I enjoyed S1 despite the jumpiness toward the end but S2 is just randoms killing randoms and the narrative got lost in the nonlinear timeline. There is no character in S2 that I care about, nothing that makes it worth watching.
shareYou have a point and I felt the same at first, but I would suggest hanging on and watching a little further, now that you've endured the "tough parts"...
I think what you describe is integral to the way S2 works, i.e. establishing a feeling of desperation and of the meaninglessness of life and lives lost in a collapsed society of factions and systematic mistrust. There is a point to this and it is going somewhere, with a message very relevant to this day and age.
Also the reversed non-linear timeline (an indeed overdone and often gimmicky storytelling device) here serves the purpose of illustrating that the death of a human being can be meaningless to us when they're mere shapes, strangers with no history (or say, an avatar and a pseudonym on a twit), but that their death becomes so much more meaningful in retrospect, once you realise they too were complex individuals with tragedy in their lives, who loved and were loved, were brave or cowards (humanly so, like we can all be sometimes), helped a friend in need, trusted, were betrayed, hoped, were kind once, afraid, etc.
Nicely written, Michael. I also enjoyed this season.
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A story told out of sequence still has to be interesting. The farmhouse characters are dead, 2 episodes later I get the story of how tweakers and randos randomly died in a farmhouse. I learned nothing about anyone. There was a huge opportunity to tell a story about the mother and daughter, but nope, nothing. I can't even name one person from the entire series. I am a big believer that every episode counts, halfway through s2 and there is nothing to care about. I will probably finish but it will play in the background while I'm doing other stuff.
TBF, I watched more episodes and S2 Ep 5 was the best of the series. If every episode were even half that good the show would be in my top 10 horror tv series. I would watch a whole series about those 2 guys. The mom and daughter are just too thin, not enough story.
shareGlad you liked Ep 5. It was a very good episode indeed and I thought it worked so well for the precise reasons you mentioned in your OP : because after four episodes of people being unable to trust each other or cooperate, you finally see two human beings who manage to transcend their initial mistrust of each other, cooperate, share, form bonds of friendship and rediscover the sublime nature of forgiveness. I think the show needed to first show us and make us "feel" this barren soil, before it could plant that seed and let us marvel at the miracle of how it was able to grow in such a wasteland. And again, I think this is, in an oblique way, extremely relevant to the state of things in western societies.
I hear you about the mom and daughter plot-line : it's thoroughly unpleasant and depressing to see them being gradually dehumanized, and their relationship (one of the most sacred) being corroded by the harsh necessities of survival at all cost... but this one goes in interesting directions as well, if you stick with it.
We will have to agree to disagree, they hired a guest writer for S2-e5. The regular episodes have writers from Z-Nation which started out good, sometimes great, but plummeted in quality after killing off Garnett. We see many similarities in set and direction from latter ZN and end of S2, overuse of plastic sheeting, characters running in circles around the same building, main characters being split off into their own storylines that aren't interesting. So if there is a S3, I expect it to take the same trajectory as ZN by involving the main characters in some absurd plot, surrounded by ridiculous characters, ultra cheap sets, adding up to a continued decline in quality until it gets cancelled.
shareAgreed. Same thoughts and looking forward to S3 for the survivors.
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