When Amazon announced three years ago that it was turning the 2011 action thriller Hanna into a series, excitement was understandably tempered. What works about that film namely Saoirse Ronan’s lead performance as the teenage super soldier of the title and Joe Wright’s directorial style, which can be brutal in its beauty are specific to that moment in time and space, they’re not inherent to the story itself. But as the next season of Amazon’s Hanna TV series prepares to launch, creator David Farr shows this grounded, gorgeous teenage assassin series has legs.
Heading into season two of Hanna, we are long past where we left off at the end of the feature film. In Season 1, Hanna (Esmé Creed-Miles) freed fellow genetically enhanced super soldier Clara (Yasmin Monet-Prince) from the Romanian Utrax facility. Erik died in doing so, and Hanna is carrying that loss with her as she protects her new family in the only way her father taught her how by moving them deep into the wilderness.
When we catch up with Hanna and Clara again in this first episode of Season 2, they’re living in the Romanian forest where Hanna believes she can keep Clara safest. Like Hannah circa Season 1, Clara doesn’t want to spend her days cut off from civilization she wants to know where she belongs most of all, she wants to find her birth mother. Ironically here in Season 2 of Hanna is playing much more Erik’s role from Season 1. Now it’s overbearing parental figure Hanah keeping restless child forced to rebel for chance to find self Clara under thumb.
Meanwhile, we begin exploring Marissa Wiegler’s (Mireille Enos) shifted motivations. At least season ended with Marissa killing Sawyer and letting Hannah Erik and Clara escape but leaving Marissa’s relationship with The CIA/Utrax complicated going forward. Marissa may have shot herself in the leg to cover up her actual role in the Utrax massacre, but Carmichael isn’t buying it lucky for her, he doesn’t care much where Marissa’s allegiances lie (as long as they don’t get in his way).
Marissa would no doubt make an excellent ally, but can Hanna trust her? Marissa is asking a lot of same questions that Erik did in Season 1 claiming to want help while keeping younger character out loop. While it’s riveting watching these two intense and complex characters interact on different points along friend to foe spectrum their relationship doesn’t hold same weight/complexity as Hanna and Erik’s dad-daughter relationship did, and therefore can’t emotionally ground story in equal ways.
In season one, one of Hanna’s chief journeys was coming understand that Eric loved her recognize him as her father. The driving questions of dynamic between Marissa/Hanna, nor Clara/Hanna for matter are never framed equally emotionally resonant way by Hanna season two which means it never hits same emotional heights with respect to particular character because it cannot do so period.
Yet, Hanna season two refrains from telling all of its stories in one go. In the second season, we are presented with a much wider view of this world and its narrative. What was only suggested at during the first season’s end that there may be other girls who didn’t escape Utrax as babies, like Hanna did becomes a full-fledged plot point in season two as we follow these future assassins through their next round of training. This takes place at somewhere called The Meadows, a beautifully landscaped estate in northern England that could have been plucked straight from X-Men‘s Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters or Vampire Academy‘s St. Vladimir’s Academy.
And while it may look like a posh boarding school filled with over-privileged teens chafing against perceived or actual adolescent rigidity, it is not. It is a baby-abducting, CIA-run assassin program that is currently busy brainwashing an entire high school’s worth of captive teenage girls into becoming obedient killers.
Some of the best stuff this season is set at The Meadows because it effectively mashes up those aforementioned coming of age boarding school dramas with espionage thrillers. The juxtaposition is brilliant and obvious. As the trainees receive the character profiles meant to become their lives (complete with names, fake families and a new wardrobe), they reflect on identity performance in teenage hood as well as the particular pressures put on teen girls even when they aren’t super soldiers an inquiry made more effective when you compare the intentionally performative ways these trainees engage with expectations of modern femininity with the wonderfully feral quality of Hanna’s exploration of identity in season one.
In doing so, Hanna season two becomes more obviously an ensemble show than ever before though what I love most about this series is how slowly it expanded its scope while still keeping things interesting throughout its debut run. We’ve seen Hanna begin to figure herself out and make her first steps into a larger world, but now it’s Clara’s turn to do so, as well as fellow Utrax trainees Sandy (Áine Rose Daly) and Jules (Gianna Kiehl) though in their case, it’s more like they’re being shoved into the deep end by Utrax with no choice at all about which side of the pool they’ll have to drag themselves up onto.
If you’re here for the vibes, Hanna still looks and sounds absolutely beautiful. (The show has one of TV’s best soundtracks.) This season brings on new directors Eve Husson and Ugla Hauksdottir along with series creator Farr himself but even when this show is at its most derivative (for example: very much season two, Nikita went tremendously underappreciated), its visual style sets it apart. From those undomesticated Romanian forests to the bright possibilities of Barcelona, this is a rich and immersive world to be in.
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