Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Carnival Row’ Season 2 On Prime Video, Which Gets Even More Complicated In Its Final Season

What were you doing in August of 2019? Hard to remember, especially given everything that’s gone on in the time since. That’s when Carnival Row debuted on Prime Video, with a huge cast and complex, intersecting stories. Due to the pandemic, production was interrupted and delayed. Now, what seems like a lifetime later, the show’s second and final season is here. Do you remember any of the first season?

CARNIVAL ROW SEASON 2 : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: After a long recap of Season 1 (after all, it did debut three and a half years ago!), we see Rycroft Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) wrapping his fists and getting ready to participate in Carnival Row’s fight club.

The Gist: At the same time, Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delevingne) and members of the Black Raven are about to hijack a train and steal the medication that their fellow fae need. It’s a harrowing fight, including some of the fae carrying people out to the water and dropping them in, but they get as much as they can carry, which isn’t nearly enough.

She feels responsible for telling her fellow Pix that The Burge was safe, and now they’re suffering. As much as Philo doesn’t want her to raid another delivery, she feels she has to. He feels he had to fight to help out his friend Darius (Ariyon Bakare).

In the main square of The Burge, the new chancellor, Jonah Breakspear (Arty Froushan) looks to avenge his parents’ murders by making an example of five Fauns, lining them up for a public beheading. He’s not sure this is the way he should go, but Sophie Longerbane (Caroline Ford) insists that he needs to do this to exert his newfound power. His advisor, Runyon Millworthy (Simon McBurney), thinks the chancellor should go to Carnival Row and meet with Philo, his half-brother, but Breakspear refuses. Philo wants to expose the fact that Jonah isn’t related to his late father by blood, and he’s the rightful heir to the throne. His goal isn’t to become chancellor, but to simply humiliate his half-brother out of office.

Philo is also roped in by one of his former police colleagues, Constable Berwick (Waj Ali) into helping him investigate a murder of a cop stationed on the supply train the Black Raven raided. Even though the rest of Berwick’s squad thinks the former Inspector is a scum half-Critch, Berwick knows that Philo can help them get information from the people in Carnival Row.

Tourmaline (Karla Crome) has a general sense of doom, and she’s infused by a supernatural force that has her seeing visions and killing cats. On a ship far away from The Burgue, Imogen Spurnrose (Tamzin Merchant) and her Faun lover Agreus Astrayon (David Gyasi) think they’re moving towards a new life free of persecution. But Imogen can’t shake the negative influence her brother Ezra (Andrew Gower) has had in her life.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s hard to classify Carnival Row. There are case-of-the-week elements on it, but the closest analogue to us is The Nevers.

Our Take: If you are like the very large group of people who watched the first season of Carnival Row when it came out in August of 2019, you’ll probably need the five-minute recap at the beginning of this episode to catch up. Even then, it won’t fill in all the blanks.

Creators René Echevarria and Travis Beacham don’t seem to make much of an effort to reorient viewers about who the players are in The Burgue, why all the fae are now relegated to a walled-off slum, why Philo is no longer a police inspector, or why Imogen and Agreus are out at sea.

As cohesive as we thought the first season was when it started, the second season starts all over the place. Multiple stories, multiple issues, multiple allusions to things that we deal with in the modern world. Both Philo and Vignette seem to be juggling their romance with multiple other efforts, which makes us wonder how well either of them can multitask; can Philo be an informant for his former colleagues, for instance, while trying to discredit Jonah? Can Vignette help her fellow Pixes and stave off the anger from Black Raven leader Dahlia (Chloe Pirrie)?

We’re not sure when or if all the stories are going to come together. Heck, we don’t even know if the story of Imogen and Agreus, which we switch to in the last ten minutes of the first episode, will ever be connected with anything happening in The Buruge. It feels like a few of the stories could be cut away and things would be a whole lot less confusing, especially for those of us who last watched the show before COVID was a thing.

That being said, the few scenes that Bloom and Delevingne have together remind us of why we liked the show in the first place, and all of the returning characters have some fine moments. We just don’t know if any of them will be well serviced during this show’s final set of episodes.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: A Pactish airship hovers over Agreus’ ship, and starts to drop depth charges to get its attention.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Karla Crome, because it feels like Tourmaline will get the most thankless, isolating storyline this season.

Most Pilot-y Line: Sophie to Jonah: “Absalom Breakspear was your father in every way that mattered.” Jonah: “You sound just like my mother!” Wow, not sure we would have been able to shrug that line off.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only if you really loved Season 1 of Carnival Row. The first episode of its final season is a big mess storywise, and doesn’t help viewers catch up from a first season that seems like it debuted eons ago.

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.