Wish-list for Sense8 Season 2
1. Of course, that there is one.
2. That the various characters keep their respective arcs in situ, dealing with the various problems in their lives, rather than find all their individual stories subsumed within the war against Whispers. Lito’s very public coming-out, Capheus’s ambivalent relationship to the Nairobi criminal underworld, Sun’s Shakespearean conflict with her brother, and Kala’s situation with the religious extremists involved in the assassination attempt on her maybe-future father-in-law are all far more interesting than yet another paranoia-conspiracy struggle against a shadowy international organization. More of that please, and less of the stuff that really could be interchangeable with the X-Files or any of a dozen dull-as-dishwater hour-long dramas on the major networks.
3. That the Sensates face shared threats other than Whispers. Even asides from what I say above about the balance between the individual arcs and the overarching story, there is a benefit to facing multiple threats rather than just exhausting the suspense of the one primary, ever-present villain. One of the keys to the way Orphan Black has maintained momentum over three seasons has been by focusing not just on the primary evil corporation but giving us a real rogues gallery of enemies (Neolutionists, Proletheans, and Project Castor) that have evolving relationships to our protagonists and to each other but at the same time all come out of the same basic science fiction concept of the show.
So, while obviously Whispers will be with us for a bit, I would love for us to see other threats. I would especially love for us to encounter other clusters. Think about how amazingly our guys and girls switched in and out of Will as they made their way through enemy HQ in episode 12. Now imagine the terrifying efficiency with which a cluster would operate if it had perhaps ten years’ experience on our heroes and heroines. And imagine that group against ours. Thrilling stuff.
4. That the basic mode of dealing with physical conflict (basically, keeping Will, Sun or Wolfie on speed-dial) gets seriously fucked with. While part of the fantasy fun of Sense8 is, yes, being able to dial-up your personal internal Jean-Claude or Arnold, beyond a certain point that should create its own really interesting conflicts and issues within the group.
I really wanted by the end of season one for there to be a moment when Sun had a moment on the order of “You know what? I’m on the toilet now, and do not particularly feel like saving you the fifth time today. If you want to learn martial arts I’ll be glad to teach you, but we’re not going to keep doing this indefinitely. Best of luck handling the guy with the machete. Over and out.”
Or, alternately, for the Sensate who gets called in to do something that really does not jibe with the ethics of the Sensate who placed the call. For example, imagine a hypothetical interaction between Nomi and Wolfgang: “Why did you think I would be okay with you using my body to kill all those people?” “I didn’t. But neither did I care.”
Essentially, I would love by the end of season two for Nomi, Kala, Lito or Capheus to have to fight their way out of a situation just as themselves, without help from the other Sensates, and for that to be a serious character moment for them.
5. That the connections get used in ways other than physical conflict. This would have been a much bigger deal for me had Kala suddenly not become so crucial in both saving Wolfgang from his uncle and getting Will and Riley out of harm’s way. Likewise, Wolfgang using Lito to tell a lie that Wolfgang literally, psychologically, could not himself tell, was one of the storytelling masterstrokes of the first season. I would love season two to have more deployments of the Sensates like that. For Sun to be called on for the negotiation skills she learned as an executive in Seoul. Or, for example, to reverse a familiar trope in season one, for Sun to call on Capheus to charm someone, and to win their friendship, in a way she probably cannot. The more creative the deployment of a fellow Sensate and the reason why they are needed, the better, basically.
6. That at some point serious rivalries emerge within the Sensates, but that they do not play out in any way as an expected consequence of their racial, sexual,or class identities. I loved when Will did not get the Conan reference and Wolfgang took that as being somehow explanatory of Will’s character in a clearly uncomplimentary way (the opaqueness of that moment, and what specifically set Wolfie off, whether it was Will-as-American, Will-as-policeman, Will-as-do-gooder, or all the above, was pure splendor, script-wise).
As they progress further into the fight against Whispers, let’s see differences of opinion arise as to how to proceed and who should decide. That needn’t dominate the story, and needn’t play out like Stark Trek: Next Generation-style bridge debates, but it could make for some fascinating character moments. Let’s see when, and under what circumstances, Kala ceases to be the group pacifist, what it takes for the group to understand that Capheus actually has a better sense of interpersonal strategy than Sun, and which one figures out first that calling in Wolfgang to deal with crushingly violent situations all the time actually verges on a kind of abuse.
7. Yes, I’ll say it. More psychic-domino cluster sex. Or even them figuring out ways to put the Sensate necktie on the door, so to speak, to keep other members of the cluster out. Think about it: Riley and Will are getting into it for the first time, aaaaannnd, without even consciously wanting to, Lito shows up. And then Kala. And then Sun. “We gotta get a system in place!!!!”
8. Last but not least, don’t forget the practical stuff. The worst weaknesses of Sense8 are the lapses in its realism about practical things. People in a hospital room do not argue over who is going on whose insurance like they argue over a restaurant check because health insurance does not work like that. When negotiating with a fence over stolen diamonds, you decide to turn and leave in a display of your impatience, you do not leave the diamonds in his possession. When on the run from a super-secret organization that literally wants your brain, you do not return to the apartment where it knows you live, even if the plot provides a convenient, if not quite believable, fig leaf explanation. And said super-secret organization, when it is in possession of your loved ones (like Amanita, or potentially Riley’s father) would probably be inclined to keep them for leverage rather than just letting them go with no evident purpose. Seriously, there should be zero tolerance for this sort of thing.
So this is a lot of “I want” “I want” “I want”, I know, but the fact that I am now so obsessed about the future of this TV show and where its stories go is, entirely, a measure of its success. I love Sense8. I want more. And I cannot wait to see what happens.
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