Homecoming

Homecoming build to a shocking and satisfying finale that you're not likely ever to forget. [25 May - 7 Jun 2020, p.3]

This second season may not be as ambitious as the first, but it is very satisfying as a bingeable work of suspense. Seven episodes may seem like a random number, but it’s exactly the number needed to tell the story being told, and I appreciate the commitment to keeping it lean, especially in this age of hashtag–Releasing Snyder Cuts.

When Monae loosens up with Chau (when the material allows it, that is), the series discovers a valuable human element. Conspiracy thrillers can be about people, or they can be about plot, or they can be about both, which is very, very difficult. At its best season two manages both.

It's like one of those movie sequels nobody really asked for, but which proves to be a pleasant surprise.

After one episode, the jury’s still out on whether Season 2 will live up to Season 1’s story and style. But Monáe is definitely good enough to carry the season, and the story may end up going in unexpected directions.

The second season of Homecoming never entirely justifies its own existence. Kyle Patrick Alvarez, who takes over as the director of every episode, doesn’t have predecessor Sam Esmail’s visual flair or his sense of showmanship. ... But the way it tricks its audience into siding with the wrong character is its best and most intriguing trick.

While Homecoming’s second season lacks the intensity and mystery that made season one a hot watch, the acting, the craft, the expansive world building, and the ensuing themes of corporate greed and military malfeasance make this newest installment a worthwhile albeit unrealized capper.

Whereas Homecoming’s initial mystery was engrossing, its second is simply unfocused. It’s not that it’s hard to follow, it’s just hard to figure out why we’re following it like this.

The new season’s second episode picks up the story from season one, untangling confusing character turns and detailing how events came to pass in a brilliantly-executed bit of plot jujitsu that avoids retroactive continuity. ... The remaining five episodes then backfill character information, which fails to be as compelling as season one’s plot.

While things pick up pace in the show’s final episodes, the series never quite reascends to its former glory, and in a season of only seven fairly short episodes, it feels like too little too late.

It’s all watchable but inessential.

Everyone's cobwebbed in a way-too-busy plot that replaces simmering office park absurdity with dystopian triple-reverses. [Jun 2020, p.88]

Unless you’re a diehard Homecoming fan, Season 2 will probably disappoint. It’s not that Homecoming Season 2 isn’t as bingeable or well-acted or stylish as Season 1; it most definitely is all of these things. But after screening several episodes, it’s hard not to come away feeling like you’ve just watched what effectively amounts to a neat little epilogue rather than a continuation of the first season.

When it comes to execution, by constantly pulling the rug out from beneath its audience, the new episodes of “Homecoming” come off as sharply made but cheaply retroactive as a creative storytelling exercise, one that’s far too reliant on structural misdirection.

There are moments of greatness in those three and a half hours, most of them in the engaging performances of the cast. However, one can’t shake the large shadow of the first season. Less narratively ambitious in every way, season two feels like an echo of something that didn’t really need an echo.

“Homecoming” Season 2 created two bad women, one white savior, and turned its innocent hero into someone willing to sacrifice innocents. What a weird way to go.

Season 2 has problems standing on its own. ... Things feel mechanical rather than risky and clandestine, serviceable rather than seductive. ... It’s a forgettable follow-up, no memory-erasing drugs required.

Season 2 of the psychological thriller (streaming Friday in seven episodes) isn’t nearly as captivating or complex as its predecessor. Rather than advance the story significantly (or startlingly), it functions more as an afterthought or a predictable epilogue. And although it adheres to the spooky, paranoid style of the first iteration (minus Roberts’s character, and also minus Sam Esmail’s direction), it simply isn’t mysterious enough to satisfy. Its coolness has gone cold.

The show doesn’t come up with a credible way forward, instead stumbling through familiar story beats with less gusto. It resembles, perhaps, one of its own characters after undergoing the amnesia-inducing treatment at the show’s center — certain of where it is but unclear on why, familiar in appearance but emptied out of spark.