Following a messy first season finale, Chucky’s second season quickly ties up the loose ends before separating the show’s teenage protagonists, Jake (Zackary Arthur), Devon (Björgvin Arnarson), and Lexy (Alyvia Alyn Lind). But not even a full episode passes before a homemade bomb and the grisly aftereffects of its explosion herd the trio back together at the Catholic School of the Incarnate Lord. Naturally, the new locale does little to protect them from the voodoo-animated Chucky doll (voiced by Brad Dourif) that’s still toddling after their hides.
The Child’s Play franchise is no stranger to big resets: The films sometimes differ in tone, such as 2004’s Hollywood meta comedy Seed of Chucky, and happily transplant Chucky to new locations to menace new characters. Series creator Don Mancini is still running things after all these decades, and the wild swings he takes to keep things fresh are part of the fun.
This time, though, the changes never quite feel natural, robbing the series of the pathos that made it work in the first place. The show’s insightful inaugural season, especially in its depiction of how its main characters’ network of friends and family was violently pruned, was tinged with an edge of genuine danger, as their lives were being permanently altered.
The second season’s primary Catholic school setting is, on its face, a great idea since it restricts the characters’ movements, leaving them in unfamiliar surroundings with people they don’t know. Their only real ally is Nadine (Bella Higginbotham), a kleptomaniac who rooms with Lexy. But the violence visited upon students and faculty alike has far less weight than last season since, as the series never really stops to catch its breath, no one is nearly as entrenched in the protagonists’ lives as the show’s previous victims. The idea that Jake and Devon’s relationship has strained, for example, is stated aloud but not really depicted on screen; we never get the time to sit with the characters and see how they’ve changed.
The season tends to swerve away from potentially intriguing subplots right as it introduces them, like how a boy tries to blackmail Lexy only to be immediately killed by Chucky. This rapid pace does make the plot trajectory tough to predict, but it also gives every dilemma the feeling of a momentary roadblock. Everything becomes a problem to be quickly resolved rather than an actual jam that might finally spell a main character’s doom. Some characters, like a strange therapist (Rosemary Dunsmore) and a suggestible nun (Lara Jean Chorostecki), are barely established at all before they become important to the plot.
Mancini and company hardly seem to be short on ideas, many of them genuinely inspired: There’s the attempted brainwashing of a Chucky doll so that it abhors violence, a couple of doll-on-doll fights, a few hilarious uses for a cellphone, and an Apocalypse Now parody that’s largely designed to let Dourif do a killer impression of Marlon Brando. The series also doubles down on its meta casting gags, with Devon Sawa returning to portray Father Bryce, the school headmaster unrelated to the deceased twin fathers who the actor portrayed last season.
The season’s weirdest subplot revolves around Chucky’s on-again-off-again partner, Tiffany Valentine (Jennifer Tilly), and the consequences of her hijacking the body of actress Jennifer Tilly for more than a decade. An entire episode in the middle of the season is centered on the Tiffany storyline, which not only reintroduces Seed of Chucky’s non-binary (and now grown-up) twins Glen and Glenda (Lachlan Watson), but also brings in various Tilly associates to portray versions of themselves, including Joe Pantoliano and Gina Gershon (in a nod to Bound).
Legacy characters lurked around the edges of the plot last season, but Tilly, the Chucky-possessed Nica Pierce (Fiona Dourif), and, now, Glen and Glenda fully occupy a B plot of shifting alliances that eventually collides with the ongoing events at the Catholic school. Chucky as a whole may not have lost its entertainment value, but it’s disappointing to see it opt for full-throated fan service over any potential standalone appeal.
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