What we learned from the Big Little Lies end of episode trailer

The Monterey Five are back! And falling apart at the seams…

Sunday night’s hotly anticipated season 2 premiere of the hit HBO drama Big Little Lies thrust audiences back into the intrigue, gossip, suspicion, and well, lies that viewers and critics alike came to be obsessed with when the limited series (originally intended for only one season) premiered two years ago.

The premiere episode catches up with the women several months after the events of the disastrous, murderous (and let’s be real, iconic) Audrey Hepburn-Elvis Presley themed charity night. Celeste (Nicole Kidman) is struggling with nightmares, Madeleine (Reese Witherspoon) is dodging suspicion and withering take-downs from Perry’s mother Mary Louise (Meryl Streep), and Bonnie (Zoe Kravitz) is struggling to cope with the fact that she killed a man — and can’t even confess her sins to anyone but the fellow ladies in this murder of gals.

The episode itself set us up for some major mysteries and intrigue this year — will Bonnie crack and turn herself into the police? Will Mary Louise be able to sniff out what really happened to her son? Will Jane (Shailene Woodley) ever get a haircut that’s not unfortunate?

The trailer for episode 2, which aired at the conclusion of the season premiere, promised we’ll get developments on many of these storylines next week, and most importantly, that this season will feature another divine costume party — this one seems to be some sort of 1960s or early ’70s groovy, hippie theme.

In addition to these costumes (will we have to wait an entire season to see them again?), the trailer revealed that Bonnie is going to continue to struggle with the lie they all told that Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) slipped and died an accidental death. She tells Madeleine, “It’s going to get us all.” And the entire Monterey Five seem to be struggling with the same thing as we see clips of in-fighting, with Madeleine accusing them of talking about her behind her back, Jane wanting to tell Ziggy the “truth” about Perry, and Madeleine’s insistence in another clip that they all have to stick together.

It appears Mary Louise will continue to insinuate her life into Celeste’s life as she grieves her son, telling someone that grief is meant to be shared. And at some point, she will find out there are missing pieces in the story she’s been told, including that Celeste was planning to leave Perry. And they’re seemingly not free from the watchful eye of Detective Quinlan (Merrin Dungey), who was re-watching their interview tapes throughout the premiere. We see Renata say, “I think she’s been watching,” and presumably she’s referring to the detective.

In brief, the trailer shows the Monterey Five struggling to move past this horrific night with Celeste still missing her husband and all the fraught emotional turmoil inherent to their relationship. And oh yeah, someone’s on a stretcher with an oxygen mask — and it looks suspiciously like Madeleine’s expertly coiffed mane. So there’s never a dull day in Monterey when it comes to these women.

Big Little Lies airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

Related content:

• Everything to remember about Big Little Lies before the season 2 premiere
• Big Little Lies season 2 is brilliantly acted and all over the place: EW review
• Big Little Lies boss David E. Kelley says ‘a cord and core of stress’ runs through the Monterey Five in season 2