"The A List" S2: From Teen Thriller to Supernatural Mess

Platform: Netflix

Release Date: June 25, 2021

After being initially developed and released by BBC back in 2018, "The A List" was released internationally on Netflix in 2019 where it garnered a much larger following. When BBC decided not to continue with the British teen thriller, Netflix stepped in and took over the show for the second season which premiered late last month. Now three years since its initial release, the show hopes to pull back fans who, like me, have likely forgotten everything that happened in the first season. So, if you are returning to the show or do not care to watch the (superior) first season, here is a quick synopsis of its craziness.

"The A List" takes place during a summer camp on Peregrine Island, where Mia meets her match in Amber, with both vying to be it-girl of the summer. But when Mia's friend, Kayleigh, jumps ship to become Amber's right hand girl, Mia begins to notice others acting strangely and uniting against her. The island holds a mystery that traces back to the year prior, when a loner girl named Midge died at the camp which everyone except Amber attended, but no one can remember. As Amber builds up to her plan of ridding herself of Mia, a few campers band together with Mia to uncover the truth behind Amber and escape off the island. Of course, this is a teen drama, so there is plenty of love, lust, and betrayal mixed in. What is discovered is that after Midge died, her body was recovered and injected with a chemical unique to the island's plants, animosine, which causes her to be able to shapeshift into Amber and gain psychic abilities. This was performed and covered up by an unknown scientific organization for which one of the camp counselors worked. Not only that, but the season concludes with Midge somehow becoming separated from Amber, with both now being individual living beings. The season ends with the cliffhanger of the ressurected Midge confronting Mia, Amber, and her friends.

This second season comes with a few changes, such as recasting Mia's main love interest Dev (which really threw me off since there is a hallucinatroy componenet to the show). Netflix also made the season better fit their typical mold, reducing the episode count from 13 episodes to 8, each sticking to the 20-25 mins run from season one. Where I would look at season one as carrying the feeling of a “Lost,” the second season feels more like a “Twin Peaks” action drama, mixing a more focused good vs evil with unconventional aspects to drive a supernatural narrative.

This season picks up wth Mia back at home, where she has been led to believe that the happenings on the island were all a hallucination due to chemical gases. Once a former camp counselor reaches out with information about the whereabouts of her friends, Mia jumps right onto the rescue train to break her friends out of the secret facility in which they are being held in. Oh, and the facility just happens to be back on Peregrine Island. With Harry and Petal in tow, Mia returns to the island only to find that she will need Amber's help to rescue her friends. Meanwhile, in the facility, Midge is growing slowly unstable, with her powers continuing to manifest and grow. As the escape plan comes together, Mia learns the origin of Midge's hate for her. As Midge's reasons appear to remain validated in the present, she conjures her own plan of escape and plans to steal Mia's body. With a plan to shut down Midge's powers for good, the group scrambles together a plan that requires an Amber with a change of heart, but she may not survive the ordeal.

While the series sounds a bit crazy, the first season was much less sci-fi than it sounds, as they kept it as grounded as possible within the pseudo-science they created. Amber's psychic abilities were never made to look flashy like a superpower and it came off more like the popular girl influence than her being an X-Men villain. Season two takes that grounded approach and throws it out the window, turning the island into a supernatural phenomenon. There are island spirits manifesting themselves and a mystical glowing crystal that gives the island, Amber, and Midge their powers. Amber and Midge meet in a psychic mind palace that gave a similar feeling to the Red Room in Twin Peaks. Rather than lay into the teen, character-focused structure that made season one a success, season two tried to become more of a grand scale superhero show, relying more on science fiction, mind-trip hallucinatory sequences, and a secretive scientific organization and tortured villain for the group to fight against.

Even if this season had the same 13-episodes run from the first, the story they decided to tell would not have had enough time to be fleshed out appropriately or even coherently. Not that it was difficult to understand, but there are still some primary elements of the season and series as a whole that still have not been explained to the audience, such as what exactly is Amber and what happened to to Harry on the island. Midge's powers, the main antagonist of the show, are barely even partially explained. Instead, the show suffers from an overly layered plot full of twists and reveals that are left weightless because they were not developed well. The character development had no rom to be expanded either, leaving us with the same characterizations for most of the characters, plus new ones who ultimately cause more confusion than support.

Whether it was Netflix's influence or the writers not able to adapt to a shorter season, season two of “The A List” loses its way from its strongest aspect: its characters. Attempting to explore and uncover the secrets of the Lockwell Institute, dive deeper into the Mia/Midge history, explore Amber's developing humanity, address the island's spirits, flesh out the supernatural power source of animosine, balance a side plot of Luca's past, and continue the character expanstion from season one is all too much for the roughly 3-hours season two is afforded. I did not hate it, but it sure was hard to like when the narrative does not allow you enough time to hold onto any of its highlights before switching to another under-developed plot point. If you watched the first season and you want the rest of the narrative, sure, give this a watch in your spare time. There is the potential for a third season, but I would not be surprised if this is the end of the show, so for the rest of you, spend you TV time elsewhere.

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RATING: 🗾🗾. 5 / 5

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