Wednesday Season 2 Review
Shastine Matsunaga Nol ‘26 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
Spoilers Ahead.
After a three year wait, Wednesday and the Addams family are back with more mayhem and murder just in time for the beginning of fall. Wednesday season two chronicles Wednesday’s (Jenna Ortega) second year at Nevermore, as she tracks down stalkers and digs up more of her family’s (literally) buried history. Season two is not shy with the horror, and introduces several new foes for Wednesday, her friends, and her family.
Fan-favorite characters return, including Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers), Bianca Barclay (Joy Sunday), and Larissa Weems (Gwendoline Christie), who continues to provide excellent banter—even in the afterlife. There are also several new additions to the ensemble cast. Pugsley Addams (Isaac Ordonez), finally enters his first year at Nevermore. Agnes DeMille (Evie Templeton) is a superfan of Wednesday who uses her ability to turn invisible to learn as much as possible about her idol. Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi) is Nevermore’s new principal with a cheery exterior hiding something more sinister within.
But for as exciting as it is, the second season of Wednesday has a rather lackluster and sometimes convoluted plot. The amount of interweaving storylines and characters muddles the story to the point where characters and important plot points begin to slip through the cracks, and the characters begin to lose the things that made them who they are.
When we meet Wednesday at the beginning of season two, she tracks down a serial killer and hands him over to the authorities. It immediately throws the audience into Wednesday’s twisted, psychotic world, but at the same time it is incredibly uncharacteristic because Wednesday should not have let him live. An integral part of her character that makes her so iconic is her fascination with death and murder.
Yet this is not a new issue with the series. Season one leaned into the teen high-school drama type of show, which led to a lot of tropes of the genre being implemented that didn’t quite mesh with the tone of the Addams family. For instance, there is a heavy focus on romance, putting Wednesday in a love triangle that never quite resolved. Season two does away with the romance, instead leaning into the horror and Addams Family hijinks. Wednesday is once again solving a mystery, but really it is at least three different mysteries, each leading to the next. She is hindered by the loss of her psychic ability due to overuse over the summer, and she attempts to get it back in increasingly more desperate and dangerous ways. Unfortunately, for such an important plot point, its introduction is incredibly weak. We never really get to see the extent to which she overused her powers, and what we do get to see is only shown briefly in the montage of her summer activities that opens the season.
It does open the door for an interesting dynamic with her mother. Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) takes away Wednesday’s book about her psychic ability in an attempt to save her from overusing her power to the point of no return. This causes a rift to form between mother and daughter as Wednesday is determined to get the book back, as she sees it as the only way to restore her ability. While this makes for some excellent banter between the two, and an interesting study of their relationship, the resolution falls short in the end. They find themselves working together to save Pugsley, but it ends up being a rather generic moment of being forced to work together and put aside their differences, rather than an actual culmination of their arcs throughout the season.
Wednesday does not get her power back, at least not in full. Instead, Larissa Weems, the late principal of Nevermore becomes her new spirit guide for the second half of season two. This provides comedy banter between Wednesday and Weems, whose stubborn guidance leads Wednesday true even if Wednesday is reluctant to take it. Morticia and Larissa, former roommates and fierce rivals, also have a heartfelt reunion, thanks to Morticia’s ability to sense Larissa’s spirit lingering around.
All of this is spurred by Wednesday’s final vision before losing her ability; which foretells that she will be responsible for her best friend Enid’s death. As a result, Wednesday pushes hard to get the book, and by association her ability, back. She also prevents Enid from helping her in an attempt to keep her away from danger. Instead, all she really does is push Enid away, and hurt her as a result. In concept, this is a really interesting idea, yet the execution ends up pushing Enid out of the larger narrative. Enid instead spends the season becoming more ingrained with the werewolf pack at Nevermore following her first transformation at the end of season one. She meets a werewolf named Bruno (Noah B. Taylor) who she develops a relationship with over the course of the season. Furthermore, she learns that she is an Alpha wolf, which explains why she is a late bloomer and sets up for a climactic moment at the end of the season. More than anything, however, it is a superficial way to make her more significant than her werewolf brethren. But this goes against one of the biggest themes of Wednesday as a show: individuality.
From the beginning of the show, Wednesday is an outcast among outcasts. Every iteration of Wednesday Addams portrays her as standing out from the crowd by choice, and this version is no different. Enid’s character in season one models this as well. She was an outcast in her own community because she was a late bloomer and didn’t think she would transform at all. Instead of letting it bring her down, she takes it in stride and refuses to define herself based on other people’s expectations. And season two continues this theme with Agnes, who, desperate to please her idol, studies Wednesday by stalking her and tries to become a perfect carbon copy of her. By the end of the season, she learns that people like her for who she is, and that trying to become Wednesday is not the way to make people appreciate her. And this only emphasizes the fact that there will only ever be one Wednesday Addams.
The same cannot be said about Enid, however, who, by the beginning of season two, is enjoying finally being part of the pack following her transformation at the end of season one. In a lot of ways, this goes against her entire character arc from season one. In fact, I don’t think she should have transformed at all. For her to go through an entire season of defining herself beyond the expectations placed on her only for her to meet those expectations anyways felt like a betrayal of her character. To then build on this in season 2 only makes her personal uniqueness feel less important, and then to give her a superficial reason to be different from her werewolf brethren makes it feel like her uniqueness doesn’t matter at all. Additionally, Enid is constantly sidelined due to Wednesday’s need to protect her, and ends up being overlooked for myriad other convoluted plotlines.
Wednesday goes up against no less than four different adversaries, all intertwined to the point where it can be hard to keep track of. As a result, the characters are also not given enough room to develop in interesting or meaningful ways before they are killed off or the plot moves to a new character. She starts off tracking her stalker from the very end of season one, who is revealed to be Agnes. This investigation puts her on the trail of a mysterious outcast with the ability to control birds (Heather Matarazzo), which leads her to a psychiatric hospital. Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan), the main villain of season two and Wednesday’s first flame, is being held there, along with his mother (Frances O’Conner) whom Wednesday frees later in the season, unaware of who she is.
Meanwhile, Pugsley, who is struggling to make friends at Nevermore, goes into the woods to dig up a dead body but ends up reviving it instead with his lightning ability as its heart has been replaced with clockwork. The walking corpse roams around eating people until it becomes a fully formed man who is revealed to be Tyler’s uncle Isaac (Owen Painter) who died while still at Nevermore trying to remove his sister’s (Tyler’s mom) Hyde which is slowly killing her. And he is also Gomez (Luis Guzman)’s best friend who tricked him into participating in the fatal experiment. Gomez survived, but lost his outcast ability. Oh, and Thing, as it turns out, is actually Isaac’s right hand, which got cut off by Morticia in an attempt to save Gomez and became sentient in the aftermath of the incident.
It’s a lot, right? And this is to say nothing of a subplot in which Principal Dort manipulates Bianca into using her siren song to convince Hester Frump, Wednesday’s Grandmama and Morticia’s mother to donate her riches to Nevermore, with the intention of taking it himself. To make it even more complicated, this ties into a briefly mentioned plot point from season one concerning Bianca’s mother (Gracy Goldman) who refused to leave a manipulative cult that, in season two, is revealed to be created by Dort. While many of the disparate elements come together in the end in what is, for the most part, a satisfying conclusion, it begins to feel overwhelming pretty quickly. It becomes difficult to keep track of all of the storylines, and characters and plot points can be easily lost in the chaos. To my point, there are still more characters such as Ajax (Georgie Farmer) and Eugene (Moosa Mostafa) that are important to the plot but so much happens that they easily fall through the cracks.
Regardless of all of my criticism, I still thoroughly enjoyed Wednesday season two. It may be extremely messy, but that doesn’t prevent it from being extremely fun. Its exaggerated nature combined with the consistently funny banter and the ongoing mysteries, which, despite their flaws, kept me consistently engaged and entertained. The horror is, as previously mentioned, ramped up, and it is spectacular. Wednesday, despite not being quite as homicidal as she should be, is still witty and quick with a clever insult always at the ready; Enid is still as cheerful and colorful as ever, despite lacking the thematic flavor she had in season one. And season two has one of my favorite episodes of the show, where Wednesday and Enid switch bodies for a day, and Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers’ acting shine. The rest of the cast are as unique and quirky as ever, and the new additions only enhance this aspect of the show. Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) makes his seasonal appearance, which is, as always, full of comedy and chaos. All in all, Wednesday season two may not be perfect, but it was still a fantastic time.