Carnival Row season 2’s buckling under the weight of its fantasy world

polygon.com:

The first season of Prime Video’s gritty fantasy series Carnival Row felt like a small part of a much bigger world. Not every decision had crystal-clear logic to it, but there was always more below the surface — a fae in a refugee village wore Eastern European-influenced clothes, more distinctive than your typical TV fantasy robes. As season 1 wound its mystery up, the world around it seemed to simply exist, with all its conflicts and conundrums. Maybe the drama went a little off the rails by the end, but it mattered that it had rails to begin with.

In its second — and, crucially, final — season, it feels like the world isn’t being tempered at all. And in the first two episodes, very little sticks: Philo (Orlando Bloom) and Vignette (Cara Delevingne) are back and together, each rebelling in their own way from the Carnival Row ghetto. Jonah Breakspear (Arty Froushan) is acting chancellor of the Burgue, trying to hold onto power and working with Sophie Longerbane (Caroline Ford) to further their political agenda. Elsewhere, Imogen (Tamzin Merchant) and Agreus (David Gyasi) are still on the run from her brother, and find themselves at the hands of something even more dangerous: The Pact, a fearsome alliance of countries at war with the Republic.

Without the backbone of a mystery, the first two episodes of season 2 feel a bit overstuffed and aimless as they set out to make a brave new world of Carnival Row. Following the season 1 finale’s annexation of the fae and faun creatures to the Row,tensions are flaring and everyone is itching for a fight. But there’s not much sense of where the writers will funnel that energy, either from what the characters are up to or where the plot is going. Season 1 was built on a sturdy