TV Review: The Great Season 2 Is The “You” of Netflix

I ask myself all the time why I ship toxic relationships. I watch Killing Eve with a rosary praying Villanelle and Eve hook up, and I watched You genuinely feeling Joe did not appreciate Love and how music she understands him. After both, I took a cold shower and analyzed my past relationships. Watching  The Great, Season 2, I was enamored by Elle Fanning’s Catherine and Nicholas Hoult’s Peter because as she became a worst person and he, oddly, because a better one, I found myself pulling for them…. and taking another cold shower to analyze my past, love choices. 

Love and Joe! Eve and Villanelle! Catherine and Peter! Hulu’s The Great, out November 16, returns with a Season 2 that will wrap you with its love politics. Forget a potential civil war within Russia, WHO CARES ABOUT FOREIGN AMBASSADORS, and promoting women’s rights, income equality, and general human rights is fantastic, but…. tell me…. Can a man change? (Lol!) Seriously, this is the big question that permeates as Hoult’s Peter is under house arrest and anxiously awaiting the birth of his first-born Paul. Hoult brings such a sweet, goofiness to Peter that you wonder where the vicious moron of last season went. Perhaps, all his cruelties stemmed from his stupidity, and now that he is a wiser man studying things like, languages, cooking, and having sexual affairs with only TWO serfs, he’s become more enlightened. Yet, Catherine…. Well…..

Season 2 thrives, in part, because hyper-focuses on its two leads and their game of romantic chess, of which Catherine is determined to both win and deny she is playing. Fanning is perfect as an extremely ambitious woman that KNOWS she is destined to rule, but has no idea who she is and how to control herself. Yes, great leaders control, but genuinely good people self-control, and it is that latter part which confounds Catherine. She wants to “save” the world while proving, in some ways, she can be quite vicious if people do not align to how she defines “salvation.” The juxtaposition between Peter’s growth and Catherine’s now spiritual recession is fascinating to watch because in a world of “bad guys” and “good guys,” it can be hard to define virtues like, forgiveness, redemption, acceptance, and thus justice. 

If Peter’s newfound commandment is “Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself,” Catherine’s is “Thou shall not judge.” When we meant Catherine, she was a teenager whom only knew of her intentions to do good by others, and now, slightly older and about to be a mom, she begins a journey that Peter took a long time ago: intentions and actions are two separate things, and, depending on who you ask, is how much it matters. For Catherine, she is surrounded by people who fear her and love what she can do for them, which makes Peter her growing reality check. Seeing him go from his delusions to marking hers, I realized that part of why we like toxic relationships, on television, is because they make us feel that if we connect with someone in darkness, somehow, we can attain our own light. The Great Season 2 comes out November 19.