Clone High season 2 turned into exactly the show it used to parody

polygon.com:

First, the good news: Tommy Walter’s still got it.

The California-born musician, under the moniker of his solo project Abandoned Pools, played a vital role in shaping the original run of MTV’s Clone High, composing its theme song and sanctioning needle drops from his (excellent) 2001 album Humanistic. The series’ Max reboot brings him back into the fold for a reprisal of the theme, plus several additional tracks — Walter’s first new work in nearly a decade. It all sounds great, maybe a little too great; his angsty, early-aughts emo sensibilities, once perfectly aligned with the milieu Clone High was responding to in 2002, now seem vestigial, a flash of cultural specificity in a comparatively amorphous season of television.

This new season concluded with two episodes that are each, in their own way, representative of its frequently baffling changes in direction. The first, an extended flashback chronicling the life of one of Clone High’s many side characters, Mr. Butlertron; the second, a half-hour finale in which the cast navigates a deadly labyrinth as part of a college entrance exam. There are jokes, some of which are even funny. But it hardly feels like Clone High.

Of course, the show’s central conceit remains unchanged. A gaggle of cloned historical figures, most around 16-17 years old, attend high school together. The first season’s key players were Abe Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Mahatma Gandhi, and John F. Kennedy. All sans Gandhi return for season 2, plus some new faces: Frida Kahlo, Harriet Tubman, Confucius, and Christopher Columbus. It’s a wonderful, infinitely malleable premise, one that immediately compels audiences to imagine a bevy of possible scenarios.

But Clone High’s true strength was always its