UPROXX

With each new revelation, each new flashback that adds additional context to one of last season’s flashbacks, it begins to feel less like a sensitive teen drama than like one of those forgettable Lost rip-offs that thought the key to success was introducing five new questions for every old one that gets answered. ... And each additional reason, each additional season, dilutes the impact of when we first heard [Hannah’s story].

It’s compulsively watchable, emotionally engaging, and almost always one step ahead of where you think it’s going.

The emotional balance of the season is very different, even though it’s leading somewhere rewarding and meaningful by the end.

The new episodes deftly explore what happens next for June and everyone else in a way that feels true to the source material, while also feeling a bit looser and more sure of itself now that the story is wholly the series’ own. ... In many ways it was even better than The Handmaid's Tale's already impressive debut season.

One of the best things the show figured out how to do was to draw lots of stories from lots of different Bosch novels, keeping Bosch, Edgar, and company so busy that there are never the dead spots you get in most shows that use the “It’s a 10-hour movie” narrative approach. This season, though, felt like it had too much on its plate in both quantity and quality of cases.

It’s still not a great show, but it’s a much more enjoyable one to watch this time around.

There are some nice action sequences, particularly in the opening two episodes, directed by Game of Thrones‘ Neil Marshall, and the series as a whole looks great, convincingly transforming the wilds outside Vancouver into something that feels genuinely alien. But outside of everyone’s complicated relationship with the Robot (and even that’s a very slow burn), there’s just not enough there in the story or characters that feels distinctive or compelling enough to keep going.

A new season that’s weirder and more vivid than before. ... The new season is at once more opaque and more direct than the first one. The premiere is so full of digressions that the plot eventually begins to feel like the real digression, yet by the end of it there’s a clear structure in place for how David will be dealing with the Shadow King.

It’s the rare revival that not only justifies its existence, but draws most of its strength from how much time has passed and what’s happened in the interim.

The side characters remain terrific--my favorite joke in the premiere may be Laurie’s utter bafflement at Monica complimenting her for the birth of her fourth child only hours earlier--and the show still has a gift for constructing comic set pieces like the black site-style office Richard tried to show the guys in the premiere’s opening. But the series was already reaching the point of diminishing returns last year, and appears to have arrived there now.