‘The Rain’ on Netflix Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: Men Without Hats

So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.

The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.

Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.

(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)

I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:

He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!

Why the change? Because while all fantastic fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and while “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a solid rule of thumb to follow when reading or watching it, you need to be kept in a mentally non-sweaty mood. The weaker the work, the less you’re getting by way of compensatory value in terms of ideas, images, writing, acting, all the things that make shows or movies or whatever of any genre worthwhile, the more likely you are to start noticing people’s hats. In that light,The Rain Season 2 might as well be a ad for a haberdashery.

It’s unfortunate, in a way, that this happened in the strongest of the season’s first four episodes, with the possible exception of the premiere. All the stuff that made The Rain Season 1 work from a character perspective is back with a vengeance. I loved the tender, halting romance that continues to blossom between Jean and Lea, who stay back at the base while everyone else sets out to find Rasmus, and the somewhat steamier variant involving Rasmus and Sarah, who’ve run away together but who can’t touch each other because of his superhuman viral load. (Her unspecified autoimmune/respiratory illness would make sex dangerous under any circumstances, she notes.) I even like the end of the romance between Simone and Martin, whom Simone feels, with some justification, she must cut loose in order to prioritize her baby brother Rasmus’s safety.

The sci-fi stuff worked better for me this time out as well. Going through the video cards he retrieves from the guy whose brains he unwittingly pulped with the sonic defense system last episode, Patrick discovers that Kira and her mother led a group of survivors who were systematically abducting Apollon goons in order to test experimental ways to remove the tiny, deadly capsules the company has been using to keep people within the quarantine zone—and that those experiments were invariably fatal.

Patrick, this time with Lea and Jean by his side, has a chance to use that sonic system again on the aforementioned Hatless Security Goon and his men when they break into the base. This time, the callousness of the “it’s them or us” set-up makes sense considering how callous these Apollon types are, which in turn makes Lea’s statement “Why can’t it be them and us?” more powerful. (It also helps that the sci-fi element is relatively down to earth.) The return of Klaus, the guy from that couple who had a lethal run-in with Simone and Martin a couple episodes back over handing Rasmus to Apollon, leads to another kill-or-be-killed moment, and this one makes sense too given the fraught emotional history there.

And it’s shot well, too. There’s a lot of lovely scenic work in the woods through which the group moves, and at the amusement park to which Rasmus and Sarah retreat. I even like the bit in which Jean, attempting to comfort Lea in her despond about the lack of human connection, fixes up the base’s garden and even paints her a little chapel in which to pray.

Okay, you knew it was coming: the “but” section of the review.

Rasmus’s virus superpowers, which are now being explicitly referred to as such by the characters, still basically stink. They’re inconsistent for starters—he literally leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes, but he can touch people through their clothing or through blankets and they’re treated like hazmat suits, and he can wander around and sleep in the same building with a very sick young woman and she’s right as rain. And again, the look of the powers feels as out of place in this relatively down-to-earth apocalypse as the arrival of Tom Hardy as Venom would. It’s hard to imagine the Venom symbiote wasn’t an influence on shots like this, that’s for sure!

As for the true supervillains of the piece, Apollon continues to show absolutely horrendous skill at tracking down a bunch of teens and twentysomethings with only one trained member of a peacetime military between them, especially since our heroes consistently have an easier time finding each other in the middle of nowhere than Jerry and the gang had in that Seinfeld episode with the parking garage. It didn’t occur to these Orwellian surveillance experts, who developed freaking nanoexplosives and a perimeter that detonates them automatically, to cover the perimeter of the base they’ve besieged? The security team that goes in is just left there stone dead for hours and hours? No one in Apollon sees the blackened trail of virus-ridden plant life Rasmus leaves everywhere he goes?

And yes, there are still problems with the emotional logic. I know Martin got dumped by Simone in a way that indicated she wants to dissolve their relationship entirely, and I know Patrick is kind of a dick, but their decision to abandon the entire group, including Jean and Lea, is made in like five words and five seconds total. I know Simone was already distraught about Martin’s earlier move to give up Rasmus when Klaus shows up and gets the drop on them, but I don’t understand why it never occurs to her that his agreement to “help” Klaus find the kid might be a ruse—or why she and Fie just sit there tied up for a while after they leave before finally trying to cut themselves loose with nearby shards of glass. They have a little heart-to-heart about Fie’s pregnancy first for chrissakes. Later, people, later!

All of these complaints are less silly and more central to the issue at hand than the hat thing. But I’m still not sure I’d have noticed them, or at the very least that they’d have bothered me, if I hadn’t been softened up by three solid episodes and a brand-new science-fictional premise that shook my faith in the show as badly as they did and do. I’m sorry if that sounds cold. Maybe next time I should wear a hat.

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 4 ("Save Yourself") on Netflix