Dark, delicious and twisted: Wednesday Addams is back for another season of sowing misery and chaos in her wake.
This season, fresh from saving Nevermore Academy from total destruction, Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) has a new quest. Or, actually, several. She needs to solve the mystery of why flocks of crows are killing people, figure out why her psychic powers are on the blink and find out who her stalker actually is.
Oh, and that’s without reckoning with the new headmaster of the school, Dort (Steve Buscemi), and the sinister plans he may or may not have to get funding flowing in. Plus, it seems like Enid might end up dead at some point, possibly at Wednesday’s hand – so there’s that to stop.
Unfortunately, we’re not likely to find out the answers to most of these questions until part two drops on September 3, but we certainly did get a few answers, and a fair few more intriguing plot hooks.
Here’s how part one unfolds – and how it ends. Spoilers ahead, naturally.
Who is the Avian?
A large part of the season two mystery has revolved around who’s been killing people around the town of Jericho. A private investigator called Carl Bradbury was the first to die, followed by the former sheriff Galpin, Tyler’s father: both of them had their eyes pecked out, and dead crows were found around the crime scene.
After some sleuthing, Wednesday finds out the pair were looking into several cases of missing Outcasts, stretching back years. All the cases seemed to be connected to the word ‘Lois’, as well as Willow Hill, a psychiatric facility for Outcasts led by Dr Fairburn (Thandiwe Newton). Just to make things extra interesting, that’s also where the Hyde, Tyler (Hunter Doohan), is currently being held.
As for the crows? They were being directed by an Avian: somebody with the power to control birds. As Wednesday finds out, Avians are incredibly rare, and none have attended Nevermore for a decade or more.
At the end of part one, we find out that the Avian is none other than Dr. Fairburn’s assistant, Judi ( Heather Matarazzo). Judi is the daughter of somebody called Augustus Stonehurst (an inmate in the facility). He was a normie, who was fascinated by Outcasts (he wrote the book on them, in fact) – to the extent he locked his daughter in an Aviary to make her into one. Spooky.
What is Lois?
Wednesday’s investigations into Lois take a fresh turn when her grandmother Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley) tells her the remains of some supposedly dead Outcasts incarcerated at Willow Hill were faked. According to Hester, she needs to find somebody called Augustus Stonehurst, who will tell her more.
Wednesday calls in the troops (by which she means her Uncle Fester) to infiltrate Willow Hill.
Fester causes a scene in the local hotel and is duly taken to Willow Hill. There, he finds Stonehurst, who is mute and sitting in a room of birds. Fester is then captured by the staff, so Wednesday, her sidekick Agnes and Enid break into try and free him.
Fester, it turns out, also has more information on Lois. Turns out, it’s not a person, but a testing facility (the letters stand for Long-term Outcast Integration Study). It’s here that Outcasts are being kept and tested on. The facility created fake bodies to fool the world into thinking they were dead, when actually, they’d been locked up – some for more than 15 years.
In Lois, the gang run into Judi, who reveals her true colours. Fester attempts to electrocute her, only to trip the electricity for the entire facility and free all the patients. Oops. In all the chaos, Judi is also presumed dead, but let’s not count our ravens before they hatch.
What happens to Tyler?
If anybody has had the opposite of a redemption arc this season, it’s Tyler. Revealed in the closing moments of season one to be the monstrous Hyde who’s been killing people, he ends up locked up in Willow Hill, pretty much chained to the wall.
An early interaction with Wednesday proves he’s not changed at all – in fact, he hates her. Episode four begins with Miss Thornhill (Christina Ricci), his former master, being transferred to Willow Hill, presumably so further tests can be run on the pair of them.
Instead, when Fester blows the electrics on the entire facility, Tyler breaks free, kills Miss Thornhill and throws Wednesday out of a window. He then bounds off into the night – seems like he’s going to be a problem.
Is Wednesday… dead?
At the very end of episode four, Wednesday ends up being thrown from a second-storey window by Tyler. It looks painful, possibly even fatal.
"I’ve always dreamed of looking death in the face,” she narrates as she lies there, motionless. “But in my final moments, all I can hear is my mother's words ringing in my ears. Maybe I have made everything worse. Much worse." Is she dead? Unlikely: the series is called Wednesday, after all. Stay tuned.
What happens to Bianca?
One of the other big plot threads from the season so far concerns Bianca (Joy Sunday), the siren former Queen Bee. As it turns out, she appears to have rescued her mother from a cult of some kind and is keeping her hidden away in a local hotel.
Over the course of the series, Bianca also falls foul of Headmaster Dort, who blackmails her into using her siren powers to get Nevermore Academy more funding. Bianca, who is a scholarship student, clearly feels she needs to keep her place at the school – which results in her charming Morticia.
However, when Fester makes a fuss at the hotel and gets arrested, the police search the place and find Bianca’s mother. Though Bianca then uses her powers to free her mother, she’s interrupted by Dort – which no doubt means he’s got something unpleasant in store for her.
What about that zombie?
By far one of the season’s last satisfying storylines has been the Slurp one. Pugsley, freshly arrived at Nevermore, wastes no time sneaking to the mysterious Skull Tree in the middle of the night and using his electricity powers to resurrect the skeleton sleeping underneath it.
Or zombie, rather. Chained inside the bee-keeping shed, he quickly breaks free and develops and appetite for human flesh. Soon enough, he’s sent to Willow Hill, but breaks free in the final confrontation and starts eating people.
As he’s about to chow down on Stonehurst, he says, “Hello old friend” – and that’s it. Who is he really? I guess we’ll have to wait.
Wednesday S2, part one is streaming now on Netflix, with part two airing on September 3
