Delightfully weird: Deepanjana Pal writes on Season 2 of Wednesday

Netflix has blunted some of the show’s edges. It’s a lot less eerie, a lot less Tim Burton. But the teen remains a vital, unapologetic symbol of defiance.

It’s been three years since Tim Burton, the patron saint of oddballs and the modern Gothic, presented the world with Wednesday. Dressed in black and putting the “dead” in “deadpan”, Jenna Ortega in the titular role is teenage angst at its coolest.

At a time when social media threatens to flatten the youth into a monoculture, Wednesday really matters.

In Season 1, she is sent to Nevermore Academy, where she makes friends with a siren and a werewolf, discovers she has inherited her mother’s psychic abilities, falls for one hell of a bad boy, and finishes her first novel.

Things are different in Season 2. From being a problem child, Wednesday is now Nevermore’s star student, with teachers and students fawning over her. Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has moved into a cottage on the school campus, determined to be there for her daughter as she grapples with her newfound psychic abilities. Wednesday’s werewolf bestie Enid (Emma Myers) is both in a love triangle, and possibly a pawn in a mind game, led by a mysterious villain with a murder of crows at his command.

Last season’s villain, Tyler (Hunter Doohan), shackled and tamed by an electric collar, is now confined at an asylum, and significantly more chiselled (a detail underlined by a uniform that consists of a single item: a pair of low-hanging pyjamas).

With four episodes released and the other four only due on September 3, all we can do as we wait is speculate about what lies ahead. My money is on Tyler saving Wednesday in some way. (In my experience, no one who develops abs like his ends the season without a redemption arc.)

From the first half, however, two things are already clear. One: Burton’s unmistakeable aesthetic has been shorn of its sinister edge. The world of Nevermore rarely feels eerie or dangerous. Two, his counter-conventional ideas of beauty have been converted into straight-out prettiness. Wednesday, the show and the character, are visually smoother and glossier. There is almost no ugliness or even awkwardness left in the characters. It is odd to see Burton’s imagination get this sort of glow-up.

On the plus side, having already been renewed for a third season, Team Wednesday has been able to commit to the long game in terms of the storytelling. Subplots and supporting characters have received their due time and attention. Thing (Victor Dorobantu), for instance, has been elevated to second-lead status. The siren Bianca (Joy Sunday) has more time in the spotlight. The prickly relationship between adolescent and mother has become almost as important as the murder mystery at the heart of the plot.

One of the highlights of Season 2 so far has been a Morticia-Wednesday duel that actualises their inability to see each other’s points of view. In a poetic and chilling contest, blindfolded, each tries to shatter the other’s glass heart lapel pin (with unexpected results).

All this enriches Wednesday the show while requiring Wednesday the character to take a step back, making the latter feel deliberately one-note. The changes are not in her, but around her.

Still, Ortega and Wednesday stand apart from most other teen heroines in contemporary pop culture. Even with blunted edges, Ortega’s on-screen charisma shines through. With her savage wit and determination to be gloomy at all costs, Wednesday is fiercely non-conforming. At a time when social media threatens to flatten the youth into a monoculture, this unapologetically weird girl is a symbol of defiance. Let’s hope the remaining episodes pit her against a villain worthy of her brilliance.

(To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)