Trying to get my outfits together and have a few questions. I know the PJ party and Scarlet night is pretty much guaranteed to happen. But what about We Fancy and the 80s party? Should I buy outfits for that now or should I wait until events are confirmed in June? (My cruise is in August). It’s a 5 night sailing.
First off, I enjoyed it. I see some viewpoints that say this was a terrible direction for the series to go in and I just don’t agree. I do think the show is trying to find its footing after having such an amazing first season. And I really think we should give it a chance to do that. I can see why it can be harder to do that with an anthology series because you’re not picking up where it was left off. It’s a whole new storyline, characters, etc. And a part of that is also for the audience to be able to detach from the last season and it’s kind of hard to just “detach” from it when you have a show where its theme requires hard hitting, emotionally relatable characters. And that is the beginning of the problem for season 2.
I think why this season failed to help the audience transition from the first season is that the characters just aren’t as fleshed out from the first season. What I mean is we don’t really learn or go deeper into why the characters are the way they are. Without this, it’s hard to relate to them. We don’t really get something new that’s worth attaching to. (So how can we detach from the last cast while watching the new one?). All the frustrating aspects are there. But none of the deep understanding as to why these characters frustrate us and how our frustration stems from how emotionally relatable it all really is. Otherwise, it’s just a show with terrible people making terrible decisions. Which I can still watch and I think can still be interesting. But I feel like it’s missing the ethos of the what this series specifically is trying to present.
We learn about Ashley’s parents being divorced and leading to her feeling abandoned towards the ending of the series and that’s why she’s holding on so hard onto Austin by any means necessary. When learning about this it just feels like a quick, random drop of information. I know this was implied in the hospital scene. But still, it just doesn’t feel like a satisfying explanation because of the way this (what should be) important piece of information was treated and expressed. It just feels like there was not much build up to this information. Her character also doesn’t really get anymore fleshed out past that. There’s so much more I feel that’s missing from her character that I just can’t find the words for at the moment.
For Austin, It would’ve been interesting to go deeper into his backstory as a mixed person and his experience being disconnected from one side of his heritage. I wish this aspect of his story was explored more outside of Eunice. But the way it’s treated just feels like it’s only used as a device for Ashley’s plight. He’s never made to feel like an important character outside of Ashley and I guess you could say that’s the point, but i feel like more could’ve been done here.
Josh & Lindsay. We don’t get much of a backstory on either of them. It just feels like two needlessly toxic people in a toxic relationship. Once again, Josh’s backstory is garnished here and there but we really don’t learn much. We don’t really get ANYTHING on Lindsay so I don’t even know what I can say.
I guess the common theme of my gripe here is that these characters aren’t explored outside of their relationships or their connections with each other. With season 1, it felt like both main characters had an existence outside of each other even though they were interconnected. I think the problem is that there four main characters here to keep up with leading to some constraints with what they could explore.
In the end, it doesn’t feel like there’s any true emotional resolution for these characters. None of these characters hit hard. However I did like the storyline and I think if the character development was there and some more runtime, the storyline could’ve ran much farther.
It was still a very entertaining to watch. And I don’t think it should be dismissed as a terrible season. But I think as apart of the Beef of the universe, the soul of Beef just did not translate very well here making the transition hard to make for a lot of people.