Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Flight Attendant’ Season 2 On HBO Max, Where Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie Is Now A CIA Asset Who’s Being Impersonated

The Flight Attendant was HBO Max’s first big hit show, and Kaley Cuoco got a well-deserved Emmy nomination for her performance as the conflicted Cassie. The show is now back for a second season, with Cassie working as a CIA asset. How does that change the dynamic of the show?

THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Split screen of various cities. Then we see a split screen of scenes where Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) is jogging, being sober and healthy.

The Gist: It’s almost a year since Cassie stopped drinking. She moved to Los Angeles, has a new boyfriend named Marco (Santiago Cabrera), and she’s got a great “part-time job”: She’s an asset for the CIA. She feels she’s living a “whole new life” and things are “pretty great”, as she shares at her AA meeting. Then a fellow attendee pipes up and warns her sobriety is a bumpy ride, no matter how you feel in your first year.

She’s still a flight attendant, of course, and for her flight to Berlin, her CIA handler, Benjamin Berry (Mo McRae), gives her the picture of a man he wants her to observe. He doesn’t want her to follow him around or anything like that, but he knows she probably will. On her crew for the flight is her old nemesis Jada (Yasha Jackson) and a new, cool flight attendant, Grace (Mae Martin).

Despite being told not to, Cassie does follow her mark around Berlin, and she observes him having sex with a blond woman with the same tattoo she has on her back. She hands him a suitcase, and when he gets to his car, she sees the woman standing there when the car blows up.

Aside from the ringing in her ears, Cassie starts to doubt herself and her sobriety — in her head, she has to fend off the peer pressure of her center-part, party girl self. Also, her luggage is missing and she was checked out of her hotel. Back in LA, she gets a visit from her best friend Ani (Zosia Mamet) and her boyfriend Max (Deniz Akdeniz), but has to leave when Berry’s boss, Dot Karlson (Cheryl Hines), calls them into her office over the Berlin problem.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Flight Attendant‘s second season has the same frenetic pace as its excellent first season, and while last season we thought it felt like Search Party, this year it may just have a closer cousin in Only Murders In The Building.

Our Take: We love how Steve Yockey, the show’s creator, has put together a particularly tense and sophisticated aesthetic for The Flight Attendant, using a tense and immediate-sounding score, split screens and lots of action. We also love that most of the cast from Season 1 is coming back, with additions like Hines and Sharon Stone in the mix. But, like the show’s first season, Cuoco’s performance is the show’s main attraction.

Even though Cassie is a woman who can’t seem to get her shit together, either when she was drunk in season 1 or sober in season 2, Cuoco’s performance is stunningly mature. We use that word because it’s such an assured performance, one that shows a confident comic actress who is willing to be emotional and physical in the same scene. Here, Cuoco ups the ante by acting opposite herself during the periods where Cassie is fighting things out in her own head. When she’s fighting with Drunk Cassie, she definitely makes it feel genuine and not a gimmick, and that’s not an easy task.

The story of Cassie trying to track down the woman impersonating her has a lot of promise, and it’ll likely play into her now-shaky sobriety in a big way. We’re still not sure how season 1 characters like Ani, Megan (Rosie Perez) — seen calling Cassie from inside a crate — and her brother Davey (T.R. Knight), but we’re confident that Yockey and his staff will integrate them into the story at some point.

But in reality, that will matter a whole lot less if Cuoco continues to show aspects of her range that she never showed on The Big Bang Theory and that have been added since the first season of this show.

Sex and Skin: Any sex we see — Cassie with Marco, the mystery woman with the mark in Berlin — is done with underwear on. We see the mark’s bare butt, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: Cassie comes to the realization that someone is impersonating her, and when she tells Ani and Max, they’re stunned silent. Then when Cassie looks for a reaction, they say “That’s bad.”

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this one to Rosie Perez as Megan. Her Season 1 plotline, where she got into hot water investigating her husband’s activities, was an intriguing side story and it seems like she’s in even more hot water now. But it’s funny that she still seems to annoy Cassie whenever she calls.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Your scarf is like from two years ago, but it looks cute on you,” Cassie tells Grace as a way of, we don’t know, wanting to be friends?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Flight Attendant follows up its excellent first season with a promising story for Cassie in season 2. Either way, we’ll be watching to see what aspects of Cuoco’s skill set she’ll display this season.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.