From Dusk till Dawn: The Series – season 2 – review

Director: various

First aired: 2015

Contains spoilers

It came as no surprise when this series received a second season. Beyond the heavy involvement of Robert Rodriguez in both the channel and the series/story was the fact that Season 1 was thoroughly enjoyable TV. Ok, it didn’t come to the standard of the actual movie but that certainly was a hard act to follow.

Kate and Freddie

Season 1 actually followed the movie story pretty tightly but added in new characters and also changed the fate of several characters. Santánico Pandemonium (Eiza González) became a central character and thus couldn’t die and neither, of course, could Richie Gecko (Zane Holtz, Vampires Suck). As season 2 moves forward we also discover that Sex Machine (Jake Busey) had been turned rather than died as it appeared.

the Twister

This is going to be an ongoing problem within the series as it has invested into certain characters and is reluctant to let them go. The coda rebirth of one of the primary characters at the end of this season is not something I’ll spoil but underlines the issue. There is also the question mark over the vampire nature of the “creatures” – called culebras, they are snake creatures. However humans can be turned, they drink blood (and eat the soul of the victim), they can change shape (and take on the appearance of their victims for a short while), and they are destroyed by the sun and by destruction of the heart at which point they dust. The nine Lords (God like progenitors) have a snake within them (as does Santánico) but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks… well…

Carlos' new fangs

The series has Santánico, freed from the Titty Twister, with Richie. They are being hunted by one of the nine Lords, Malvado (Esai Morales), who sees her as his property and are on a mission to destroy him themselves (Satanico wants him dead, Richie wants his crime empire – these are not necessarily compatible desires). Carlos (Wilmer Valderrama) escapes from the mystical labyrinth beneath the Twister and restarts his machinations (and forges fangs from silver as he had to rip out his fangs to escape the labyrinth) and Ranger Gonzales (Jesse Garcia) is trying to rebuild his family life. Meanwhile Kate (Madison Davenport) is being initiated into a criminal life by Seth (D.J. Cotrona). I felt the Seth and Kate storylines were probably the weakest – Kate's motivations just didn’t seem to ring true (she has been painted so good in series that some of her in-season choices didn’t gel) and Seth’s descent into drug addiction and subsequent speedy recover just seemed badly thought through.

Jess Fahey as Uncle Eddie

New characters included Seth and Richie’s Uncle Eddie, which was a welcome but sadly short performance by Jeff Fahey, and an underused, in my opinion, but welcome return to the FDtD family for Danny Trejo not as his movie character (who had been played by another actor in season 1) but as the Regulator, a mystical almost indestructible warrior sent to hunt down and retrieve Santánico. The story itself becomes, beyond the Santánico and Malvado grudge, a search for the Well – a mystical source of ultra-powerful blood. The bonds that Richie and Seth stole at the head of season 1 hide a map to it – a concept that was perhaps a little hokey but has to be accepted to make the series hang together.

Danny Trejo as the Regulator

If I had one gripe for season 1 it was the toned down language, which jarred in places especially as the film script was written by auteur Quinten Tarantino. As this has fully diverged from the film and gone into uncharted waters, and thus is not reimagining scenes, I didn’t have the same frustration. However I felt (as indicated above) that some of the story and character motivations were a tad hard to swallow and thus I don’t think this quite matches up to the first season. That isn’t to say it was bad – it was still enjoyable TV – but the writers need to be braver with the main characters in the confirmed season 3.

6.5 out of 10

The imdb page is here.