‘The Rain’ Season 2 Episode 1 Recap: Here Comes the Rain Again

When it Rains, it pours. Since Netflix’s Danish sci-fi thriller The Rain debuted—and I mean the very first seconds, which follow main character Simone Andersen running to school, and the very first minutes, which depict the apocalypse from beginning to end in significantly less time than it takes to watch an episode of I Think You Should Leave—the story and character beats have been delivered not in a drizzle but in a torrential deluge.

Which is what made The Rain such a refreshing experience to soak in. Compared to standard post-apocalyptic fare, which tends to belabor the obvious like no one in the audience has ever seen one of these things before, and the legendary pacing problems of “Netflix bloat,” a show that moved this quickly came as a pleasant surprise.

It moved deftly, too. This wasn’t some no-attention-span repeated bludgeon to the head, but a surprisingly nuanced study of young people forced to fend for themselves, and eventually care for each other, in a world rendered uninhabitable by, literally, their parents. (Imagine that!) The gentle faces and studied softness of lead actors Alba August as Simone, Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen as her brother Rasmus (patient zero for the rain-borne virus that nearly wiped out the population), and the small band of survivors they hook up with lent warmth to the inherent coldness of any post-apocalyptic/dystopian project. Whether it was one or not, it sure felt like a deliberate rejection of The Walking Dead‘s fascist prioritization of us-versus-them conflict.

So I’m not quite sure what to make of The Rain‘s new season premiere. Oh, the stuff I loved the first time around is still there: the cast (in addition to the Andersen siblings, Jessica Dinnage as the cherub-cheeked Lea and Mikkel Følsgard as Simone’s love interest Martin are also standouts), the fundamental gentleness of the core characters, the unswerving sense that hurting other people to protect your own is Bad, Actually.

But the pacing has been dialed up to Ludicrous Speed even by The Rain‘s standards. So have the sci-fi elements, which have gone from “unscrupulous corporation creates miracle cure that turns into a biblical plague when unleashed” to “there are infected trees now and they can communicate with people” and “this one guy’s bodily fluids have all been replaced by liquid virus that explodes out of him like that oil rig in There Will Be Blood.” It’s…a lot, is what it is. Maybe too much.

The episode begins true to form. Before the opening credits roll, Simone, Rasmus, Martin, Lea, and their pals Jean (the dorky one) and Patrick (the sketchy one) escape the forces of the Apollon corporation in a high speed chase, get recaptured at a roadblock, are intercepted by Simone & Rasmus’s dad Frederik (he started the virus in a successful attempt to cure Rasmus’s undisclosed childhood illness, then covered up the kid’s location after all hell broke loose, leading to countless killings at the hands of Apollon’s goons during the search for him), receive coordinates of an outpost where the virus can be removed from Rasmus’s bloodstream without killing him, watch Frederik get shot to death by one of his own colleagues, unleash the virus on their captors when one touches Rasmus’s skin, escape again during a daring shootout, and head off on their new mission.

Again, that’s all in the timespan of your average cold open. It took me nearly as much time to type all that as it took to watch it.

Sometimes this form of storytelling leads to engaging shortcuts around dull, workaday “point A to point B” plot movement. By the time the group hashes out their plan to find a boat and sail it to the island where they expect to find salvation, for example, we’ve already seen them successfully come ashore. (For those following along with the discourse at home, this technique would have made Game of Thrones Seasons 1 through 5 watchable, but it’s also, somehow, what made Game of Thrones Seasons 6 through 8 unwatchable. Hey man, I just work here.)

At other times, however, the speed is an emotional detriment. Simone and Rasmus’s father, for example, was an ends-justify-the-means piece of shit. Even so, they just reunited with him for the first time in six years—the six years during which the world ended, culminating in a couple of weeks where they were repeatedly almost killed by various groups of survivors—days, if not hours, before his murder. He nearly killed Rasmus in the Season 1 finale in order to prevent the virus’s spread, but he’s in the process of repenting by trying to get them to safety when his coworker blows him away.

Granted, Simone and Rasmus have a brief but intense confrontation about how they’re handling this. But within hours in story time, it’s like it never even happened. The whole group has moved on, enjoying their new digs in the compound of rogue ex-Apollon scientists to which Frederik directed them. Jean and Lea awkwardly flirt. Martin and Patrick do their usual bicker/banter two-step. Simone loses her virginity!

From one huge life milestone to another in, what, a day? And that’s before we discover that Rasmus is capable of…well, this.

This kind of “wow, that sucked, okay, this rules, onto the next thing, wow, that sucked” rapid-fire proliferation of incident is endemic to any open-ended science-fiction, fantasy, or superhero story. How many times did the Avengers fend off the end of the world, alone or as a group, before it actually happened? You’d think dealing with it once was enough! It always messes up the emotional realism of the story.

This is an even tougher problem to deal with on episodic television, which requires even more frequent beginnings middles and endings than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Battlestar Galactica is one of the best dramas of the past 20 years, and I think almost every pair of characters were both sworn enemies and romantic interests, sometimes simultaneously.

I’ll say this for the pacing, though: It keeps you on your toes as a viewer. At least three seemingly major characters, including lead scientist Jakob and his colleague Anders, die in the virus explosion triggered when they conduct a lumbar injection on Rasmus and unleash the toxic black goo within. Headfakes like that are always welcome where I’m coming from, and the fact that the show managed to create memorable characters with multi-dimensional relationships in the approximately ten minutes of screen time they had before dying speaks to its strengths.

But the dying part raises another issue. The science fiction in this episode gets so science-fictiony—poisonous trees, plants and people communicating via their telepathic virus, humans who can extrude viral fluid like a kids’ backyard sprinkler—that the speed works against our suspension of disbelief. It’s probably meant to be disorienting and dizzying, but it comes across as excessive, even silly.

There’s plenty of time to right the ship, of course. And there are intriguing new developments beyond the killer trees and the black blood explosions. There’s Martin and Simone’s romance, and the revelation that other people—including Sarah, Jakob’s sister—besides Rasmus seem to have been exposed to the virus without dying. I’ll wait to see what happens before rendering judgment. With this show, I won’t have to wait long.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream The Rain Season 2 Episode 1 ("Avoid Contact") on Netflix