Loki Season 2

Loki Cokey

Loki Season 2
USA 2023
Marvel/Disney
6 episodes 

Okay, so I’ve finally caught up with Loki Series Two and the good news is... it’s markedly better than the first series. It might be because all of the episodes here are directed by the great Benson and Moorhead but, given the absolute state of Disney’s Marvel TV shows (not to mention the Star Wars franchise they’re also currently ruining), it counts for a lot, I think, that this follow up series is any good at all.

Once again, this one stars Tom Hiddleston, reprising his role as the multiversal variant of Loki who split off from the regular timeline in Avengers Endgame (reviewed here) and, also returning are most of his co-stars. These include the brilliant Sophia Di Martini as a female variant Loki, Owen Wilson as Mobius, Wunmi Musaku and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and... Jonathan Majors as ‘the big bad’. We also have a new regular, the delightful time scientist OB (aka Ourouboris) played by legendary actor Ke Huy Quan… aka a grown up Short Round from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, who also won an Oscar last year for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (reviewed here).

Now, if you remember my review of the first series of Loki (reviewed here), you will remember I said it had one weakness which was to introduce or re-enforce Jonathan Majors (from Ant-Man And The Wasp - Quantumania, reviewed here) as the ultimate threat to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so all the episodes seemed ultimately to play second fiddle to that idea. And the post credits on one of the Marvel movies featuring that actor along with Loki and Mobius, I forget which one now, dovetails into an episode here.

Well, there’s a similar weak point here. Now that Majors has been found guilty of spousal abuse and effectively cancelled, it’s pretty clear that he can no longer go on to be the future lead villain of what, I assume would be, a future Avengers movie. So, although Majors is in this a lot, mostly playing a much nicer template variant named after the original comics company that became Marvel… Timely… this series is very much involved in a single story arc to eradicate him as the big bad of the future, effectively writing him out of any future Marvel movies and TV projects. So the whole of the series pretty much just serves this resolution… albeit in the most twisted way imaginable.

That being said, it’s certainly a very fun and fast paced series despite, like the first one, not having many action sequences… even less I would say. But it doesn’t matter because it’s lightning fast and though a lot of it is expository dialogue, most of which I didn’t understand a word of by the final episode, it never gets dull and the performances of the high calibre actors involved certainly carries it. Also, although I clearly should have watched this before going to see Deadpool And Wolverine (reviewed here), it didn’t really matter that it includes one of the lead characters in a position of Time Variance Agency authority, which she hasn’t yet attained here.

Ultimately, then, I really enjoyed this second series of Loki way more than the first and, though I’m sure it’s almost certain that Loki himself will return (in films for sure and maybe even a third series), this one doesn’t leave things on a cliff hanger… it has a definitive ending. Which is a bit unusual for modern Marvel I must say. And no episode here has any kind of post credits sequence attached to it… so I am grateful to latch onto those small mercies while I can.

Perry Mason Series 2 (2023)

This Never Happened 
To The Other Della

Perry Mason
Season 2 - 8 episodes
March - April 2023
HBO 
Chinese Blu Ray 

Warning: Some spoilers

So the second and, regrettably, final series of the latest incarnation of the Perry Mason TV show, very loosely based on the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, sees the return of Matthew Rhys as Perry, his now partner Della Street, played once more by Juliet Rylance and the excellent Chris Chalk as his investigator (and ex-cop from the first series), Paul Drake. 

And it’s all pretty great... perhaps even better than the first season. 

This one involves the murder of the son of the boss of a corrupt, crooked oil man and two young men who are accused of his shooting. Sworn off criminal cases since the outcome of the first season, Perry and the gang go right back into it, defending the two gentlemen but, as we soon find out, through the course of the investigation, the two may not be as innocent as they at first seem. 

And like the first one, the show does some great work looking like a somewhat authentic 1930s milieu. I spotted a drawing of a certain big ape in the background of one of the shots (one of the two accused is a good artist and is accepted into art school... although he only hears about this after he is being held with his brother in a jail cell) dated it for me as being set in 1933 and, yeah, it’s confirmed later when Perry takes his young son to see King Kong (reviewed here) at the cinema. 

It all feels right to the period and, I’d have to say the art direction on this show is absolutely awesome. And, of course, the language and colour of the streets is perhaps more reflective of the times than, say, a movie of the time made contemporary to that period would be allowed to be (much like the use of language, slang and attitudes found in a James Ellroy novel set in, say, the 1940s or 1950s). 

The cast are all terrific and, although Perry’s former ‘friend with benefits’ Lupe, played by Veronica Falcón, returns for the first episode, she’s moved out of the narrative fairly quickly in order to build a new romantic interest for Perry in the shape of his son’s teacher, played by the always watchable Katherine Waterston. Another new actor to this, but only for the first couple of episodes and, used something as a plot device, is Sean Astin as a greedy and expanding store owner. 

Shea Wigham returns as Perry’s former investigator Pete Strickland but, now working for Hamlton Berger (a returning Justin Kirk), he has to balance his friendship with Perry with the fact that he is working against him in the case that Perry is working on and, yeah, the two do come into some pretty heavy conflict which has big repercussions for Perry as he finishes this second season. 

Also on board this time is the great Hope Davis but, her character is used in an interesting way and, though she doesn’t exactly have a huge spotlight in the series, she does have a lasting presence on the proceedings. Della Street also has a new flame in this, with Jen Tullock playing a character who, while not named as such, is based on real life Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos. And the two of them are pretty good together in the show, it has to be said.

Okay, it looks like this is one of my shorter reviews but, this show really had some bite to it and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Gritty in all the right places and with some really great cliffhangers. The conclusion of the trial is not about the sudden piece of shock evidence which gets everyone off and, though there is some big evidence given, it’s mostly resolved behind closed doors and, well, there are repercussions for Perry due to something which is found hidden in his office when the opposing legal team have broken into it... lets just put it that way. I would love to see where a third season of Perry Mason would go but, alas, this one doesn’t seem to have been renewed, for whatever reason. A pity. Despite rumours to the contrary, we are not yet living in a time of television of great quality so, when a show does come along which does absolutely everything right, you’d like it to keep going.

The Rig Season 2

Oil Be Back

The Rig
Series 2
6 episodes Jan 2 2025
UK Wild Mercury Productions

I had a lot of good things to say about the first series of The Rig, not least of which came down to the excellent acting skills of the ensemble cast including stand out performances from the likes of Iain Glen, Emily Hampshire, Owen Teale and Martin Compston. I also said I was unsure why the series was left open ended on a cliff hanger of sorts and, considering the title of the show, after the giant tsunami is released, surely the only place the helicopters carrying the survivors could possibly go is to another rig. Which is, it turns out, exactly what happens.

This one is a bigger, luxury rig which can also move itself around if needed but the majority of the surviving ‘extras’ from the first show are taken back to civilisation after signing problematic gagging orders by the company that is trying to end ‘the ancestor’, as the Cthulhu-like presence beneath the sea has been dubbed in the first series.

The problem with this second series is that, asides from the acting, it doesn’t really have a lot further it can push forward on the science fiction/horror element of the show, it seems to me. So we have the two characters played by Owen Teale and Rochenda Sandall going back to the broken, post tidal wave UK to look for Sandall’s character’s wife while the main cast from the last one are playing survival games on the new rig. That is to say, the human villain, Coke (played by Mark Addy) is trying to stop the mysterious species beneath the ocean while the crew of the previous rig are trying to stop him.

Now, don’t get me wrong... it’s fast paced, very dramatic and never gets boring at all. A pretty entertaining package all around, I would say... but it’s nothing really new it’s showing us here from last time around. At least not enough, I would say, to justify a second series. Also, the creature itself, while not in the background, certainly takes a seat far from the action for the most of the six episodes. None of the Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers style shenanigans in this series and the element of threat seems almost gone. It’s brought in every now and again but this second go round is more about the politics and butting heads of the various human cast trying to stop each other before it’s too late. This includes famous actress Alice Krige coming in as one of the big bosses of the company running the rigs. And, her character goes through a similar arc to what the underused (in this second series) Iain Glenn had to go through in the first one... coming out on the right side before the end of the last episode while the ambiguity of the allegiances of the character are explored by all and sundry.

The music is somewhat off in this one, I thought... at least in that you can kind of hear the temp track coming through and bleeding into the original score. I would be completely unsurprised if bits of Philip Glass alongside the main theme from The Terminator were used to temporarily score the rough cut of this show with, as the music feels more than just a little reminiscent of these too in certain areas.

Having said all that, big shout out to an actress called Molly Vevers in this. She’s a secondary character and doesn’t get all that many scenes but she’s got huge screen presence in the bits and pieces she’s in and she should be getting more work, I think. For this reason alone, I’m kind of hoping the series gets renewed for a third season at some point soon... while the story can easily be finished here, there’s a weird, last shot coda which I’m not entirely sure about (okay... I admit I didn’t understand what’s going on there and kinda don’t care truth be told) but The Rig has a good cast so I hope it gets picked up again.

And I don’t have much more to say about this one, I’m afraid. It was much ado about nothing but I still enjoyed it for what it was so would certainly be a part of the audience for a third part, if it comes up.

Yellowjackets - Series 2

 

Wilderness Things

Yellowjackets - Series 2
USA March - May 2023
Series 2 Nine episodes

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Yellowjackets Series Two  is... mostly pretty good I’d have to say. Continuing from the point it left off, where one of the major grown up versions of a character was kidnapped on the point of suicide, this one details just what happened to her and the attempts of grown up Misty to find out who has kidnapped her and why. Meanwhile Shauna, her husband (played brilliantly by Warren Kole) and her daughter (Callie Sadecki) are trying to throw the cops off the scent of Shauna’s murder of her ‘fling’ in series one. Also, we have Taissa dealing with the fallout from her somewhat violent sleepwalking stints (as her reflection gazes back at her before doing its own thing, in some nicely chilling moments)... with symptoms of that being hallucinating a visitation from her son and putting her wife in a coma from a car crash in an early episode.

Of course, we also have the teen versions and various other ‘probably mostly expendable teen versions’ trapped in the wilderness with their now one legged coach, dealing with Shauna’s pregnancy and also, quite accidentally, getting into a taste for cannibalism... while they embrace the ideas and teachings of the teenage version of Lotte (Courtney Eaton).

And it’s pretty riveting stuff with all the cast from the first series back for the second, including Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Teen Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Natalie (Juliette Lewis), Teen Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), Misty (Christina Ricci) and Teen Misty (Samantha Hanratty). There are also a couple of new members of the team. Firstly, the grown up version of Lotte (who has apparently spent at least ten years in a Swiss psychiatric hospital) is played by Simone Kessell. She’s now running a kind of cult retreat for troubled souls, which is a bit of a bad idea for that character when you think about it.

Also, we finally get to see who Teen Taissa’s red headed girlfriend, Van (performed wonderfully by Liv Hewson) is played by when she’s grown up. As Taissa somehow manages to drive to her VHS video store ‘While You Were Streaming’, we find that she’s played by the brilliant Lauren Ambrose.

Meanwhile, Misty gets some, at first unwanted, help from a fellow amateur but somehow millionaire crime sleuth... who is also probably a serial killer (I reckon)... played by Elijah Wood. All I can say is... they make a cute couple. And the song and dance stuff they do when Misty is availing herself of Lotte’s sensory deprivation tank is pretty silly (which means it’s cool, in my book).

And, yeah, it hurtles along at a pace with some nice momenta such as, when teen Shauna is talking to the frozen body of her dead best friend, it transitions from living actress to corpse version and back again between the cuts. When the two get in a tussle, Jackie’s frozen ear falls off and Shauna is mortified... except, by the end of the episode, she casually slips it into her mouth and eats it. Nice touch.

And everything hurtles towards the inevitable double cliffhanger ending for the girls in the ‘end of season finale’ episode... this season is an episode shorter than the first, for some reason. So in the back story, the girls barely escape their cabin burning down. While in the modern story, all the characters converge (including those pesky cops) in Lotte’s retreat where, things get fairly dramatic and a regular character dies (yeah... she’ll be back in some form, I reckon). Although, I’d have to say that, after a great lead in, I kinda found the last episode a little anti-climactic, truth be told.

Here’s the thing though... I think I’m getting a sense of where this might be going. Although... I kinda hope I’m wrong and this show manages to surprise me instead. There have been little clues, quite subtly hidden (or else I’m imagining them) that things from the present are kinda, maybe, bleeding back into the past. So I’ve got two theories where this might be going... especially since we now know how easy it is for any of the characters to be hallucinating and we also know, especially due to the episode dealing with Shauna’s first pregnancy, that the camera eye doesn’t always tell the truth. Furthermore, we also know the grown up versions of the characters have hazy memories about certain aspects of their past.

One idea I have is that, maybe the girls didn’t get out of the wilderness and have grown up there without realising they didn’t escape and have been collectively (or even singly) imagining their modern life. Which would be interesting, for sure. Or... the girls never escaped but they are still in that time and just imagining their future (which would be a bit of a cop out, truth be told). So, I kinda hope it’s not one of those things but... well, time will tell I guess.

Ether way, series two of Yellowjackets didn’t overly disappoint and I can’t wait for season three to arrive. Hopefully they’ll finish the story off with that one, maybe?

Penny Dreadful Series 2

Judged Dread

Penny Dreadful Series 2
2015 USA Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, okay. So this review of
Season 2 will go the ‘spoiler route’.

The second series of Penny Dreadful is something I was especially interested in seeing because, although the little sub-plots involving the Frankenstein monster (played by Rory Kinnear), Dorian Gray (played by Reeve Carny) and Ethan Chandler (as played by Josh Hartnett) all obviously have a much longer course to run, the main story which brings together Chandler, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Sembene (Danny Sapani) and Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) was pretty much finished with in the first series.

Now I was told that this second season is much stronger than the first but, although there is much to recommend in this one, I found it to be a little less compelling in places. Certainly the pacing, especially in the last few episodes, seems more than a little sluggish when compared to the previous series and although there is the sex, gore and action which helped make the first run so watchable, there seems to be less of this happening in this one and much more plotting and talking. Not that I mind this at all but I did find it a little duller than the first year, if truth be told.

One of the problems I had was the way in which the writers forged a new plot/danger to ensure our heroes stay together, for the most part, to defeat the latest menace together. After a strong opening which sees Miss Ives and Mr. Chandler attacked in a coach by naked witch creatures, we are eventually treated to a whole load of extra back story about Miss Ives which establishes that she is a practitioner of ‘witchery’ and which gives her a new enemy acting as a representative of ‘the devil’ who is already trying to claim her soul. It seems somehow clumsy to me that this is all brought into play only now, when so little of this has been mentioned after the lengthy examination of her back story in the first series. However, it does at least make use of Helen McCrory as Evelyn Poole, reprising her role from the first series and being given a more personal history with Miss Ives.

A couple of things which were pretty predictable in the first season do come to pass in this...

First and foremost of those being Billie Piper reincarnated from her previous dead character to become Lily... the latest iteration for the Bride Of Frankenstein (or at least the Bride Of Frankenstein’s monster... although not quite). With this performance, her character appears to be one thing but, as we learn later in the season, looks can be deceptive and Lily has a far less passive role in the impact of her life on others than you might at first suspect. The real problem with this character though is that although Billie Piper does an amazing job with her (I wouldn’t expect anything less from the lady in question), she does seem to be suffering from Clark Kent/Superman syndrome throughout the whole production. That is to say, in the DC comics involving Superman we are asked, for some strange reason, to assume that when he is wearing glasses, he is somehow disguised from being mistaken for Superman. This makes no sense, of course...

Similarly, in this incarnation as Lily, the previous version of the character, Brona Croft, is not in any way recognised by anyone other than, perhaps, that there is a strong probability that Dorian Gray does and can see something has happened to her. But only Dorian. Why? Because she’s had her hair dyed blonde... um. What? So, for instance, after having picked out dresses for her, when Miss Ives is asked by Frankenstein to meet his ‘cousin’, she doesn’t immediately say... “Oh, I remember you. You were my current love interest’s girlfriend I met outside the theatre in the first season... how come you’re not still dead?” Instead, she has no idea and goes about her business, Lilly’s golden tresses fooling even this cunning character. Um... yeah, okay.... moving on.

I said in the last interview that Ethan Chandler looked like he was well on the way to becoming another staple of Universal Horror after his werewolvery was finally revealed (or rather confirmed) at the end of the last series. I was, in fact, referring to the character that Lon Chaney Jr made famous as The Wolfman... Lawrence Talbot. Well, in this one the connection is tracked down by an interesting, one armed detective character, who himself seems to be a quick, half hearted nod to Lionel Atwill’s character in the 1939 film Son Of Frankenstein. Turns out Ethan’s Chandler’s real name is 'Ethan Lawrence Talbot'... so, yeah, as far as I know, Hartnett’s only the third person to play this role which, for most of film history, was played almost exclusively by Chaney Jr. Josh Hartnett’s role is more developed as a character in this one, where he’s shifted over from being the ‘hired hand’ to being a friend and protector to Miss Ives. He also makes friends with Sembene... a friendship which has tragic results in a much more traditional kind of problematic manifestation for the Lawrence Talbot character.

So yeah, we have intrigue and mayhem and we finally get to see ‘the portrait’ of Dorian Gray. Only a fleeting glimpse but it’s not done too badly although the character is almost something you feel the writers don’t quite know what to do with yet. He’s been pretty much at the periphery of the other character’s lives for two series now but you at least, at the end of this one, get the impression that he’s going to be thrown into the mix more when the next series hits, due to his unholy alliance with Billie Piper’s Bride of Frankenstein character.

All in all, there was enough to keep me interested in continuing to watch this second series and, once again, I really don’t know where they are going to go from here, being that each set of characters seems to have split up and gone to different parts of the world. The first trailer to the third season looks like none of them are together and I just hope that the series manages to find a credible way to reunite them all again at some point and, hopefully, fairly early on in the season... it’s the chemistry of having all these strong actors and actresses integrating with each other and also having to deal with their own subplots, in my opinion, that is one of the main strengths of the show.

Since I don’t have the fancy channels where programmes like this are broadcast, and I certainly don’t want to be left a the mercy of commercial breaks anyway, it looks like I’ll have to wait until near the end of the year before I’ll be able to catch up with Series 3 of Penny Dreadful but, certainly, this previous season was, at the very least, good enough so that I still want to. Although I think they could have done a little more with the creepy little dolls than they managed here.


My review of Series One can be found here.