The Returned: L'enfant

March 14, 2016 12:44 PM - Season 2, Episode 1

They're ba-ack!

It's six months after the flood, and the military has the town under lock down. Adèle is having nightmares about the zombie-baby, Léna and Jérôme are estranged, both still trying to cope with recent events, Serge is still skulking about the woods, and Pierre is still running his pseudo-commune at the Helping Hand.

And now the dead have started to return. Lucy and Simon collect the ones they can and bring them to a village across the water. Camille and Claire take in Audrey, another girl from the bus crash. And Julie and Victor are joined by Victor's mother.

posted by kanewai (2 comments total)

I loved the first season of the show, and I loved the use of Mogwai together with the beautiful slowness of camera movement to highlight the creeping return to bodily life of all those ghosts presumed buried but not forgotten. However, the first episode of the second season seemed kind of confused in what it wanted to achieve, and concentrating almost entirely on the (un)dead took away from the suspense so integral to the first season. It simply seemed that they've no longer anywhere to go. Okay, they literally don't have anywhere to go, being a series of returns and circles around the same motif of being forced to live in a place where life in all its required passion is quite impossible. The undead are not dangerous, they are simply miserable - a feeling that sits well with the shows overall tone. But ... I have the creeping feeling that this aspect is taken too seriously here, and that they cannot find a way out: while we were watching, my wife asked something like, 'why couldn't one of the characters occasionally conjure up a smile?' After that remark I couldn't get rid of seeing everything that was happening as being acted out with a forced seriousness - like the characters acted under a ban of even the smallest enjoyment. Okay, this is probably finally where I wanted to go with all this: it tries too hard to be the same show as the one three years before. And perhaps it ends up being even more the same show, taken to its extreme, to near-deadness together with the leading characters.

Okay, I know it seems that I have only bad things to say. But I have nothing against the 'unrelenting gloom', as AV Club puts it. And it is still awfully beautiful. And it is still extremely well acted. Just, the good bits do not take so much effort to explain to myself. Let's see to where and from where the season returns in its end (beginning?).
posted by sapagan at 3:59 AM on March 15, 2016

It was a strange episode for me. The first season felt very organic and natural. Or rather, this one supernatural thing happened, but everyone's reactions felt realistic. This time I kept thinking: why are they acting like that? It felt more plot driven.

I still enjoyed it quite a bit; I just need to adjust to the new tone.
posted by kanewai at 11:48 AM on March 15, 2016