The first half of Wednesday‘s second season ended on a cliffhanger: Did Wednesday Addams die after her battle with Tyler Galpin in full Hyde mode? Given the show’s name, it’s a pretty safe bet that the teenager will be alive and well for the season’s second half.
Opening Shot: Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is shown in her hospital bed. She’s in a coma, lying with her arms crossed like she’s being prepped for her funeral.
The Gist: During her coma, a result of her confrontation with Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan) when he was in Hyde mode, Wednesday finds out that Nevermore’s now-dead principal, Larissa Weems (Gwendoline Christie) is now her spirit guide; it turns out that they’re very distantly related. Weems seems all too eager to tell Wednesday that the reason why she no longer has her telekinetic powers is that the high schooler isn’t being honest with herself.
Wednesday wakes up, much to the joy of her parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán). In the meantime, Sheriff Santiago (Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo) and Judi Spannegel (Heather Matarazzo) are informing the public of the three Willow Hill patients still at large: Tyler, Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen), and the zombie known as Slurp (Owen Painter) to his buddy Pugsley Addams (Isaac Ordonez). No one really knows that Jodi was the one conducting experiments on patients that were believed to be dead… including Tyler’s mother, Francoise (Frances O’Connor).
Tyler leaves Wednesday a note that he’s going to kill both her and Enid (Emma Myers), who is at a disadvantage because she can’t use her werewolf strength when there isn’t a full moon. When Wednesday returns to Nevermore, it’s her favorite day of the year: The Day of the Dead. Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) has a remembrance vigil set up, and Wednesday thinks that’s when Tyler will attack. Wednesday has a plan to control Tyler, though, something that Weems tells her is a suicide mission. Of course, Wednesday doesn’t listen to her new spirit guide.
In the meantime, Pugsley asks his father to help him find Slurp, and when Gomez finally sees the regenerating zombie, he ends up recognizing who it really is. Ajax (Georgie Farmer) helps Bianca (Joy Sunday) hide her mother Gabrielle (Gracy Goldman) from Gideon Sterling (Casper Van Dien).
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Wednesday is, as we all know, a sequel series to The Addams Family series and movies.
Our Take: If it seemed like Wednesday creators Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and their writers crammed a whole lot of stories into the first half of Season 2, you were right, to the point where not every story could be well-served in the four hour-long episodes that opened the season. We see more of that as the second half starts, with certain stories getting one-scene lip service from the writers and others not being addressed at all.
Let’s get down to brass tacks: What do you really want to see? High school drama, things going on with the parents of Wednesday’s Nevermore classmates, or Wednesday finding a Hyde and attempt to control him? We can’t speak for every viewer, but we are the most interested in seeing what’s going on when Ortega is onscreen being Wednesday at her darkest.
It really did seem that the only time when the fifth episode really crackled was when Wednesday was interacting with either Weems, her new spiritual guide, music teacher Isadora Capri (Billie Piper), who actually dated a Hyde at some point and defeated him, or when she’s bantering with Morticia about mother-daughter stuff. The only other story that mildly intrigued us was what we saw at the end of the episode involving Enid (we’ll talk about that below).
But what we really wonder is why the creators and their writers continue to keep throwing new characters at us when it seems like the ones that are still around aren’t getting the development time they deserve.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Enid finds herself going all wolfen; Capri goes into her dorm room and sees Enid’s clothes ripped off on the floor, and the window open. She looks up and only sees a crescent moon.
Sleeper Star: Steve Buscemi continues to be creepily funny as Dort.
Most Pilot-y Line: “I commend you on your ability to appropriate with such panache,” Gomez tells the leader of Pilgrim World when he and Puglsey sees what they did for Day of the Dead.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While Wednesday is still fun to watch, it feels like it’s starting to strain under the weight of too many stories and not enough time to tell them in.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.