This second season is a measurable improvement on the first in every conceivable way and has certainly restored my faith in the show. Still, it's undoubtedly suffering from some missteps holding it back as an adaptation.
Notably, its biggest mistake this season is spending too much time on the wrong areas. When taking a step back and looking at the arcs of this season on their own, it's easy to see what they were trying to achieve (and succeeded at, nonetheless). It's excellent development & fantastic character-building for the characters in the spotlight, but, as an adaptation, it's leaving other characters by the wayside, leaving some characters feeling useless, only further exacerbated by some minor pacing issues still hanging around. I'm not overly concerned - with these two initial seasons out of the way, there's a whole load of setup out of the way, and things should continue to run more concurrently with the book story moving forward. However, these misaligned focuses still held this season from achieving greatness in its current strides.
What I watched on screen was still really good, but the extra time spent on some things, and not others, leaves me wanting more. And that's, essentially, the crux of my issues (and if I'm being honest, they're mostly just nitpicks). I just want more. Eight episodes is not enough. It was still an enjoyable season to watch - there are plenty of fantastic sequences, and, for the most part, just about every character is knocking their role out of the park. But it just needs...more.
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Season 2 Review:
The second season of this show is a very mixed bag for me, and it's the most apparent in the characters. For example, I loved everything we got from Jepperd this season including the fleshing out of his darker backstory and seeing just how much he has changed and grown since meeting Gus. His devotion to Gus and the lengths he's willing to go to in order to keep him safe were really great. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, General Abbot was an incredibly one-note and silly villain that I did not care for. And all of the other characters fall somewhere on the wide spectrum between these two. Another inconsistency was the tone. We'll get fart jokes one minute and the next there are people threatening to cut open and experiment on children. This show has a very unique style and tone that tries to balance these two extremes, and sometimes it comes across really well, but in this season it just felt all over the place a little. I also had a really difficult time getting behind some of the costume designs for the kids. Some looked okay but others looked like poorly drawn makeup and clearly fake props. Most of them just looked like normal kids wearing costumes, so getting me to believe they are human-animal hybrids was difficult. However, I did enjoy much of the script across the season and the story that was told here. The themes were on point, resulting in a heartfelt story about friendship. The emotional beats worked well enough for me especially between Gus and Jepperd, they have a really great relationship and the actors have good chemistry. The production design was also pretty good. So all-in-all, I wasn't as endeared to this season as much and the inconsistencies with characters and tones drag it down, but the story is good.
6.0/10 -- Decent
A decent follow up to the first series, I didn't find it as thought provoking and at points the plot can be a little linear. Some episodes merely act merely as filler, it feels like this could have been condensed into a theatrical length film. Visually beautiful with some good ideas, by far the stars of the show are Simone Missick who plays the interesting cyberpunk hacker/bounty hunter with one foot in the action and another trying to balance her commitments to family and the absolutely fabulous Chris Conner.
Exploring the fragmentation of Poe makes him feel only so much more human, a trait which unfortunately is lacking in leads Anthony Mackie and Renee. I understand this is a point the show is trying to make, the humans who have experienced lifetimes of memories and have moved from sleeve to sleeve are potentially less human than their AI counterparts but this just means we don't feel as invested in our lead two. The big reveal of the elders follows a fairly standard execution of aliens in sci-fi, the mystery disappears and unfortunately what could have been a deep dive into an alien culture is brought short abruptly with flashy fight sequences.
Enjoyable enough for any sci-fi/cyberpunk fans.
