NOS4A2 Review: Bad Mother (Season 2 Episode 1)
NOS4A2 returns for its second season and an eight-year time jump on Season 2 Episode 1, “Bad Mother.”
There’s a problem inherent with doing a time-jump, which is that it’s so incredibly easy to not execute it properly. If you don’t reestablish the world and the characters — the state of how things are after all of that time has elapsed — the audience can feel like they’ve either missed something important or don’t have a sense of how things are now.
Too often, it becomes a game of diminishing returns but other times it can be implemented to rather successful extents. Take Lost, for instance, which propelled the story to new places but seeded it in enough prior. That let it feel like we still had a good sense of the characters as they are now but also the time in between that that we didn’t get to see as much of.
That being said, NOS4A2 skipping ahead eight years in between its first and second season is an extremely bold move to make. For that, you have to give credit where credit is due because that’s a really interesting and confident choice to make, especially following a season where it often hesitated to make a lot of decisions like that.
Now, the ultimate question here is: Does it work? The answer to which is a little bit complicated. For the story? Sure. Granted, this is something that will become clearer with hindsight, but, for the moment, this seems like the direction that the show always intended on going from this point forward and might set up something more interesting for the rest of the season.
On the flip side of that, is this a good move for the characters? At least for this episode, that seems to be no.
We jump straight from Vic mourning the loss of her quasi-boyfriend and being pregnant to here where she is a full-fledged mother and has a drinking problem. It’s too jarring and the episode takes too many shortcuts with the contextualization of this new life of hers.
We don’t get to see her mourn in any significant way or really have a sense of how she got to this point now. We don’t get to see the steps it’s taken for her to have any kind of struggle with alcoholism. The episode introduces a preexisting romance with Lou but we don’t really have any kind of investment in his character either.
It all comes off as being particularly hand-wavey in a way that doesn’t work as well as the episode needs it to for a lot of this to land. The episode’s entire conceit that Vic is, as the episode title indicates, a bad mom doesn’t really carry over as well because it’s all based in her drinking, forgetting to pick her son up, or panicking over Christmasland frights.
The problem lies in that it’s hard to get a footing into Vic’s parenting because we see so little of it before she ultimately decides to leave. It has this interest with making her seem like a bad mother but we don’t get to see all of the ways that she’s a good one, too. It’s too much of a one-sided portrayal.
Overall, if this is a premiere designed to get us back into the show and give us an idea of what we’re all in for this season, then this is an auspicious beginning.
What did you think of this episode of NOS4A2? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.