By: Alex Tilton

After waiting three and a half years we finally have Carnival Row Season 2. But the wait was worth it. Season 2 lived up to my hopes, with a few small-ish problems along the way. I leave a satisfied customer.

Mild spoilers ahead. Here’s a quick refresher.

The titular Carnival Row is a district of The Republic of The Burge (early 1900s steampunk London) where a bunch of refugee fey (fairies) lives after their homeland was conquered by a steampunk version of Tsarist Russia known as The Pact.

We pick up shortly after the conclusion of Season One, when the fey were forcibly confined to the row following the supposed assassination of The Burge’s Chancellor Breakspear by a cult of disaffected fey who were (justifiably) enraged at their living conditions. In reality, the chancellor was merely injured by the fey assassin, and actually killed by his wife to ensure her son would ascend to the Chancellor’s seat of power and the fey were blamed for the whole thing to avoid a scandal.

Our two main characters are Philo (a half-fey), played by Orlando Bloom and Vignette (a pixie) played by Cara Delavigne, recently reunited as a couple. Season 2 opens with the pair of them working desperately (although separately) to change the situation for the fey. This task is complicated by a mysterious assassin who appears to be carrying out murders designed to pit humans and fey against each other for reasons unknown.

Our two secondary characters are a mixed-race couple; Imogen Spurnrose (a reformed but still spoiled aristocrat) and Agreus (a type of fey called a faun), who fell in love in Season 1 and fled The Burge to avoid persecution. Season 2 finds them comfortably on the run in Agreus’ private luxury liner, looking for a place to call home. They are captured by what appear to be airships from The Pact, but turn out to be rebels calling themselves the New Dawn, a steampunk version of the Bolshevik revolution. The New Dawn is led by a fey called Leonora, a blunt analogy for Leon Trotsky. The writers of Carnival Row are not trying to be subtle. Intrigue abounds as Philo and Vignette search for answers, while Imogen and Agreus learn more about their captors and debate whether they might be even worse than The Pact they war against.

But how good is it?

It’s excellent. In fact, I only had two problems with this season. Much like Season 1, Season 2 is aggressively immersive. You fall right into their world and every streetcorner is full of believable texture. The characters feel real and you care what happens to them. The plot is addictively interesting and well crafted. A lot of love and effort went into this show, and it was executed brilliantly. The acting is superb, the pacing is perfect, and almost nothing feels forced or contrived.

So what didn’t I like? Spoilers ahead.

The monster for this season was poorly set up and felt arbitrary, although it did redeem itself somewhat later when it turns out to be an agent of the New Dawn. That’s fine in itself, but in no way did it organically emerge from Season 1. It felt very tacked on because the plot needed it. They checked all the boxes to do it correctly, and it didn’t ruin anything because they were more or less honest about what they were doing. But it still stuck out to me. This is the lesser of the two problems.

The bigger problem has to do with the big speech at the end. The substance of the speech was exactly what it needed to be, but the style was horribly wrong. It sounded like it was coming out of the bullhorn of a modern-day college student speaking at a rally on the quad. It could have, and should have, delivered the same message while sounding like it came from a man of his time and place. He even used the phrase ‘do better’. It was ham-fisted, it made me roll my eyes, and I wish they’d had the guts to take a risk of a few angry Twitter users saying they ‘didn’t do enough’ to preserve the atmosphere of the show.

But that’s it. Aside from those two things I couldn’t find anything worth complaining about. I even need to give the show credit for taking my least favorite character from season 1 (Imogen’s brother Ezra) and making him both interesting and useful They tied up all their loose ends and gave the audience a satisfying conclusion. All in all, very well done.

Image Source: rottentomatoes.com