TV Shows #19 - Part 2

Hanna Season Two (2020)
Developed By: David Farr Starring: Esme Creed-Miles, Mireille Enos, Yasmin Monet Prince, Dermot Mulroney, Áine Rose Daly, Anthony Welsh, Cherrelle Skeete, Gianna Kiehl, Katie Clarkson Hill, Emma D'Arcy

Certificate: 15 Running Time: 47-53 Minutes per Episode, 8 Episodes

I had been very enthusiastic about watching the first season of Hanna since I liked and still like the film original very much. My wife and I watched the series adaptation with interest pretty much as soon as it was available, and while it probably had too much filler, we both enjoyed it nonetheless. Happily, season two was soon given the greenlight too, which would surely take us into wholly uncharted territory since the events of the film were covered in the first season (albeit slightly differently). It has taken me a long time to get around to watching it - so long, in fact, that I decided to first rewatch the whole of season one to refresh my memory, and doing so made me think I was a little harsh on it in my review. I think part of it is that I've warmed up to Esme Creed-Miles in the main role. Whatever the reason, I was very much up for season two. My wife didn't join me this time (waiting for her is part of the reason it took me so long to watch!), but I was nonetheless eager to see where Mr. Farr took the story.

It resumes very soon after the end of the first. Erik (Joel Kinnaman) has died, Hanna (Creed-Miles) has escaped the Utrax facility with Clara (Prince) after receiving some unexpected help from Marissa (Enos), and the pair of them are now living off the land in the vast forest that surrounds the now-destroyed facility while evading attempts to capture them, and the remaining trainees are not euthanised as I had expected, but are instead on their way to a new facility for the next phase of their training.

This facility is called The Meadows and is an old English manor/estate somewhere up north. Here the girls are each given rooms more akin to college/university students than the prison cells they had back in Romania. They are also all given a 'welcome pack' of sorts which tells them their new name and identity including details of their friends and family, and even assigns them interests and passions, with their rooms decorated accordingly. They are afforded much more freedom too, as they learn about the world they are soon to enter as 'agents' (i.e. assassins). Somewhat startlingly, the girls seem to embrace this newfound freedom, shedding their cold, robotic demeanour and developing distinct personalities almost immediately (unless there was some sort of time jump that wasn't made obvious).

In charge of The Meadows is John Carmichael (Mulroney), Marissa's former boss, with Leo (Welsh) assisting him and Terri (Skeete) who is in charge of the fake social media network the girls are all registered with. It's a bit strange how easily some of the girls accept all this actually. A few of them, particularly Sandy (Daly), formerly 'trainee 242', act as though the 'family' they were given (doctored) photos of themselves with and with whom they chat via social media (actually Terri) are real, and it's a bit weird. Then again, how messed up might someone be if they were born and raised in a cross between a lab and a prison for the first eighteen-odd years of their lives?

While the seemingly-innocent girls there are being trained for a darker purpose, Hanna and Clara are still in Romania, hiding in the forest. Unfortunately, the flanges in charge at the Meadows are seeking them, and Clara naively responds to a message from her 'mother', only to find herself captured and hauled back to rejoin the group of trainees she was once part of. Hanna, who has grown close to Clara, resolves to find and free her, and Marissa, who has tracked Hanna down, wants to help her do that despite still officially being part of the evil group of CIA oafs running the Utrax programme (who - very minor spoiler alert - we later find out are called the Pioneer Group). Can they trust each other enough to get the job done?

As you may have gathered from this extremely excellent synopsis, this second season is quite a bit more action-orientated than the first, mainly since there's no need to set up the characters or premise, or indeed show Hanna fannying around with other teenagers and partying and all that bullcrap. It does definitely help the pacing of the show too, which was one of the main issues with the first season.

That said, it's not an all-out action-fest this time around either. Much of the season is spent with the suddenly-transformed 'trainees' at The Meadows but some of them do get a mission - their first, in fact - toward the end of the season, and it did kind of make me wonder why they (Pioneer) have put so much effort into creating these young assassins. I won't spoil it with specifics but, judging by this first mission, the girls aren't needed for anything more than an existing hitman or even a sniper could easily have achieved without the massively-expensive scientific research and many years of medical treatments and training. Yes, a teenage girl seems like an unlikelier assassin than a shifty military-looking guy, but if they are going to blatantly shoot people in front of tons of witnesses, what was all the effort for?

Oh well, questions over Pioneer's methods aside, it's still for me a more entertaining season than the first. I like Esme Creed-Miles in the role more than I did before (even in the first season when I re-watched it). Her Hanna is unsurprisingly now more sure of herself and her talents/training and she looks more believable while employing them too, and she is also more independent since she no longer has her father or any chavvy teenage girls to look out for her.

Enos is a standout again too. You're never quite sure where Marissa's loyalties lie and she looks like she has been in a war by the end of it! The same goes for Carmichael to a lesser extent and it's interesting to see Mulroney play a bad guy for once. One of the standouts of the season for me, though, is Daly as Sandy, the trainee who gets the most focus at the Meadows. She's a bit loopy if you ask me, but if the convoluted Utrax programme was ever going to work, it would be down to 'soldiers' like Sandy who can be your happy best friend giving you a pep talk one minute and a cold, committed killer the next. Most of the new characters work well though, even if they aren't all likeable, and along with the returning characters (i.e. pretty much just Hanna, Marissa and Clara) make for an engaging season.

For any faults it might have, and there aren't many (the aforementioned pointlessness of the Utrax programme and the odd strange decision by Hanna are my only issues really), it remains intriguing and exciting in more-or-less equal measure throughout, leaning more towards the latter as it builds towards its climax. It improves on most aspects of the first season and adds a few interesting dynamics (such as the Hanna/Marissa relationship) and gives us a decent mix of action, drama and plenty of twists and turns. More of the same for the third and (sadly) final season please!

RKS Score: 8/10