‘Wednesday’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: “The Devil You Woe”

It took me a minute, but I figured out what the second episode of Wednesday’s second installment reminds me of: Conan O’Brien’s old “Late Night’s Parade of Characters” bit. Hey, everyone, look! It’s Thandiwe Newton as a director of psychiatry for a hospital for the criminally insane! It’s Heather Matarazzo as the hospital’s chipper, ugly sweater–wearing personnel director! It’s Hunter Doohan returning as his evil Tyler/Hyde character, who’s now basically the Red Hulk! It’s Fred Armisen making an Uncle Fester Cameo for ten seconds! It’s Christopher Lloyd as a severed head in a robotic jar! It’s Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán as Morticia and Gomez, who are now series regulars because we realized the Addams Family is more interesting as a concept when it’s an actual family! And don’t forget Principal Evil Steve Buscemi! But wait — Morticia’s estranged Mama Hester is still on her way!

Though this episode is brimming with sideplots and sidequests, its throughline is exactly as it should be: Wednesday Addams continues to investigate the murder of a local — and now the murder of his friend, retired Sheriff Galpin. Wednesday finds him in his boarded-up, graffiti-tagged home, his eyes pecked out and his belly stuffed with birds that come flying out of his mouth. (It’s one of the series’ most memorable horror images, no matter how obvious the CGI is.)

After she shakes off the cops’ suspicions herself, Wednesday’s own finger points at Galpin’s superpowered son Tyler, incarcerated in Thandiwe Newton’s (let’s face it) Arkham Asylum ever since Wednesday brought his rampage during Season 1 to an end. Chained and shock-collared, Tyler nevertheless refuses to help Wednesday search for his father’s real killer, since he very obviously had nothing to do with it. Several times he attempts to Hulk — er, Hyde out, only to be thwarted by the electricity from the shock collar. (Pugsley, start practicing your fingertip lightning now.)

With Tyler ruled out, Wednesday’s next best suspect is the mysterious figure who’s been sending her stalkerish photos and messages throughout her first few days back at school, most recently from Sheriff Galpin’s missing phone. When Enid and her hunk werewolf BF Bruno (Noah Taylor) are abducted from under Thing’s watchful, um, fingernails?, they’re chained up beneath a collapsing ceiling of knives and swords at the top of Nevermore’s abandoned Iago Tower. 

This “final act of Warren Beatty’s Tim Burton–indebted comic-strip adaptation Dick Tracy (1990)” is thwarted by Wednesday, who solves a literary riddle with the phrase “The Invisible Man” and stops the tower’s clockwork mechanism from poking Enid and Bruno full of holes. Then the mastermind reveals herself: It’s Agnes DeMille (Lachele Carl), a redhead whose eyes look like special effects and who’s Wednesday’s number-one fangirl.

Turns out that Agnes doesn’t really want to kill Enid and Bruno, or Wednesday either for that matter. She just wants to impress the school’s unlikely queen of popularity, and hopefully get invited into the team trying to crack her current case, too. What better way to do it than to seize the opportunity of the school’s traditional Prank Day and really go the extra mile, you know? 

Elsewhere on the show, Pugsley and Eugene keep the Addams boy’s new zombie friend, dubbed Slurp for his honey-guzzling ways, chained up in their beekeeping shack. Unfortunately, the revenant breaks free and eats the driver’s ed instructor. 

Former Queen Bee Bianca remains under Principal Dort’s thumb. He forces her to siren-song Morticia into calling her mom to hit her up for money for the school, lest Bianca’s own scholarship get cut off. Gomez gets Wednesday out of the interrogation room at the police station but refuses to tell her what’s up with Morticia’s crow-linked sister, Aunt Ophelia. Ajax is jealous of the attention Enid’s been paying her wolf buddy Bruno. Bruno and Enid make out. Christopher Lloyd debuts as Professor Orloff, a classic head-in-an-ambulatory-jar bit.

It’s one of the few bits that works, which is one of Wednesday’s biggest problems. This show is festooned with so many deadpan Jenna Ortega one-liners and cutaway gags to zany incidents for the characters’ past that citing examples almost seems beside the point. Despite their sheer numbers, however, I can’t think of a single joke that made me laugh out loud. Can you? The only genuinely funny character/performance combo on this show is Enid: Her remark that “This is my ‘fun and freedom’ era — I’ve sworn off all dead bodies this semester” cracked me up, which on this show qualifies as a miracle on par with raising the dead. (More miraculous than that, actually, since this is The Addams Family and at least two of its core characters were stitched together from body parts.)

But it’s not just the joke writing that can’t get it done, it’s the plotting itself. The Principal Dort/Bianca storyline hinges on his possession of a magical pocketwatch that immunizes him from her powers, allowing her to continue to blackmail her at will. But this episode also establishes, via her interaction with Morticia, that Bianca erases the memories of her siren-song interactions fro people after the brainwashing is concluded. What’s to stop the siren from simply grabbing the watch out of Dort’s hands, tossing it into his office’s gigantic fireplace, and immediately hitting him with the “you will no longer extort me and you will remember none of this” whammy? Nothing, that’s what, except the need of the show to keep this storyline going.

Too often, in fact, Wednesday requires you to overlook a problem’s obvious solution so that events can play out according to the writers’ wishes. Take the Swords-of-Damocles situation Enid and Bruno find themselves in. Before long they free themselves from the chair to which they were very poorly chained and flop to the floor, but instead of rolling to safety, they take the time to make out. Wednesday saves them in a race against time, but all the while I was thinking “they could have taken the ten seconds required to move out of the way of the dangling blade deathtrap and still had ample opportunity to play tonsil hockey.”

The writing gets no better when weightier issues than Goonies booby traps are involved. During Wednesday’s visit to Tyler, she dismisses him by saying he’ll spend a lifetime “rotting away in this cell in anonymous mediocrity.” It sounds like a burn, except for the fact that he’s a) not anonymous but now likely even more famous than ever since his ex-cop father’s death will put his own crimes back in the spotlight, and b) not mediocre since it takes a science fiction level of security technology to keep him from turning into a gigantic Tim Burton movie monster and tearing everyone’s heads off. Someone in that writer’s room should have realized her words sound hollow, not badass.

“Hollow, not badass” is a pretty good assessment of Wednesday overall, actually — a show that has watched a lot of similar work and thinks it can fake its way through the final exam. But again, you simply cannot dismiss how Ortega and Myers in particular make this mundanity feel like magic with their energy and presence on the screen. The two of them act like they’re in a sharper, funnier, better show, and the dull, unfunny, deeply okay show they’re in benefits as a result.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.