Into the Night Season 2 review: Manufactured thrills dampen an exciting setup-Entertainment News , Firstpost


The hitch with this follow-up season is that unlike the first time round, it seems they had to invent obstacles all over the place, just to keep the thrill going.

Still from Into The Night

*Note: Minor spoilers from Seasons 1 & 2 ahead*

The first season of the Belgian Netflix series Into the Night had me hooked. A bunch of passengers are forced to circle the globe in order to escape a killer sun. Arriving when much of the real world was locked down last year, its mysterious apocalyptic premise promised much, and the show was paced fast enough for one to overlook most leaps of logic it took. It showed once again that a show might not be great, but it can still be immensely binge-worthy. 

The season ended on a cliff-hanger that really set things up, when Sylvie and her fellow passengers finally made it to the safety of an underground bunker under a dam in Bulgaria. Season 2 kicks off a little after the point at which the show left us. The passengers have joined the existing inhabitants of the bunker – mostly a group of NATO soldiers – to fashion some sort of a life here. 

Now, daytime is when they sleep. The solace of the night is when they get out and forage for items of survival. In any form of dystopia, you would expect humankind to go back to a crude version of its long-forgotten hunter-gatherer days. Fresh food does not exist out in the world anymore; the sun destroyed it all along with any forms of life that were exposed. The commander of the NATO forces tells us that a few disparate groups around the world are trying to figure out a solution to the sun dilemma. But that is all there is on that front. They tell us that somewhere, something is possibly being done. Nothing is shown, nothing else is implied.

Unfortunately, the hitch with this follow-up season is that unlike the first time round, when the problem facing them was genuinely terrifying at its core, this time it seems they had to invent obstacles all over the place, just to keep the thrill going.

The new entrants on the show – a couple of politicians and a few soldiers – add their own layer to the dynamic between the group that is forced to live under one roof. You would expect there to be basic trust issues between these intrinsically different types – the ruling class, the serving class, and the civilian citizenry. The societal lines between them are erased when they are confined together in this most unexpected manner. Indeed, that does become one of the tracks pursued in this season. 

Even among the two politicians, you see two different kinds of leaders – the idealist and the realist. One attempts to motivate through words and example. The other will say or do what it takes to survive and keep the peace. The soldiers, on their part, retreat to the safety and comfort of their own code. It begs the question: Does that code have any value when the world that created it has been upended beyond any realm of recognition? And the common folk, it seems, are still unable to see beyond their own self-centered view of existence.

There is a lot of meat and juice to be extracted from this setup, but the conflicts are still manufactured. It might have been a stroke of genius, had the show changed tracks from being a breathless thriller to becoming a survivalist drama that explored how people evolve and adapt emotionally in this grim new world. In attempting to be both, the show tends to suffer. 

So, for instance, the Russian woman Zara and her ill son Dominik are trapped in a generator room that no one is able to break into. For them to survive, the generator must be turned off. And that would threaten the survival of everyone else at the bunker. There is a debate about how the mother-son duo are probably the least useful among the survivors, so there is no point risking everyone’s life for theirs. 

It is an interesting thing to thrash out, but it turns into a whole episode with a flurry of action but not much substance. Groups splinter off and to look for solutions outside their bunker, while some stay behind to juice out some emotion. Instead of a thought-provoking debate on this prickly moral issue, you only have time for people to respond to a disagreement with a quick, “You know who else did/said that? The Nazis.” There is not much moral nuance you can explore once you reach there. (Granted, it may just be too complex an issue for Binge TV to tackle with sensitivity.)

In a later episode, one of the other manufactured problems on the show is a bipolar woman who has been off her medication for a while, now living in complete isolation in the global seed vault in Svalbard, Norway. (This is a real thing, by the way. And it is fascinating.). I do not want to get into specifics of why and how Gia becomes a problem for the survivors, but the manner in which it is treated does not do justice to the subtleties of mental health. There is an attempt at sensitivity, yes. But there is something disconcerting about the way Gia’s entire storyline is treated. Surely, after a killer sun, they could think of something more imaginative to hold the characters up.

To be fair, the entire track about Svalbard is one of the interesting angles taken forward in this season. That, in combination with the conflicts back at the Bulgaria bunker, helps lead the season to yet another intriguing end, with whole new possibilities for a next season (if it works out). That sun quandary is still the most intriguing aspect of the show, so here is hoping there is some progress on that front, with a more satisfying approach to the show the next time round.

Into The Night Season 2 is streaming on Netflix.



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