Wednesday Season 2 Is a Supernatural Veronica Mars
(Photo: Netflix)
In the first four episodes of Wednesday Season 2, Jenna Ortega’s titular teen sleuth delivers wry one-liners, is deeply protective of her best friend, feuds with local officials, and has a dad who gets her out of police questioning.
Wednesday, who grew from a character in cartoonist Charles Addams’ The New Yorker strip about a family who derives pleasure in making normies confront the macabre, is a champion of outsiders even as she’s suspicious of them (because she’s suspicious of everyone). The major theme for this season, which is broken up into two parts with the second half dropping September 3, is that our heroine must crack her jawbreaker exoskeleton to allow room in her heart for … shocking as it may seem to her … people who look up to her and actually want to be her friend. She also gets into battles of wits with the eccentric personalities who both go to her school, Nevermore, and live in the nearby town of Jericho. Stunt casting is involved, as former child stars like Heather Matarazzo and Haley Joel Osment get some fun screentime.
Wednesday is, essentially, Veronica Mars. And, thus, Wednesday the show is Veronica Mars, but about people with supernatural abilities. Kristen Bell’s prickly heroine from that cult favorite series, which premiered in 2004 on UPN, was memorably described as a “marshmallow” in its first episode: hard outer coating with a gooey center. The show’s fans, which in the pre-streaming days never came close to amassing as large a following as Wednesday’s legions, adopted this as a moniker; our jaded attitudes and eye rolls were performative defense mechanisms, and we didn’t, like, really hate you. Wednesday attempts to intimidate adults with lines like “if you can’t kill them with kindness, try lethal injection” and explaining that she has “FOBI: Fear of Being Included.” But her major missions during the first four episodes of the season concern saving her bubbly roommate Enid (Emma Myers) from a doom that Wednesday prophesied in a vision and vindicating society’s so-called Outcasts like the sirens, werewolves, and gorgons who go to her school.
This is the dichotomy of Wednesday and Wednesday. Wednesday the character hates all human interaction and professes to love cruel and unusual punishments. If we actually listen to and believe what Wednesday is saying, her only gripe about Enid’s potential death is that she doesn’t get to drop the hatchet. Wednesday should also both want her mother, Catherine Zeta-Jones’ Morticia, dead and be wary of her affections. Because the Addamses are both delighted by all kinds of war and fiercely protective of one another. If normies were to hurt a family member, the Addams family would feel both fury and glee in exacting vengeance.
But for Wednesday the show to work, Wednesday the character must be a marshmallow. Audiences must want her to be an underage April Ludgate and to actually be a motivated protector. Audiences must also accept that this is a world where Outcasts are known and prevalent, as opposed to the Addamses being the sole oddballs who, in turn, think everyone else is odd. But then does Wednesday the series go against the intent of Wednesday the character and her family? Kinda, yeah.