It wasn’t a fluke. Wednesday Season 2’s mid-season finale was the show’s best episode ever — funny, frightening, and genuinely striking to look, all in ways the show had so often struggled to achieve. That struggle seems to be over. The fifth episode of the series’ bifurcated second season is even neater and nastier.

After her near-lethal run-in with her monstrous Hyde nemesis Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan) last episode, Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) awakes in a hospital bed, where what to her wondering eyes should appear but a vision of the late, unlamented Nevermore Principal Larissa Weems. 

Gwendoline Christie, a sight for sore eyes in her magnificent Hitchcock-blonde outfits and styling, is a welcome return, especially now that Thandiwe Newton and Christina Ricci’s characters have met their makers. (Obviously, never say never on this show where death is concerned.) Citing a distant familial link, Weems reveals she’s Wednesday’s new spirit guide, but her guidance is mostly to reprimand Wednesday for acting like a dumbass.

Ghosts are nice and all, but there are monsters abroad. Thanks to Wednesday’s meddling, both Tyler the Hyde and Slurp the Zombie (Owen Painter) have escaped from Willow Hill’s top-secret experimentation facility, and both are absolute murder machines. Meanwhile, the mystery woman who was also freed turns out to be Françoise (Frances O’Connor), Tyler’s mother and an old friend of Morticia’s. The evil Dr. Stonehurst (Heather Matarrazzo, having a ball) has an assassin try to hunt them down; it doesn’t go well for the assassin, to put it mildly.

The Addamses are on the case as well. Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) comes clean to his father, Gomez (Luis Guzmán), about the whole resurrecting-the-dead thing, and the pair head to a kitschy Day of the Dead festival at the nearby amusement/reenactment park Pilgrim World.  It’s a spectacular sight, the kaleidoscopic carnival lights captured as well here by director Angela Robinson as I’ve seen anyone do it since that one town-fair episode of Euphoria years back. (As Mistress Arlene, one of the park’s head employees, actor Lisa O’Hare perfectly channels the aggressively chipper energy of similar normies from Barry Sonnenfeld’s two excellent Addams Family films.)

But when Gomez and Pugsley track Slurp down to the haunted-house attraction where he’s busy butchering and eating the brains of the customers, both take pity on the poor cannibal, and allow him to slip past the police cordon. Interestingly, they both either lie or omit this fact to one another. I get why Pugsley wouldn’t say anything about it, but what’s Gomez’s excuse? 

Sure enough, Slurp gets right back to his murderous ways by killing Dr. Stonehurst. No great loss, I realize, but still. He’s also much closer to human now and has regained the ability to speak thanks to his eating habits. “The brains — they brought me back,” he says, nearly directly quoting the sinister Uncle Frank in Hellraiser, explaining how blood brought him back in a similar fashion. (I’m now more convinced than ever that the mid-season finale’s Hellraiser franchise references were deliberate.)

Wednesday gets in on the monster-hunting action as well. In a conversation with Professor Capri (Billie Piper), who we learn is a survivor of a run-in with a Hyde as well, our heroine discovers that Hydes who’ve slain their masters can be remastered, and by god, she’ll be the one to do it. Her desire to become Tyler’s master certainly gets interestinc considering her later admission to him that she found him attractive. 

Similarly, Wednesday’s stalker Agnes admits that she braided Wednesday’s hair and tried on her clothes while she was comatose, which is a Single White Female level of psychosexual dysfunction I’m not sure Wednesday audiences are ready for. But if there’s one thing you can count on a submissive for, it’s help in a pinch.

Wednesday learns via the stolen diaries of Tyler’s late master Marilyn Thornhill that an injection of some concoction is required to take control of a Hyde, and with the help of Enid and the members of the Nightshade Society, she sets a trap for Tyler using Enid as bait. But just as Wednesday is about to take control of Tyler — again, about two seconds after telling him she was attracted to him, however she feels about him now — his mother comes to the rescue.

Françoise, it turns out, is a Hyde herself, and as a female she much larger and more in control. Acting on a tip from her old friend Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones), she bursts in on the battle and brings the boy to heel. As they bound off into the wild together, Morticia assures Wednesday that Françoise plans for her and Tyler to leave them all behind forever.

There’s one last monster to consider. In the middle of solo dance practice, Enid suddenly and unexpectedly wolfs out. Despite the fact that it’s only a crescent moon, and not the full moon required to unlock werewolves’ abilities, she goes full-fledged lycanthrope and runs off into the wilderness herself.

I’d ask “where to begin?” with an episode stuffed with this much fun stuff, but the answer is always going to be Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers as Wednesday and her roommate slash opposite number, Enid. Even at the show’s unfunny, pedestrian worst, these two actors perform as if they’re John Goodman and Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. They understand the assignment arguably better than the creators of the show themselves. Shit, man, they are the show. 

But it goes beyond them now. Though she’s been forced to play a mother whose daughter rebels against her despite being given no apparent reason for a child to rebel, Catherin Zeta-Jones remains purringly perfect as Morticia. I couldn’t be happier to have Christie’s almost literally inimitable screen presence back in my life. And for the first time, the show seems to have figured out what to do with the miscast Guzmán as Gomez: He and Ordonez’s Pugsley make for a perfect Shaggy and Scooby team to go off having comical misadventures while Fred, Daphne, and Velma do the real work.

And it looks great, too! From the glow of the carnival to the pleasing contrast of Enid and her boyfriend Bruno’s (Noah Taylor) purple school uniforms and red strawberries against the green of the field where they’re having a picnic, the show looks like care was put into its composition. The unapologetically Tim Burton-y monster design for the Hydes remains a low-key leap forward in the field. Even the contrasting heights between Weems, towering but immaterial in white, and Wednesday, diminutive but made of flesh and blood in black, pops off the screen.

To paraphrase one of the great humorists of our time, Wednesday is back. It’s good again. Awouuu (wolf Howl)!