NOS4A2 Review: The Night Road (Season 2 Episode 3)
NOS4A2 Season 2 Episode 3, “The Night Road” follows Vic as she attempts to find herself back in Haverhill and Charlie makes his next move.
“The Night Court” suffers overall, as an episode, from a sense that we have already seen this kind of episode before. It is perhaps too similar in regards to both Vic working through who she is in relation to who her parents are and the way that affects her, along with Charlie doing his kidnapping routine.
It’s a well-trotted path for the series and the problem is that it doesn’t add enough new here. It’s largely a rehash of things we’d already seen in the previous season.
That isn’t to say that nothing new is presented because there actually is. This is primarily found in the sequence where Charlie and Bing face off against Lou and Wayne and end up losing for once, which is a nice twist on those scenes from the first season.
This puts Vic, Lou, and Wayne into the position of being the ones in hiding and being on the run from Charlie. That’s a stark juxtaposition of the first season where the two sides were at odds but neither side ever made any kind of a move until the very end. Instead, there is a lot of forward momentum here that makes it feel like characters are actually progressing.
At this stage, it’s probably one of the better moves that the show could make. It can’t really keep Vic and Charlie in a staring match, waiting for the other to blink now, so it has to ratchet up that tension. Having one side chasing the other is a solid way of going about that.
We’re still having to watch Charlie and Bing try to kidnap another kid but it works here remarkably well. That part is fine.
What doesn’t work as well is watching Vic have to sort through her parent issues (this goes past just mommy or daddy issues) because this is an unnecessary well to return to. It was arguably the worst part of the first season and it drags this episode down so much. Yes, this probably relates to how Vic is feeling regarding Wayne but there has to be a less clunky way.
It just reeks of a lack of subtlety that makes us wonder if the writers have ever heard of subtext. Of course, this is what Vic is struggling with but we have already gotten that. It is the epitome of “duh” to have to bash us over the head with it, especially when it serves practically no purpose here.
“The Night Road” isn’t necessarily a bad episode. It is just a tedious and overly familiar one and that’s almost worse.
What did you think of this episode of NOS4A2? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Critic Rating:
User Rating:
NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.
Follow us on Twitter and on 
Instagram!
Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!
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.