From Season Two: An Incomprehensible Season Full of Superfluous Characters and Dispensable Story Arcs

*MILD SPOILERS*

As a fan of From: Season 1, I was happy to get a hold of these screeners as I was interested to see where the story was progressing to.

Unfortunately, the amount of side stories and characters that are overstuffed into Season 2, left literally everything baffling with barely any perceivable movement forward until the very end.

Trying to do too much at once

From Season 2 begins with all of the characters we were used to from Season 1, reeling from the loss of Jim (Elon Bailey) and Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) Matthew’s home and the failed attempt to make contact with Jim’s radio idea.

Tabitha is haunted by images of ghostly children since emerging from the caves, which sets off her story arc trying to figure out what they may be trying to tell her.

Boyd (Harold Perrineau) returns from the other world he was stuck in, infested with paranormal worms and bugs while he also has to be everywhere at once trying to create some sense of normalcy among the people.

Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) is struggling with the return of her lover Mari, (Kaelen Ohm) who is learning to navigate the town and her addiction compulsions, whilst being the only “doctor” in the town.

Just as we were starting to learn more about the original characters in Season 1, a new busload of people show up early in the season. This begins the full on chaos that plagues the season, taxes and bores the audience and unleashes countless side stories, making the whole thing utterly bewildering.

In All honesty…

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From: Season Two was simply too much and not enough at the same time.

There were some interesting revelations this season, and we got to investigate a little with the original characters, finding out more about the creatures that terrorize the residents every night, and the new dimensions within the town and neighboring areas, that are slowly illuminating all of the different components surrounding the town and its mysteries.

The problems mostly stem from the writing/planning of the season, and it’s insistence of juggling far too many characters at once. When writing an ensemble piece, it’s important that writers design characters to fulfill the needs of the story and the script, incorporating less characters that are just “there”.

It is no easy task for writers to integrate large groups of characters to begin with, so the writer needs to have a focused, unfettered plan ahead of time that sets characters strategically to further the story and add to the ultimate task of drawing it to its main conclusion. In films, this can become more of a challenge than in series, because a series gets much more time to lay it out in detail.

Series such as Game of Thrones, with its vast amount of characters, finding time to section off each character throughout the season can prove difficult. Game of Thrones was successful because they managed to give each character some personal time throughout each season, that not only kept the pace with all the others, but also gave the audience time to get more involved.

For From: Season Two, adding an entirely new busload of people to an already large ensemble cast was a huge mistake. There already wasn’t enough for side characters to do in Season 1. We needed at least one more season with just the Season One cast, adding more depth into each character and giving each of them explicit requirements and movement within the story realm.

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Because that care was seemingly not taken in From Season Two, we see extraneous characters that become nuisances and suck time away from the focus of the original idea. Colony House is brimming over with people who spend most of the series trying to be pertinent and aggravating what the original characters were already doing before.

The acting suffers profoundly as too many people try to find their place in the circus, again paring down on time and development of the original characters.

Ellis (Corteon Moore) and Fatima (Pegah Ghafoori), were waysided this season, and diminished into paltry Hallmark-like, cheesy lovers. Fatima had a much larger presence in Season One and was entirely necessary to the well being of the residents of the house. Why not expand her from there?

We now have to deal with idiocrasy like Randall (A.J. Simmons), who causes more preposterous problems by not listening to anyone and, superbly annoying ones like Tillie (Deborah Grover) who just randomly pokes herself into everything, giving out pointless advice that no one asked for.

I’m not sure what purpose either of them served or will serve, but so far, that’s more time that should’ve been used for expounding upon the more interesting, core themes of Season One. Most of the scenes in Colony House this season were talky and utterly boring.

Boyd was used in so many places where he “needed” to be, many times just showing up, leaving me wondering where he came from. To top that off, the supernatural disease Boyd brings in to Season Two, becomes an additional “plague” of sorts, for the people to deal with, sidelining the night creatures, and setting Boyd on yet another side story dealing with a music box entity.

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This season reminded me of The Walking Dead: Season Two, where one of the producers had the “brilliant” idea of cutting the budget, leaving practically no zombie action whatsoever and putting to the side the entire point of the show.

From Season Two’s obsession with adding “more”, ends up sidelining the entire point of the show that was building in Season One, lollygagging itself into reckless obscurity.

Where is this show going? Is Season Three going to bring in two more busloads so the series can go completely off the rails? I personally am not down for it. They had such an intriguing concept that it’s sad to see it veer off into something so disorganized and poorly executed.

Less is definitely the “more” that this series was looking for.