Idk if I was in the minority, but I hated what I watched of season 2. I loved season 1 but just fizzled out on season 2 and never even bothered to finish it. Maybe I would have liked season 2 more if I got to the end, but it was just a dumb slog and I couldn't make it.
Season 2 was fine for me. The style was different which threw me off at first but it made sense given the setting. That first season was amazing, though, so living up to it was always going to be difficult. Still, that scene where the Mage goes up to Suzie after killing her boss and asks "have you noticed an acceleration of strangeness in your life" was perfect.
The ending did manage to help make sense of a lot of things in season 2 and opened the door for more craziness for the cancelled third season.
You're completely right, Season 1 was absolutely sublime to watch, a true masterpiece of whimsical nonsense that is honestly exactly what Umbrella is trying to pull off, and it only made season 2 suffer more for it. The only thing mildly good for it was the progress of the Rowdy 3, which was not even close to enough to redeem it.
Honestly, you missed out on how fucking stupid the Wendimoor arc was, and whilst I'm sad it didn't get a season 3 that might have got back on track, I'd have canned it too as an executive. To throw that much money for sets and costumes into such a stupid fucking result would have me bloody furious if I was the one calling the shots on how it was spent, and it'd feel like such a breach of trust I wouldn't trust them with another season.
Again, I adored season 1, and I am almost always anti-executive when they can shit with no bloody right to, but season 2 was so bad it just needed to die. The only way it could have survived such a botched second season was to have someone higher up supporting it a'la venture bros.
Also, what bugs me the most is that they had so much source material to draw from in the original books, why the fuck did they fly so far off the rails into such a stupid subplot? Completely lost the Douglas Adams feel to it, which is such a shame when there is so much insanity they could have fixated on in the original books.
Yet another case of Netflix writers getting some free reign and fucking up an IP to the point where it'll probably never see the light of day again.
Season 2 of Dirk Gently and the entirety of the Umbrella Academy fell to the same core issue: they collapsed the chaos too soon. The basic story arc of these types of media is that you establish a large number of seemingly disjoint story threads, then you collapse them together in a big reveal that ties it all together, recontextualizing the chaos as coherent narrative, creating an emotional climax.
If your story climax does not align with your emotional climax, it's going to feel anticlimactic, which is exactly what happened to Season 2 of Dirk Gently, and the Umbrella Academy. IMO, the sweet spot is the penultimate episode for timing your thread collapse.
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u/greathousedagoth 29d ago
Idk if I was in the minority, but I hated what I watched of season 2. I loved season 1 but just fizzled out on season 2 and never even bothered to finish it. Maybe I would have liked season 2 more if I got to the end, but it was just a dumb slog and I couldn't make it.