From Ecoterrorism to Polyamory, the Second Season of Siren Continues to Transcend Expectation

The last time I sat down to write about Freeform’s horror-adjacent mermaid series, Siren, it was early in the first season’s run. On the whole, I liked it. But after concluding that its central story—which at that point followed the violent adventures of a predatory, barely articulate mermaid come to land to rescue her kidnapped sister—was A) bloody, unsettling and ecstatically unpredictable and B) quietly getting away with subversive, genre-muddling murder, I became overwhelmed with network-specific anxiety. How long would it be, I worried, before Freeform’s documented pro-’shipping agenda managed to undermine all the weird, wild work the Siren crew had put into making theirs a show that defies sexy simplification? How long before Ryn’s (Eline Powell) feral animalism was itself forced to shapeshift in favor of fulfilling the fairytale fantasy of a beautiful mermaid falling in love with the handsome human man (Alex Roe) her siren song had bewitched?

(Nevermind that said song, in the world of Siren, is a defense mechanism so ruinous to the human brain that it literally leads another character to drown himself in the ocean—Freeform may slay when it comes to The Bold Type and Good Trouble, but it is also the network that saw a high school teacher enter into a relationship with a student he knew was both sixteen and in the midst of being terrorized by a masked villain and was like, yes, this is sexy and good, let’s get them hitched. Mine are not unfounded concerns!)

Well, good news, friends: In spite of my fears, Siren, which returns for the summer half of its second season this week, has managed to stay ferociously anti-formula. In fact, not only has it maintained its feral unpredictability, but as the bond between Ryn, Ben and Maddie (Fola Evans-Akingbola) has deepened, and as both the human and mermaid worlds have each expanded, Siren’s sophomore outing has played out almost like a game of supernatural chicken. You want a titillating ‘ship?, the show spent the winter half of the current season asking, pulling Ryn into Ben and Maddie’s relationship not as a mermaid ex machina wedge, but instead as a very willing third. Well then we’ll see your titillation, and raise you a stable polyamorous throuple.

Yes, you read that right—while most of us spent February distracted by Russian Doll, PEN15 and Schitt’s Creek, Siren went ahead and made Ryn’s default observation of humanity, “Ben and Maddie are love,” extremely literal. But where a different show might have taken the prospect of a mermaid-inclusive throuple and squeezed it for all the visual titillation it might be worth, Siren has leaned instead on the deep emotional bond the three characters have been working to develop since the pilot. This isn’t to say that nothing of the physicality of their new relationship is shown; Roe, Powell and Evans-Akingbola are young, attractive and smouldering with chemistry, and there is very real value both on a representation level and in terms of dramatic propulsion to showing a mutually supportive polyamorous relationship at work (and at play). But while this physicality has been given enough screen time to make it clear both to viewers at home and to the trio’s friends and family in Bristol Cove just what is going on, the camera never lingers so long that any of us risk becoming voyeurs. Moreover, the writers have been careful from the start to separate Ben and Maddie’s sexual attraction to Ryn as a person from their supernatural attraction to her mysteriously powerful song, and to separate Ryn’s attraction to the two of them from her own internal reaction to singing. It helps, of course, that her song induces in both Ben and Maddie not sexual fantasies, but rather violent visions and self-destructive behaviors. Still, to introduce your physically-dreamy mermaid lead as being in possession of a bewitching, obsession-inducing song and to then not fall into the trap of mixing that up with the sexual and/or romantic attraction she might command just as a person, that’s a real coup.

That said, as excitingly anti-titillating as the reality of the Ben-Ryn-Maddie power throuple is, it’s the utter audaciousness of the various narratives woven together all around them that have made Siren’s second season such compelling television, and the series as a whole so worth catching up on (even in the Age of Too Much Damn TV). For one thing, the series is unapologetically political: As marine biologists-cum-environmental activists running a nonprofit sea lion rescue center in a small town (kept afloat by an increasingly deleterious commercial fishing industry—an industry in which Ben’s family, already bearing the centuries-old legacy of mermaid genocide, is local power player), Ben and Maddie’s ideological leanings have been clear from the start. That the show shares their ideology has only grown more evident as the obstacles faced by mermaids and humans alike have come to include not only the ruthlessness of the American military industrial complex (i.e., the people who kidnapped Ryn’s sister for stem cell experimentation and drugged Ben’s friend into oblivion to keep him quiet about it), but also the cold-blooded avarice of those who stand to make a profit off of deepwater drilling (i.e., the oil company Ben’s dad made a deal with to drop a well off Bristol Cove’s shore). For a particularly, erm, earnest look at Siren’s sociopolitical mission, surf on over to their mortifyingly self-serious Earth Day ad spots.