'The Devil’s Hour' Season 2 is Too Clever for its Own Good

As Halloween approaches, the time-bending psychological thriller The Devil’s Hour Season 2 has the right amount of creepiness for your TV. The new season’s horror-tinged gore and jumpscares make it an atmospheric match for dark autumn evenings, but good luck wading through the overly complex plot. The first season purported to be a fresh, Peter Capaldi-driven crime thriller with a time-bending twist; in reality, it was relatively standard and Capaldi-lite until the last episode, narratively disjointed but grounded in familiar detective tropes starring compelling actors. Season 2 returns with everything dialed up to eleven: more twists, layers, an increasingly dark tone, and far more questions than answers.

Season 1 followed Lucy Chambers (Jessica Raine), a mother whose emotionally distant young son Isaac (Benjamin Chivers) is kidnapped from their home. Lucy and police detective Ravi Dhillion (Nikesh Patel) get swept up in the investigation into Isaac’s disappearance. She finds her son and catches the kidnapper, but he swears he has good intentions. The kidnapper, Gideon Shepherd (Peter Capaldi), claims he has been reliving his entire life in a combination of reincarnation and a time loop. Each time he regains consciousness as a baby, he recalls strangers’ deaths that he learned about in his last life and covertly moves the person out of harm’s way.

Like him, Lucy can also perceive her past lives; this lifetime is the only version in which she has a son, which explains Isaac’s detachment. It would take several thousand words to explain the ins and outs of Gideon’s time-bending story, but Season 1 ends with Gideon escaping from prison, Lucy and Isaac fighting for their lives in a house fire, and a different version of Lucy arriving at the scene of a house fire, this time as a detective.