Homecoming

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.