Psych 2: Lassie Come Home Could Have Been a Lot Less Confusing, but We Still Love Psych
Timothy Omundsen back in action? Truly great. The rest? Ehhhhh.
Photo Courtesy of Peacock
As a true-blue Psych-O, please believe that I say this with all the love in the world: There is little about Psych 2: Lassie Come Home that isn’t baffling. Central mystery? Indecipherable. Character arcs? All over the place. Psychic episodes? Almost nonexistent. Is it fun to dip back into Psych’s warm, goofy world after two and a half long years away? Obviously! But man, what a laundry list of whiffed opportunities.
We’ll get to a full spoiler rundown of everything that’s most baffling about this latest Psych outing in a moment (as Shawn would say, wait for iiiiiitttt—), but first, a quick summary of the two key things that aren’t.
Okay, so first major non-baffling thing: The Peacock partnership.
Originally slated to run on USA in December of last year, the long-awaited sequel to 2017’s genuinely delightful Psych: The Movie ended up being punted seven months forward and one NBC Universal service over, presumably in a bid to help drum up as much enthusiasm as possible for Peacock’s big summer launch.
This isn’t baffling at all! For one thing, as far as strategic programming moves go, a brand new streamer could do worse than make a passionate fandom’s beloved franchise a cornerstone of its launch. (Which, considering how Peacock teased said launch via an “Egg Cam” live feed that ended with a peacock hatching fully grown from a chicken egg, flying over to a hay-strewn baby grand piano and launching into an acoustic cover of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” as a pair of horrified farmers watch from the shadows, it’s a streamer that certainly knows from worse.) For another thing, unlike its 2017 predecessor, Lassie Come Home isn’t even Christmas-themed. Did I miss Shawn and Gus and everyone else when the original December premiere date rolled by, Psych-less? Of course. But having that same return to look forward to as Peacock’s launch date approached has pretty well made up for that.
Next (and, I’m sorry to say, final) major non-baffling thing: Lassiter’s character arc.
With Lassie Come Home right there in the title, it was a given that Timothy Omundson’s tightly wound SBPD Detective-turned-Chief would play a key role in Psych 2’s plot. Considering, however, the massive stroke that all but knocked Omundson out of the game shortly before Psych: The Movie started filming—the effects of which he is still working to recover from, more than three years later—just how active a role that would turn out to be was anything but.
On this count, fans have every reason to get excited. While it might have been fun for this sequel to pick up where John Cena’s bomb-toting cameo at the end of the last one left off, writers Andy Berman, Steve Franks (also the series’ creator) and James Roday Rodriguez (i.e. Shawn Spencer, himself) made the smart move to instead focus on working Omundson’s new limitations into the very frame of Psych 2’s central mystery. They made Lassiter the lucky survivor of a brutal shooting in the middle of a secret case he can no longer remember, whose slow, monotonous recovery in a fancy private hospital outside of Santa Barbara is either part of the plot that got him shot in the first place (Lassiter’s take), or has him seeing mysteries (bloody zombies, sleepwalking coma patients, one-handed murderer victims) where there are none (everyone else’s). Narratively, this works aces in giving Lassie plenty of opportunities to bicker with Shawn and Gus (Dulé Hill), vent to Juliet (Maggie Lawson) and grumble at Nurse Dolores (guest star Sarah Chalke), while also driving the plot engines of the story’s various investigations. Practically, it gives Omundson—who’s really turning in excellent work—chill recovery-friendly perks like rolling around his room, Rear Window-style, in a slick wheelchair, hanging out with a sweet-tempered German Shepherd (spoiler: Morrissey is back!) and napping in a plush, king-sized bed while Rodriguez holds his hand.
In short: Lassiter’s recovery-centric arc, from start to finish, makes perfect sense. Not only that, it’s a genuine joy to see the whole Psychphrancisco team rally around Lassiter after his stroke on screen, just as the whole Psych team has been rallying around Omundson after his own in the real world. Nothing to baffle here.
And that, alas, brings us back to where we started: Bafflement. Every other part of this movie seems so untethered from kind of clever, self-aware storytelling that’s always made Psych so great, that trying to make sense of it all can feel Sisyphean. From the unfired Chekhov’s gun of the majestic Lassiter beard invoked by Carlton’s dad (a very averagely bearded Joel McHale) in the cold open flashback, to the steep backwards slides in character growth across the board (the cringey man-child energy is so potent, it felt like I had time-traveled back to 2008), to the fact that, despite introducing himself to several credulous strangers throughout the course of his investigation, the only time Shawn uses his “psychic” “gift” is when he’s privately processing evidence (and even then, that doesn’t happen until more than thirty minutes in).