By: Alex Tilton

Some spoilers ahead.

For those who haven’t seen season 1, Wednesday is a dark action/comedy Harry Potter clone aimed at young adults. Harry Potter wasn’t the first ‘wizard school’ series, it just happens to be the one that mushroomed into a freakish success and blotted out the sun. Regardless, Wednesday was a huge hit for Netflix and turned Jenna Ortega into a household name. I thought it was good, but not great.

Three years later the first half of second season has finally dropped. There was much joyful squealing among the fans, and some skeptical cynicism from me. Wednesday is probably their highest priority behind Stranger Things so it seemed reasonable to hope a good result, but it would take a strong will to resist the temptation to play it safe with a story designed to suck up to the squealing, obsessed, unpleasable fandom.

Thankfully they went the opposite way with it. Almost the first thing that happens in season 2 is Wednesday encountering her own (in universe) superfans, making it clear that she holds them in the deepest contempt, and promptly moving on. I appreciated that. But, is the show in general any good?

I’m giving it an A-. The story is good, as is the acting, the pacing and most of the writing, but very little has changed since season 1. Wednesday still thinks she knows better than everyone else because of her psychic visions, and she hurts a lot of feelings along her well-intentioned path of destruction. Her roommate Enid is still a boy crazy werewolf girl dealing with relationship issues and still frustrated over her complicated friendship with Wednesday. The other students at this ‘definitely-not-Hogwarts-inspired’ Nevermore Academy have their own side plots. The best one involves Bianca, the siren, who gets pressured by the new principal into using her mind control skills to raise money for the school. The worst one involves Wednesday’s brother Pugsley and his pet Zombie. 

My problem with this is the inconsistency. Season one kicks off with Wednesday dropping a bag of piranhas into a swimming pool, causing a student to get mutilated as revenge for bullying Pugsley. Her ‘punishment’ for this is to be expelled and sent to court ordered therapy. Ok. Fine. If those are the rules of this fictional universe we can roll with that. She gets threatened with expulsion all the time in season 1. It’s the all-purpose punishment for assault, kidnapping, stealing evidence, vandalism, breaking and entering, grave robbing etc… she doesn’t get caught for everything she does, but when she is caught, expulsion is always mentioned. In season 2 her brother Pugsley accidentally resurrects a flesh-eating zombie which starts killing people…and he gets an afternoon in detention stuffing envelopes.

The show does remember to provide an excuse for this; the new principal of Nevermore (Steve Buscemi) openly hates ‘normies’. But he’s also obsessed with keeping the school’s board of governors satisfied by raising money, which is hard to reconcile with assigning detention as a punishment for negligent manslaughter. 

::sigh::

Later on, for various reasons, Wednesday carries out a raid on the local asylum where many outcasts (anyone with superpowers) are being experimented on, and because of this the Zombie breaks out of its cell and kills six people; four disposable guards, the head doctor and a catatonic (but formerly evil) inmate. I realize that in TV logic it’s ok to do horrible things to bad people because they’re bad. But I would appreciate it if they set the bar just a little bit higher. The zombie’s first victim is the driver’s ed teacher whose only crime was to be mildly obnoxious.

I have some other complaints, while we’re at it. I wish Steve Buscemi’s character was written better. It works well enough as a ruthless, two-faced bureaucrat but I found myself rolling my eyes and making a little ‘get on with it’ gesture whenever he started talking. Pugsley’s character doesn’t have enough to do and his side plot is functional at best. Gomez doesn’t have much to do either, but he’s not trying to be a part of the main story so it doesn’t matter. Morticia and her mother have an interesting thing going on, and it works well because Wednesday herself is heavily tied into it. But as much as I appreciate the show giving the secondary characters a life of their own, a lot of it just isn’t interesting enough to justify the time they spend on it.

That being said, I enjoyed most of it. And I especially enjoy the fact that I can cancel my Netflix subscription (again) next month after the second half comes out. 

Image Source: Netflix.com