The Flight Attendant Season Two Review: A Trippy, Genre-Hopping Voyage to Healing

If the first season of the international-crime-thriller-cum-comedy The Flight Attendant had been merely as madcap and affable as its jocularly animated opening credits, it still would have been a delight. But by merging genres and challenging the audience’s eagerness to laugh at its reckless protagonist, the HBO Max series managed to thread the needle of both spy-laden laugh riot and psychological drama.

The show’s second season finds Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) a year sober, and seemingly finally getting her life in order. Still, the shadows of her alcoholic father’s death and the collapse of her relationship with her mother continue to haunt her. Voices in her head viciously remind her of her wild past and urge her to give up the good-girl act and soothe herself once more with the easy answers offered by her addiction.

Cassie now lives in L.A., in love with her picture-perfect boyfriend, Marco (Santiago Cabrera), and under the warm watch of her AA sponsor, Brenda (Shohreh Aghdashloo). In addition to her gig as a flight attendant, she’s also become a civilian asset for the C.I.A., and she’s good at it, even if she tends to overstep her bounds. She’s certainly gotten too close, on assignment in Berlin, when she’s just feet away from an explosion that takes out the man she’s been trailing. Worse, the killer appears to be a Cassie lookalike who’s stolen her identity.

As in the first season, creator Steve Yockey (now joined by co-showrunner Natalie Chaidez) keeps the characters constantly on the go through peripatetic split screens like a frenzied chase through an Icelandic spa. The mystery may now be a little more opaque than last time around, the danger a little more removed, and the stakes are inconsistently clear. But what this new chapter of The Flight Attendant sacrifices by slackening the plotting, it more than makes up for by complicating Cassie’s relationship with her demons.

The six episodes made available to press expand on the fantasy worlds that Cassie crosses into as she navigates her mind. Mostly she’s confronting past versions of herself who try to lure her back to drinking, but we also get surreal synchronized swimming sequences that are both gloriously goofy and disturbing. There’s a real-life meeting with her embittered mother (Sharon Stone), too, that’s hard to watch as parent and child put each other through agony.

Some fairly static subplots involving Cassie’s bestie, Megan (Rosie Perez), and her lawyer pal, Annie (Zosia Mamet), pale in comparison to her own heightened internal struggles. On the other hand, Michelle Gomez’s Miranda Croft, the deliciously casual assassin-for-hire who stole much of The Flight Attendant’s first season, makes an applause-worthy entrance midway through the new one: “No more Miranda-ex-machina,” she warns, as if self-aware of the shockwaves she sends through the story whenever she charges on screen.

The central mysteries (who’s impersonating Cassie and why? What’s up with all the suspicious activity at the C.I.A.?) play second fiddle to the real suspense of whether Cassie will be able to maintain her grip on her sobriety. And through it all, the layers of Cuoco’s characterization continue to reveal themselves in each episode; it remains a consciously genre-defying performance, as if Cassie is coming to realize that she’s been trying to live in a rom-com when she really needs to take her story and her pain more seriously.

Much like the second season of Ted Lasso got to the psychological roots of its characters’ seemingly silly past behavior, The Flight Attendant revisits earlier episodes, giving Cassie the insight to alter her expectations of what it will mean for her to heal. By the end of last season, Cassie was ready to seek help, but that doesn’t mean she’s won the war. Far from it. Trauma and addiction, and the long tails that follow behind them, The Flight Attendant suggests, cannot be overcome in a year of good intentions, let alone in a single season of a TV series.