I quite enjoyed the first season of Wednesday.
The season told its story well, for the most part, holding everything together with great humor and a fantastic performance from Jenna Ortega as the titular Wednesday Addams.
And then we had to wait three years for Season Two.
Yeah, the long wait between shows is really starting to get annoying.
It makes sense for shows like Arcane, where there is a lot of animation to be done, but it feels like it should have been easier for Wednesday’s second season to release quicker.
Now that we do have it, the season has been split in two, which is equally annoying.
At least Season Two improves upon many of the criticisms I had of the first season.
The story picks up with Wednesday returning to Nevermore Academy for the year.
She is not alone this year, however, being joined by her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), father Gomez (Luis Guzman), and younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez).
Things predictably take a turn for the darker, when a new series of murders are committed, and Wednesday experiences a vision of her best friend Enid (Emma Myers) dying because of her.
Desperate to stop this vision from happening, Wednesday works to uncover the mystery behind the murders.
Starting with the positives for this season, Jenna Ortega once again does a great job as Wednesday, bringing a lot of dark humor to the table.
This dark humor persists throughout the season, with a lot of sequences leaving me chuckling.
One of these is Pugsley’s storyline, which sees him teaming up with Eugene (Moosa Mostafa) in a plotline that I am interested to see where it goes in Part Two of the season.
Along with the old characters, there are also a lot of good new ones.
With Principal Weems dying last season, Nevermore gets a new principal, Barry Dort, played by Steve Buscemi.
He is pretty much a ruthless version of the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme, which makes for quite an entertaining character.
My favorite new character though is definitely Agnes DeMille (Evie Templeton), who is basically Wednesday’s number one fan, although more in the Annie Wilkes Misery fashion.
Another positive for Season Two is that it fixes some of my negatives from Season One.
My primary criticism of the first season was that the mystery’s answer was so obvious it made the red herrings infuriating.
Thankfully, Season Two’s mystery is hidden a lot better, and I actually enjoyed its surprises.
That being said, we still have another half of a season to go, so who knows how the remaining mysteries will be answered.
My second big criticism of Season One was the focus on a love triangle between Wednesday and two other characters.
My hope was that Season Two would focus more on her friendships and investigations.
Fortunately, the season did exactly that.
Unfortunately, the love triangle plotline was transferred from Wednesday to Enid.
Aside from one pretty good joke, this subplot was a complete bore, not helped by one of Enid’s love interests being as blank as a piece of white paper.
What makes this more bizarre is that Wednesday’s motivation this season is to solve the mystery to stop Enid from dying.
Yet Enid’s storyline mostly focuses around which boy she is dating.
Hopefully, she will have more importance to the story in Part Two.
Overall, though, I would say that so far Season Two has been an improvement over the first one.
Jenna Ortega’s performance is still great, as is the humor, and the mysteries are handled a lot better.
I hope Part Two can keep the quality up we get it in September.
THE REVIEW MONSTER 