5 Life Lessons to Learn from Season 2, Part 2

Warning: This post contains spoilers from Wednesday season 2, part 2.

The four episodes that concluded season 2 of Netflix’s nightmarish Goth fantasy mostly hit the right notes.

You have to be grateful for the production, a hideous yet beautiful vision of horror reminiscent of Sleepy Hollow, the 1999 film directed by Tim Burton — his predilection for the shiningly grotesque has set this series at a far remove from Barry Sonnenfeld’s Addams Family movies.

For instance, there turned out to be not one but two Hydes, Tyler (Hunter Doohan) and his mother (Frances O’Connor), both of them gaunt, imposingly tall wraiths — they wouldn’t have been out of place at Burning Man. They were also wracked by a recriminatory hostility that gave their relationship a dysfunctional resonance far stronger than anything manifested by the Addamses.

In the words of Wednesday (Jenna Ortega):  “I haven’t enjoyed a mother-son relationship like this since Psycho.”

Part Two certainly wasn’t perfect: The finale kept you hooked with a dire premonition that someone in the Addams family was doomed to die — the most obvious contender being Wednesday’s grandmother (Joanna Lumley), with her sneer of disdain and strangely cadaverous pile of hair.

Brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), inoffensive and friendless, wouldn’t have been missed, either. But as far as I could tell everyone survived. 

Still, Ortega’s performance proves that sulky, baleful gravity doesn’t have to lose its strange luster over time (a third season has already been announced).

If anything, her sarcastic, morbid comments, as well as those of most of the other characters (apart from poor, dear Pugsley), can be considered almost inspiring.

Yes, the show’s scripts are littered with deadpan jokes about death (and suffering, and pain, and misery). Yet, interpreted in the right light and spirit, they can almost be a useful, even healthy way to approach life itself. 

“I’m just trying to embrace my inevitable decay with a touch of enthusiasm.”

Wednesday is on the money with this morsel of wisdom — unexpected in one so young.

Part Two at first almost threatened to subvert her, as the zombie Slurp (Owen Painter, quite good) gradually reversed his state of physical rot. (A diet of screaming human victims was good for his health.) But the show’s atmosphere of moldy darkness never lifts — nor should it.

This is the state toward which all of life declines. A simpler way of putting it would be: Face the music and dance. You may also, from time to time, come across people saying how much they like being old. But I don’t know if I trust them.

“My shoes are filled with broken glass and razor blades. You’d bleed out after two steps.”

So says Wednesday to nascent werewolf Enid (Emma Myers), who’s unaware that her Nevermore roommate has been trying very, very hard to keep her from dying — yet another premonition of doom.

This is something like a bleaker take on Atticus Finch’s famous line from To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Oddly enough — or not, given the show — Wednesday and Enid do just that, in a Freaky Friday twist that’s one of the season’s better moments.

“You can’t see yourself as an appendage, but as a whole person worthy of love and respect.”

This slogan of affirmation is uttered by Christopher Lloyd’s Professor Orloff — a talking head preserved in a bell jar — at a body-parts support group attended by Thing, the Addams’s right-hand hand.

In a season not big on surprises, Thing ends up having the most unusual narrative arc: He’s both an appendage and a whole person. Isn’t that a wonderful thought?

“Perhaps one day you’ll appreciate the intoxicating power of weaving mystery and passion.”

Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) isn’t necessarily being critical when she makes this observation to her preternaturally cynical daughter — the tone is more of regret and disappointment because Wednesday has been deriding Morticia’s efforts as a novelist. (One of her books is titled Kisses in Coffins.)

But Morticia has been a constant, salutary reminder of the magic of romantic feeling — something otherwise underrepresented in the Addams universe.

Part Two partly compensated for this deficit by bringing in Lady Gaga for a few scenes as a ghost named Rosaline Rotwood: She looked glamorously translucent and milky, like Cate Blanchett‘s Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings.

“Flattery is like formaldehyde—it is to be sniffed, never swallowed.”

A rather too aphoristic comment made by Grandmother Addams, but it’s certainly good advice to keep in mind when you’re around a beaker of formaldehyde.

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Wednesday season 2 is streaming in full on Netflix.