Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow…
I’ll say this about El Rey’s From Dusk Till Dawn series: It feels better now that, in Season 2, it’s no longer aping/adapting movie at all. It’s beholden to nothing except the story it wants to tell. That doesn’t mean it’s now good all of a sudden, it’s just inherently more interesting.
Season 1 was a 10-epispode run that started out viable, but then quickly collapsed under the weight of both carrying the film and its own budgetary issues. After the first episode took the film’s opening Earl McGraw scene and extended it into 44 minutes, the pattern seemed set. For instance, another full episode was devoted to the Geckos taking the Fuller family hostage at the motel. And another to the Geckos trying to cross the border in the RV. Short, memorable moments within the movie were being needlessly expanded upon.
Now the show’s as free as a bird. Or a bat, as it were. Our main characters have been scattered to the wind. Freddie’s (Jesse Garcia) back home, Seth (D.J. Cotrona) and Kate (Madison Davenport) are scrounging for cash and shelter down in Mexico, and Richie (Zane Holtz) and Santanico (Eiza González) are driving a head-first assault on the Nine Lords. Now an outlaw couple, Santanico will stop at nothing to kill the head of the Nine, a newly introduced “big boss” character named Malvado (Esai Morales). In flashbacks, we see that it was Malvado who enslaved her and turned her into a siren at the Titty Twister.
Eiza González and Zane Holtz in From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series.
So Santanico’s motivations are clear. And she’s so blinded by her quest that she knows she can’t be the object of Richie’s affections. Not in the way he wants. Despite their teamwork in and out of bed. And right now, her plight is the only element of the show that’s close to feeling investable. Season 2 may be untethered, but the show’s still filled with flat performances, unexciting violence, and an overall malaise. Despite the crazed premise and the hyperactive cult film it’s based on, the show doesn’t “pop.” It sits. In a weird, boring place between horror and crime.
Elsewhere in “Opening Night,” Kate made it clear that she wanted to reconnect with Scott so as to try and help him be a functioning vampire. But she’s dull and her brother’s now an undead creeper back at the Twister. A lapdog who seems content being a Renfield-type. So why should we care about his fate or her plight? The first season left things off with him being sort of a villain, so hers isn’t a quest I’m invested in. Nor do I need Seth to reunite with Richie. This side of the story didn’t exactly spark here in the premiere, though Seth realizing that the motel’s night manager was a vampire was a nice beat since it initially played like he was overly paranoid.
There is a rebirth quality to the season here at the outset. Whether or not it will work in the long run remains to be seen, but Santanico’s talk of shedding her former self, shedding old skin, was telling on two fronts. She’s really become the standout here, and her escapades with Richie, taking down the meat packing money men for the Nine Lords, was the best part of this one. She’s sort of gone the full hero route now, even saving one of her dozing co-workers from an accident that would have produced a lot of precious crimson. And then, in the end, freeing the women who the goons were shipping off to Mexico for bloodletting.
There was a teensy toying with time here, as the episode opened with Santanico and Richie seemingly failing at their task (getting venom’d out by indie wrestler Brian Cage), and then flashed us back to the build-up to that moment. Letting us know that months had passed since the Season 1 finale and that the Twister had fallen into desolation in the aftermath. But none of the time reshuffling helped save this opener from feeling drab. And also that goes for Malvado ripping off Narciso’s face off and the magical resurrection of Danny Trejo’s “Regulator.”
