"Dirk Gently," Year Two

If you liked the first season of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," you'll probably like the second. However, if you didn't make it to the end of the first season, the second is not a good place to start. Nearly every member of the big, messy cast returns for a new adventure, joined by a couple of newcomers. And just like the first season, it takes a while to sort out what exactly is going on.

We could start with the fairy tale land of Wendimoor, where a civil war is going on between the families of Panto Trost (Christopher Russell) and Silas Dengdamor (Lee Majdoub), star-crossed lovers trying to fulfill a prophecy to defeat the evil Mage (John Hannah) destroying their lands. Or we could start with Project Blackwing, now lead by the dimwitted Sgt. Friedkin, which is holding Dirk Gently, the Rowdy Three, and Bart's friend Ken captive. Speaking of Bart, she finds her way to the little town of Bergsberg Montana, where a housewife named Suzie Boreton (Amanda Walsh) starts some trouble with a newly acquired magic wand. Todd and Farah, who also end up in Bergsberg looking for Dirk, team up with Sheriff Hobbs (Tyler Labine) and Deputy Tina Tevetino (Izzie Steele) to investigate. Oh, and we can't forget Amanda is still involved, as is a fifty year-old double murder case, a missing boy, a holistic actress, and an evil bounty hunter played by Alan Tudyk.

This year's mystery is much more straightforward and comprehensible than the first, and has more breathing room with an extra two episodes. Instead of time travel and brain-swapping, we have portals to different worlds and magic working in real life for reasons that the heroes have to uncover. To that end, the show is much less science-fiction and much more fantasy/supernatural this time out, especially everything surrounding Wendimoor, which is deliberately made to look like a child's fantasy land. The show is still very adult oriented, with a lot of people getting killed off in creative ways, but there's no denying that everything feels much sillier when you've got pink-haired people going around brandishing giant scissors, and people getting blasted with magic wands.

Though there are a lot of good individual pieces, this year felt a lot less successful in execution. I liked the first season primarily because of the mystery, which took a lot of wacky, random events and slowly revealed how they all fit together. The characters were a very mixed bag, and the writing was frequently overloaded with exposition, but I thought it worked pretty well overall. This year, the characters are mostly stronger, and I especially like some of the newcomers, but the mystery aspect was seriously downplayed, and less smartly put together. It feels like "Dirk Gently" is transitioning to something more character-centric and mythology-based, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

The trouble is that the character work still has some significant bumps. Dirk spends much of the season in a gloomy, existential funk, which means that he's no fun at all until he snaps out of it. Bart is also questioning her place in the universe, which means she spends most of her time not killing people and not being dangerous. Maybe that's leading somewhere, but not that I can tell yet. The lead actresses both see significant improvements though. Amanda gets empowered and given a mission, which is great to see, while Farah benefits from being teamed up with the delightfully rough-edged Tina. A similarly good Odd Couple team-up occurs between idiotic Sgt. Friedkin and an incredulous Ken.

However, my favorite character is Suzie Boreton, initially presented as a sad victim of suburbia. Her arc nicely subverts our expectations, slowly revealing that Suzie is a far more complicated and formidable creature than she appears to be at first glance. Amanda Walsh is fantastic at giving her these twitchy, over-the-top reactions, and gradually morphing her from pitiful to something quite different. She also boasts the best costuming in a year of some very iffy production choices. I mean, the idea for Wendimoor and all its fantasy characters is fine, but a TV budget only goes so far.

To sum up, this year of "Dirk Gently" should be a decent watch if you already liked the first one. I suspect the changes in style and storytelling are really going to throw some people though, and it'll end up working much better for some viewers than others.
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