Today, I (like others) got to absorb the final, four episodes of Netflix/MGM's Wednesday: Season 2 (see August reflection for the first set, which includes a cast rundown).
The crafty continuation veered from Season 1's Kolchak/Scooby-Doo formula, with focus falling on the Catherine Zeta-Jones/Jenna Ortega's mother/daughter conflict and its bumpy remediation (punctured by Wednesday's temporary, psychic depletion), matched by a midway, comatose gimmick with a splash of sporadic Dickens (ushered by Gwendoline Christie's Larissa Weems) and spliced with the coverup tactics of Heather Matarazzo's sneaky Judi Spannagel of Willow Hill Psychiatric Facility. How's that for a mouthful!
With that said, I found Wednesday: Season 2 to stand more on a socio-cultural platform than the previous stretch, even with its teased quandary of Hyde vengeance; Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez)'s kidnapping; an attached Thing's rebellious streak; a Bub-ish/Tarman, mad-scientist ascent (courtesy of Owen Painter's "slurp"-ish portrayal); a fleeting, Freaky Friday rift; and sealing it off, the general, Charles Addams/Can't Take It With You, cartoon/sitcom quirks. Well, what do ya know! An even bigger mouthful!
If the truth be known, the key to Season 2's saturating flavor is buried in Season 1 and was woven through the sequel's first half, pressed by Steve Buscemi's dorky, Frump-finagling Barry Dort, who at a celebratory event labels Bruce Springsteen an "outcast" when the rough-voiced staple is indisputably mainstream and to the ho-hum degree (i.e. he's sure not the macabre-oriented vaudevillian one finds in Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie or Ozzy Osbourne), which only proves that perceptions of pop-communal derision can be fired from any prejudicial trajectory.
The Nevermore Academy (a Hogswarts with freakin' fangs) is an excellent example of this, with the school accommodating so many special factions (for one, Emma Myers' Enid and her fellow lycanthropes, overseen by Billy Piper's wolfpack connoisseur, Isadora Capri), and though all pockets should mesh, they possess the same contradictory, competitive rifts and short-sightedness that the "normies" do. However, the normies may be more outcasts than not in this melodramatic twist.
For example, Part 1's Anthony Michael Hall's Ron Kruger, who guides the Phoenix Cad Scouts, is more of an outsider/underdog than any Nevermore resident. And what of Hunter Doohan's Tyler "the Hyde" Galpin, so prominent in both seasons? He's a ferocious monster for sure, enough that I'd take my chances with taskmaster Kruger any day over that impulsive, bug-eyed beast, let alone Frances O'Connor's domineering, bug-eyed mom.
Yes, indeed, this cultural contrasting, whether forged by accident or plan (by a pure flip of my imagination or Tim Burton and his fellow producers' clever intent) came to color my thinking of Wednesday in a personal way. Season 2, that is, forced me to recall my own plights within the so-called outcast faction, where its members have come across as obnoxious, selfish and apt to belittle others to cloak their own flaws. Heck, give me the boisterous, beer-bellied, football fan on a Sunday afternoon over any callous, imagi-fiction snob, and trust me, members of the former are most plentiful. I'd even go so far to say that they're now as mainstream as mainstream can get.
As fascinating as this notion is (if, again, I'm reading it right), I'd prefer that Wednesday stress an uncluttered, detective path, but if that's not to be, an Uncle Fester series, with Fred Armisen doing a kind of Monk thing, would work as well. There are hints of the prospect in Wednesday. Perhaps they were planted in anticipation and if so, how excellent!
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