Series one of this paranoid near-future drama had two things going for it.
The first, which now seems more important than the second, was Julia Roberts. The film star, her allure dimmed, her hair square, added to the show’s off-kilter geometry. The second thing, which seemed refreshing, but is now degraded by repetition, was the jumbled plot.
That, too, was wobbly, because the show was about manipulated memories. The narrative was based on a podcast, so it played out with the peculiar rhythms of that medium.
Season two floats more freely, but is still about misty perception. Structurally, it retains the podcast dynamics, starting boldly, digressing, and trying to maintain interest with the selective release of information, in episodes which fade. The endings feel like beginnings. They are cliff-hangers in reverse. This should be more-ish, but those long credit-rolls are a high-risk strategy when the story is spread so thin.
Oh, the story. The opening moment, at least, is captivating. Janelle Monáe, whose character name is withheld here to protect a spoiler, wakes up in a rowing boat, knowing nothing. She’s in the middle of nowhere, confused. (Viewers are advised to enjoy this sensation.) She doesn’t know her name, or her address. She has a tattoo on her arm that she doesn’t recognise. And she thinks to herself: well, how did I get here?
Good question. The answer unfolds in flashback. Knowledge of the first series helps with the reconstruction of this cryptic jigsaw, though it doesn’t necessarily overcome the show’s reluctance to start making sense.
Would Monáe’s character, freshly liberated from her lost rowboat, really hop in a car with a stranger and start retracing her steps? If she did, because she’s inherently sharp and feisty, wouldn’t she be more wary of this paranoid weirdo and his rants about “the powers that be”? Well, maybe.
Homecoming takes dreamy confusion and injects it with vogue-ish paranoia. It is a twilight mirror, a black zone, deploying a Cold War mindset in a corporate now. There’s a mysterious bag of cat kibble in the trunk of a car, and the billboards are adorned with the slogan Get Over It.
What’s new and what’s not? Monáe’s character gets to be morally ambiguous, a feminist triumph which also permits her to have a lesbian love interest to manipulate in an evil hustle against the shadowy Geist corporation.
Geist was implicated in a military brainwashing scheme in the first series, and the baffled soldier Walter Cruz (Stephan James) is still stotting around, wondering where it all went wrong.
“I got this big hole where the world was,” he says, which is an identifiable sentiment, at least. Is it him we’re supposed to be rooting for? Maybe. Or possibly it’s Geist’s Dude-like wreck of a boss (Chris Cooper) who eats “nine-grain mush” while trying to do the right thing. “It’s not good or anything,” he says, “but you won’t be hungry for days.”
Homecoming is streaming on Amazon Video now
