'We Hunt Together': Season 2 Remains a Demented Delight

The first season of Showtime thriller We Hunt Together was a breath of fresh air in the crime drama landscape—a cat and mouse thriller that was just as interested in telling the stories of the pair committing the crimes as the detectives chasing after them. Part love story, part procedural, and part psychological exploration, the show's first season was intense and unique, asking viewers to question their own beliefs about vengeance, justice, and what both those things actually look like in the real world.

In many ways, the show's second outing is more straightforward than its first, for good and ill. There's a much more traditional murder investigation, and a more familiar sort of serial killer sits at the heart of the story. Their obsession with Freddy Lane (Hermione Corfield) is what brings her more directly into the action of Season 2, but it also means she's less of an overt villain this time around. (Though her hands still aren't exactly clean here either.) She's still wrestling with plenty of her own inner demons: her visions of the dead BFF she pushed into a lake whose name she now wears, her still-raw grief over Baba's death, the loss of the one person who loved her unconditionally, her seemingly bottomless urge for attention and validation.

But though Corfield's performance remains as deft as ever, carefully walking the line between emotionally damaged millennial and gleeful psychopath, there are fewer larger narrative questions about how we're meant to feel about her character this season and no uncomfortable questions about what her choices mean. Instead, the show now seems to view Freddy as a slightly less violent (at least in terms of sheer scale) version of Villanelle from Killing Eve, and rather than trying to understand her, it seemingly expects its audience to simply revel in what she's allowed to get away with, and thrill at how close she comes to getting caught (or at the very least implicated in some larger crime.)