The first season of Freeform’s Cruel Summer was a surprise hit during the spring of 2021. Touching three different timelines in the mid-1990s in Texas, the plot followed the disappearance of a young girl and the seemingly disconnected rise of another girl in the small town’s social class. The multiple reference points in time gave us different access to the story, as audiences watched the events that happened before, during, and after the disappearance concurrently.
The series is back for a second season, relocating to Washington and the Y2K era with July 1999, December 1999, and July 2000 being the anchor dates. As with the first season, the show’s lighting helps indicate which point in time we’re in with regular lighting used in the July 1999 scenes, slightly darker lighting in December 2000, and a green tinged effect used in July 2000. The characters’ styling also shows the passage of time, especially as the plot gets darker.
Cruel Summer Season 2 follows Meghan, who lives with her mom and sister in a small town situated near the water where all of the businesses are primarily owned by her best friend Luke’s dad. Meghan’s family isn’t poor but they’re not really well off either and as a way to make up for their inability to do international trips, her mom invites an exchange student named Isabella to live with them in July 1999. Meghan couldn’t be less excited about hosting a new kid for the summer — and even snoops in her bag when she arrives — but when we check in with them in December 1999, they’re thick as thieves.
Much of the first episode is spent setting up the story and providing backstories for the main characters. Meghan is a high-achieving student with her sights set on a computer science scholarship at University of Washington; Isabella is the daughter of diplomats who has moved around her whole life and wants to spend senior year in her home country; Lucas is her best friend whom she also has a secret crush on, and feels threatened when Isabella arrives and also has eyes for him. By December 1999, Meghan has successfully received that scholarship AND made a move on Luke but soon finds out that he and Isabella have also hooked up via a sex tape of them that gets broadcast at Luke’s dad’s Christmas party.
The 2000 timeline is where things really go awry, likely stemming from that betrayal seven months prior. In some fun styling, 2000 Meghan has gone full goth and embraced the hacker stereotype by wearing all black, thick eyeliner, an eyebrow piercing, and slicked back hair. She’s a coder who’s trading mysterious floppy discs for cash in abandoned buildings, and she has a newfound animosity towards her entire family. What happened?
Well, it turns out there’s a missing person and she’s pretty convinced that Isabella had something to do with it. “None of this would’ve happened if she hadn’t come to town,” a girl says to Meghan as she stands in front of a Missing Person poster that has been ripped up enough that we can no longer see whose face is missing. At the pharmacy, she overhears that authorities found a body in the lake and she zooms over to a cabin presumably owned by Luke’s family to scrub blood off of the floor. Doesn’t exactly scream innocent to me.
There are a few other loose threads and small details that could potentially prove important: in December 1999, Luke’s mom and Meghan’s mom are also dating, which is kind of weird since Meghan and Luke seem to be in love. In that timeline, there’s also a quick encounter with a neighbor at the cabin who has a penchant for using his shotgun in the middle of the night. In 2000, Meghan drops an ID that looks like it belongs to Isabella but shows the name “Pat Highsmith” instead, which makes me think back to Meghan rummaging through Isabella’s belongings in 1999 and pausing on her passport specifically. And there’s a friend in the circle named Jeff who is always recording things with his camcorder, and there’s no way that doesn’t come into play at some point.
Thankfully the mystery behind who is dead won’t be a season-long arc: by episode’s end we find out that it’s Lucas in the body bag, as confirmed by his dad. As Meghan looks on, Isabella appears beside her and ominously says, “we have to get our stories straight.” Pat Highsmith or not, it’s clear that neither of them are entirely innocent.
Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Vulture, Teen Vogue, Paste Magazine, and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.