of advice to Enid, while Heather Matarazzo’s reveal in Part One as a partial mastermind to the goings-on of Willow Hill gets dropped like a bad habit. Instead, we focus so much more on Dort’s machinations at the school, Slurp’s growing sentience as he feasts on brain after brain, and Wednesday’s ongoing efforts to help Enid, despite her own outward disdain for her roomie.
It’s this latter part that works best this season; the sixth (or third? who cares) episode, without revealing the mechanics of it, offers both Ortega and Myers a chance to spread their wings, modulating their performances around one another in ways that impressively mimic the other. Even Evie Templeton grows ever more endearing as Wednesday’s wide-eyed, obsessive fan Agnes, whose adulation of the young Addams would put the protagonist of this year’s “Lurker” to shame. The production still feels sharp, from the costumes to the production design of Nevermore, and director Tim Burton (alongside “D.E.B.S.” stalwart Angela Robinson) directs the episodes with a welcome competence.
But competence is all we really get, and it’s that kind of baseline chugging through the narrative that leaves “Wednesday” Season Two Part Two Point Five lurching more than, well, Lurch (Joonas Suotomo). The fifty-minute-long episodes flit mercilessly from one subplot to another so fast your head will spin, to the point where it becomes hard to keep track of each character’s relation to one another, how this and that cameo (you’ll know the one) ties into Wednesday’s broader journey, and exactly why each new reveal of familial relation or hidden past is even necessary.
The rest of the Addams family, so loudly integrated into the first half of the season, gets so little to do in this chunk; Pugsley mostly serves the back burner of Slurp’s storyline, and Catherine Zeta-Jones‘ Morticia and Joanna Lumley‘s Grandmama Hester mostly purr their way through a creaky gala episode that mostly serves as an excuse to try to replicate last season’s viral dance moment. (Heaven, or Hell considering this group, knows if it’ll work this time.) Luis Guzman mostly sits on the sidelines as Gomez, and praise Beelzebub we don’t get more of Fred Armisen‘s Uncle Fester this round.
“Wednesday” is a frustrating watch for these reasons and more; the role is a perfect one for Ortega’s perfectly calibrated comic intensity, and Burton gives us glimmers of the kind of Addams Family film he’d have directed had he not given the reins to Barry Sonnenfeld in the ’90s. But Gough and Millar bloat this series with so many supporting characters, tacked-on anticlimaxes, and tossed-off bids for the TikTok crowd, that it’s hard to shake the feeling that you should be watching “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” instead. Wednesday so prides herself on being unexpected, of zigging where a normie would zag; it’s a shame, then, that “Wednesday” the show just can’t seem to surprise.
All four episodes screened for review. Currently streaming on Netflix.