Towards the end of this second season, I checked my user comments of the first, because I was doubting what I had felt about the latter. The comments confirmed how I felt, and how many of my issues continued into this second season. In that way I suppose I have no right to complain – although in fairness, everything I liked about the first season is also here in the second.
Specifically those elements relate to the delivery. There is a great sense of tone and atmosphere to this season, just as there was in the first. The landscape may have changed, but the sense of pain, distance, and space is still there. So too are the performances, which are roundly strong whether in the recognizable faces or otherwise. The weakness of this season is not in how they deliver it but rather in what they are delivering. The plot rides a lot on coincidence – at first but also throughout. Characters all converge, which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing (after all, we follow these characters because they are part of the same story), but the issue is that from the first episode the characters are already clustered in a very small space; there are some outliers perhaps, but still everyone is half a step removed from one another. This smacks of convenience and kept me from going with the story, as it all felt too tidy to do it like this – putting everyone together.
The narrative also fails to really flow. It has ideas and action, but in its main thrust it doesn't sell itself as a drama. The performances within this messy affair are very strong as I said, and they sell it more than it deserves to be sold, but they can only do so much. If anything, at the end, it is hard not to feel like the cast deserved to have better – in particular Moss, Christie, Tang, and a scenery chewing Dencik. It is a quality season in some ways, but it is overly trite, convenient, and asks the cast to do a lot of heavy lifting without giving them a lot of help.
