[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for “Wednesday” Season 2, including the ending — Episode 8, “This Means Woe.”]
“The crack in your monochrome armor is overbearing arrogance.”
So says Rosaline Rotwood, played by Lady Gaga, to her visiting wish-maker, Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega), when the dour student seeks out her “legendary” teacher at Nevermore Academy. Wednesday needs to use the psychic powers she lost at the start of Season 2, and Rosaline’s glowing apparition can give them to her — temporarily (so Wednesday can advance the plot without disrupting her larger story arc, like using a cheat code in a video game).
Related Stories
Maybe Rosaline will resurface in Season 3, but until then, her character is little more than a convenient pitstop in Season 2, Part 2 — more product placement than plot development. (Maybe you’ve heard, Lady Gaga wrote a new song for Season 2!) Despite her trivial inclusion, Mother Monster’s warning still lingers. After all, this isn’t the first time Wednesday has been told she’s stubborn, single-minded, and self-important. Such descriptions dog her throughout Season 2, surfacing whenever she refuses to go along to get along, which is pretty much all the time.
If her mother, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), asks her to avoid a certain family member, you better believe Wednesday will seek them out. If her best friend, Enid (Emma Myers), pleads with her to consider the fates of her fellow students before running off to play detective, Wednesday will certainly ignore her. If her cosmically appointed spirit guide, Larissa Weems (Gwendoline Christie), tells her not to hunt down her werewolf-like ex-boyfriend (who’s not a werewolf, which is a different thing from a Hyde, apparently), then Wednesday is already out prowling the night, looking for clues, poison syringe at the ready.
The point being: Wednesday never backs down. But “Wednesday” always does.
Across a scant two seasons, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s Netflix series is consistently in a state of retreat: retreating to elements that worked in its breakout first season; retreating to elements that have sustained the long-established “Addams Family” I.P.; and, most vexingly, retreating from the basic storytelling duty of providing emotional closure to their strung-along audience.
If “Wednesday” itself shared a snippet of Wednesday’s unfailing arrogance, perhaps Season 2 would feel less timid, more creative, and ultimately destined to grow the franchise instead of protect it from evolving at all.
One of the most overt concessions to convention is also a fairly common problem for marquee second seasons: repetition. When a new show hits, it’s tempting to follow-up with more of the same. It’s what the studios think the audience wants (when what they really want is to feel like they felt during the first season, not literally see it again), and it’s easy enough to give it to them. Perhaps that frame of mind explains why “Wednesday” is so desperate to hold onto Tyler (Hunter Doohan) as a chronic antagonist.
After Wednesday freed him (accidentally) at the end of Part 1, the Hyde teen promises to finish her off in Part 2. Instead, his mother, Francoise (Frances O’Connor) — who’s also a Hyde — saves him, nurtures him, and introduces him to his uncle, Isaac (Owen Painter), the reanimated corpse Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) has been calling “Slurp.” Turns out the mad scientist in the family thinks he can save Francoise from a mysterious illness by removing the Hyde side of her. He just needs to rebuild his on-campus laboratory, recruit a few live subjects, and complete the experiment he first tried 30 years ago.
…back when Gomez Addams (Luis Guzmán) was his roommate at Nevermore. Issac recruited Wednesday’s future father as his sacrifice, Morticia had to save him, and then the couple buried his body in order to avoid a murder charge. History repeats itself (as does “Wednesday”) when Isaac takes Pugsley as his replacement offering, his sister Wednesday has to save him, and no one has to worry about murder, because who has the time?
Extending the Season 1 conflict between Tyler and Wednesday to the Galpin and Addams families isn’t the worst idea (assuming there was some sort of mandate to cede more time to the whole Addams family beyond Wednesday, you know, because “bigger is better”), and the pyrotechnic ending features some nifty practical sets and a passable CGI Hyde battle. But Season 2 kills off the older Galpins without evoking any fear from their dastardly plans or pity for their ultimate plight. How can something so big feel so small? When there’s no investment required.
Worse still, the expanded family focus does nothing to develop Tyler and Wednesday’s relationship. She literally does the same thing twice — saving him from captivity (and likely death) first at Willow Hill, then with Isaac — without either of them so much as discussing what it means. In her closing monologue, she wonders if her act of kindness will be her ultimate downfall, but simply punting the question down the road does nothing for this season’s drama, nor does it make her bland ex-boyfriend a compelling Big Bad. (He flees town with the former music teacher, Isadora, played by Billie Piper, so you know he’ll be back for future seasons.)
Outside the plot machinations that resurrect Season 1, a more overt attempt to revisit the past comes in Episode 7, “Woe Me the Money.” (I will say: The episode titles are pretty good.) Via a prolonged dance scene at the school gala, Enid and Agnes (Evie Templeton) perform to the aforementioned Lady Gaga single, “The Dead Dance.” Now, for those of you who can keep track of three-year-old pop culture trends, you may remember that “Wednesday’s” viral TikTok videos were part of what helped it spread awareness to broader audiences. Inspired by a cut of Jenna Ortega‘s outcast dance set to Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” many a teen tried their hand at flopping their hands from side to side — as did Madonna, Kim Kardashian, and Gaga herself.
Will “The Dead Dance” take off the same way “Bloody Mary” did? Can corporations manufacture viral moments? Do any of us really know why teenagers do what they do? I would venture the answer to each of these questions is the same, but recognizing as much also means I shan’t claim to know what will happen in the coming weeks. What I do know is the song’s inclusion rings of shameless imitation — an attempt to reverse engineer a random cultural phenomenon, rather than trust in the series’ natural creative choices to get people talking, dancing, or doing something else entirely (which is what actually lent the Season 1 dance movement its magic).
(Side note: The splendid body swap story — a vibrant one-off arc in a sea of repeating plot extensions — really magnifies Season 2’s missed opportunities. Do more bits! Have more fun! Give Jenna Ortega new shit to do!)
Even if you could set aside the bloated cast and crass consumerism, there’s still the problem of the payoffs — or lack thereof. “Wednesday” Season 2 ends without the most basic element a story can offer: emotional closure. Plots come to a head, sure. They pretty much have to, and seeing the Galpins get got and Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) shattered into a million stony pieces gives the eight episodes the illusion of resolution. (Dort, thanks mainly to Buscemi’s spirited turn, deserved a much better death.)
But what really changed for our heroes? Pugsley makes one (1) friend, completing the shallowest arc possible for a kid who’s basically there to feed the villain long enough to eventually become his victim. Morticia and Wednesday’s season-long dispute gets an even emptier gesture toward reconciliation when the elder Addams hands her kiddo Aunt Ophelia’s journal. (That the object immediately turns into a plot device for Season 3 only proves how little weight is given to the mother-daughter dynamic.) Grandmama Frump (Joanna Lumley) and Enid are similarly dangled as threads for next season, with the latter only learning she might not need a boyfriend right now (OK?!) and the former learning nothing whatsoever.
Finally, there’s Wednesday. What became of the dilemmas she faced to start her sophomore year, like the annoyance she expressed for her newfound fame? That’s wrapped up without her, as Agnes abandons obsessive fandom once she’s established enough in the group to be seen as a “normal” friend. (Her transformation carries the casual, troubling implication that fanatical stalking is nothing more than a phase?) And Wednesday’s persistent insistence that people don’t change? Cast aside or forgotten, unless you count the characters’ lack of growth as evidence toward Wednesday’s position.
OK, but her oft-promised comeuppance for being so brazen — something had to come of that, right? That’s how the season started, when she rushed into capturing the Kansas City Scalper, and how the half-season restarted, when (in the fifth episode’s self-described “recap”) Larissa Weems “congratulates” Wednesday on being “the architect of her own demise.” Her hubris is the culprit, of course, just as various adults repeatedly insist it will be throughout Season 2. But in the end, Wednesday’s arrogance is still an asset, as she once again goes off on her own, flipping through her new book while asking question after question about what will happen next.
Based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s bound to be more of the same.
“Wednesday” Season 2 is available on Netflix. The series has already been renewed for Season 3.
