A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES (S:2): Used to be a Guilty Pleasure

When I found out that the second season of the series A Discovery of Witches, a television adaptation of the novel cycle All Souls Trilogy, had been released on HBO, I was very happy. The first installment was not a perfect adaptation, but it was watched with great curiosity and pleasure. Therefore, I could not wait for my guilty pleasure of 2020 to return to the screens. Unfortunately, despite good intentions, with the second season the series dangerously approaches collapse, showing that a story about demons, witches, and vampires can simply be boring.

Our heroes, escaping certain death, end up in Elizabethan London, where Diana will try to learn to wield magic, while Matthew begins the search for the Book of Life. Unfortunately, matters will begin to get complicated when it turns out that a member of the de Clairmont family must return to his duties from the past, namely torturing the enemies of the Crown. The change of era and surroundings makes our heroes more and more often stand against each other, defending their arguments, and their relationship seems to be heading toward inevitable catastrophe.

I really wanted to like the second installment of the series, but everything seemed to stand in the way. A few times I caught myself finding the fragments from the present, the story of the witch aunts, or the plot of Matthew’s vampire son much more engaging than the adventures of our couple, and that already says something. Additionally, the very theme of time travel, which could have been prepared in a thousand different ways, seems to take the easy way out and simply bores. Besides, the heroine at every step tells everyone that she is a time traveler, so all animosities, frictions, and potentially interesting threads do not come into play, because everyone knows that the heroes came from the future.

The only thing left for us is sightseeing in Elizabethan London, but even that eventually becomes boring and repetitive. As for the acting, unfortunately it is also weak. What brought a smile in the first season, this time is tiring. Even the performances of such good actors as Matthew Goode are wooden and lifeless. Sometimes I had the impression that the director deliberately told him not to act so that none of his companions would look bad. On the plus side is the performance of Alex Kingston, who is a class of her own. But most of the portrayals border on self-parody.

What in the first season was fun and brought a lot of enjoyment, here bores and gives the impression that the actors are tired, uttering successive meaningless lines. What irritated me most, however, was the reduction of the relationship of the main characters to banality. Watching this type of series, I always say that if the characters involved in the relationship sat down and talked honestly, we could avoid a series of such senseless misunderstandings. This is also the case here, because both Matthew and Diana each time must let their pride take over or act in secret from the other person. This leads to absurd situations that could easily have been avoided.

This whole cat-and-mouse game does not in any way take their relationship onto new tracks – each obstacle is only a temporary misunderstanding that contributes nothing to the plot. It should also be noted that the creators do not fully adhere to the rules they set for themselves regarding magic and time travel. What in the first season was repeated like a mantra, in the second is completely ignored by the characters. Diana is constantly shown as a witch of enormous power who controls the elements, and here she can practically do nothing.

When she finally begins training, it turns out that her powers are completely different than initially. At the end of the first season, just like that, she transports herself and Matthew to the past, and now she cannot return because she has no training. The creators seem to be overcomplicating this matter far too much.

The new installment of A Discovery of Witches turns out to be merely passable and very disappointing. On screen, instead of the naive lightness known from the first season, soap-opera boredom reigns – a guilty pleasure for women is replaced by The Bold and the Beautiful in a fantasy version. A range of interesting threads has been pushed to the third plan, while the unengaging actions of the main characters are stretched over as many as 10 episodes.

The second season did not capture me at all. Despite this, I am timidly waiting for the next installment of the series, because I still have a faint hope that the present may bring something more interesting than the past.

Read about the third season here.