Sense8 Season Two
The super social network returns
released OUT NOW! 2017 | sVOd Creators The Wachowskis, J Michael straczynski Cast doona Bae, Jamie Clayton, Tina desai, Tuppence Middleton
netflix If you like a good montage, Sense8 is your show. As soon as you hear the first few notes of the next track on creator/ writer/director Lana Wachowski’s chill-out mixtape, you know you’re in for another globe-trotting pick’n’mix of stylish slo-mo, showing the series’ impossibly cool and diverse stars in rapturous joy or exquisite sadness.
The central concept of the show makes the montage not just an affectation but a slick storytelling tool. It concerns a cell of eight “Sensates”, all born at exactly the same moment but in various different countries. Not only can they meet up in a kind of mental chatroom, they can also swap skills with each other. The montages show their powers in action, as they come together to celebrate, or use their various talents to help out when one of them is in trouble.
With the first season effectively being an origin story, the full-on eight-person montages only came later on, when all the Sensates had contacted each other. With season two they pop up three or four times an episode. They’re often stylish, clever and audaciously shot (sometimes they require the entire main cast, in various locations around the globe) but after a while you can’t help wishing that the Wachowskis would use them to just tell the
story rather than making each one a mini work of art.
The other two main elements powering Sense8 – its pro-active diversity and its conspiracy arc plot – are both ramped up in season two, but this time around the soapy plots focusing on individual characters are more fun than the rather clunky “bad men in suits have nefarious plans for plucky Sensates” arc.
Bad guy Whispers, who really passed his dramatic sell-by date in season one, is back to scheme some more, but the conspiracy plot offers nothing that we haven’t seen in shows like The 4400 and
Alphas, and it’s no great shame that it vanishes for vast swathes of the season. Even the season finale only seems to remember it exists in the last 15 minutes.
Far more interesting are Capheus’s political ambitions in Nairobi; Lito’s attempts to resurrect his career as a film star in the States after coming out; and Sun Bak’s revenge on her ruthless, daddy-murdering businessman brother in Korea.
You could accuse the show of being rather fairytale in its relentlessly positive representation of its minority characters – honestly, in this show being gay, bisexual or transexual instantly makes you the coolest, most adorable, well-adjusted and sexy people on the planet – but you know what? It’s actually refreshing to see “minority” characters having such fun on TV, instead of experiencing constant angst, so we can forgive a little sugar-coating.
It all makes for a show that’s odd and frustrating, but beguilingly so. Dave Golder
Montages become slick storytelling tools