Honestly, fuck gen:lock season 2.
Season 1 was great, and I encourage people to watch it, but I will not be watching more of season 2.
Season 1 was bright and hopeful, about transhumanism and doing whatever you can to make a difference in the face of overwhelming force and oppression. (Dr. Weller even says it - “they want you to become numb”) While things weren’t great right now, they could get better with tremendous effort and a little luck. Things weren’t all doom and gloom all the time - the characters made jokes and had fun together and just got a chance to be human.
Season 2 is at best angsty fanfiction that took one look at canon and tossed it out the window.
First, the tone completely changes. Now everything is doom and gloom and hopeless, no fun allowed. It’s a full dystopia where one side is unapologetic murderers who will do whatever it takes to win, and the other is somehow supposed to be sympathetic despite also being murderers who will do whatever it takes to win.
Everyone gets reverse character development - Miranda goes from emotionally shielded to just cold and uncaring. Colonel Marin loses all sense of morality. The team has lost everything they gained in season 1, and then some - the start of a found family has turned sour. Chase’s mom has always been a Union sympathizer.
The time skip doesn’t work well. Where they could have gradually shifted to a darker tone, and shown all the things infodumped in a monologue at the start of the new season (which would have been very interesting), they just chose to skip over it. I want to see those increasingly hopeless battles against growing numbers of Nemesi. I want to see the team being worn down through pyrrhic victory and crushing defeat until they can barely stand each other, rather than simply being told it happened. I want to see the effects of climate change becoming inescapable, rather than going from the forests and grassy parks in the background of season 1 to the desolate fire-swept plains of season 2. Climate change doesn’t - can’t - go from “everything seems fine” to “this is literally hell” in a few months. You wouldn’t get from the lush forests of Oregon to “I heard there were still trees in New Zealand” in months. The time skip is the laziest possible way they could have done that transition, and as such it simply doesn’t work for the narrative.
It’s inconsistent. Someone else pointed out that Yaz defected because she accidentally outed her parents as intellectuals, where season 2 has them openly working on science for the Union government. In season 1, “the Union does not innovate,” seeming to rely on captured scientists forced to work. They are a force of oppression and death. In season 2, they value scientific knowledge and use gentle persuasion to recruit a scientist. They were a utopia with a dark heart, turned war machine after a preemptive strike from the polity. Season 1 left well-developed characters with promising arcs, and season 2 said “we’re not going to do any of that - let’s do this instead.” Season 2 is a completely different show, tacked on to season 1 with duct tape and string. This is not the union whose nanotech burned a park in New York, this is not the Marin who let Weller decide whether the recruits stayed, not the Val who fought the Union “his whole life,” not the Chase who wanted to talk to his friends again but wasn’t sure how to start.
And lastly, a personal pet peeve of mine. Why all the sex? It seems to be a staple of this flavor of dystopia and dark & gritty “mature” works to have sex be a prominent part of the story. In most cases, it adds nothing to the narrative. Dumping a boatload of sex into the story doesn’t make it more mature, just like rhyming doesn’t make something poetry.
It’s like they took everything I liked about season 1 and discarded it. While some people might enjoy season 2, I doubt they are the same people who liked season 1. Gen:lock is like two different shows stapled together with silly string now, and for me canon ends with season 1, episode 8.
jbbartram-illu
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
