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The Tourist: Season Two Review

"This whole situation is banana cakes."

This review spoils everything.

I don’t think we needed a second season of The Tourist, but I’m glad we got one. It’s a bit of a mess, but not in a bad way, and it shares the great strength of the first season: characters so absurd that they feel completely real.

But before I get there, I have a promise to fulfill. Billie asked me to explain the plot of this season. The magnitude of that task is part of what took me so long to complete this review. If you want to skip this bit, just scroll down to where I say "The important thing is that none of this matters." Here we go...

The Mystery Plot:

For generations, perhaps centuries, the McDonnells and the Cassidys have been feuding. They’re the Hatfields and McCoys of the northwest of Ireland. About 60 or 70 years ago, a male McDonnell had an affair with a female Cassidy. They had a baby girl named Niamh. That Old McDonnell (as I’ll call him), meanwhile, also had a son, Frank, with his lawful wife.

Because of the feud, and because it was midcentury Ireland, Old McDonnell and Ms. Cassidy had to keep the baby on the downlow. That baby grew into the woman we know as “Mama Cassidy”: Elliot’s mom.

In the early 1980s, Old McDonnell, on his deathbed, told his now-adult son Frank that he was sending him an important package in the mail. The mail plane crashed into the ocean, and the package was lost. Frank never knew the contents but was haunted by their loss.

Niamh, however, was aware of the contents: the intimate, “sometimes quite raunchy,” love letters exchanged by Old McDonnell and Ms. Cassidy during their affair.

Niamh asked her paramour, a diver named Elliot Stanley, to help her recover the letters from the downed plane. He did, and Niamh killed him to cover up what they’d found. She then buried the letters out in the countryside. The feud continued.

Sidebar: That Elliot Stanley is our Elliot’s dad. Our Elliot’s real name is Eugene Cassidy, but since Helen keeps calling him Elliot, I’m going to do the same.

In the early 2000s, our Elliot had an affair with Claire, the wife of Donal McDonnell, who is Frank McDonnell’s son. Claire had a baby—Fergal—but kept his true parentage hidden from her husband, who’s an abusive jerk. Part of the reason Elliot left was to keep Claire safe.

In the present day, Niamh, now played by the astonishingly gorgeous actress Olwen Fouéré, is the matriarch of the Cassidy clan. (They might be Travelers? They have caravans and a general disregard for bourgeois niceties.) She rules with an iron fist and talks about how much she hates the McDonnells.

Frank, the patriarch of the McDonnell clan, is a bit more bougie. He and his henchmen all wear fabulous wool coats and live in nice houses. He also rules with an iron fist. He also talks about how much he hates the Cassidys. (Don’t forget: Niamh knows she and Frank are half-siblings, but Frank doesn’t know.)

Both the Cassidys and the McDonnells do crime, but I don't know what crimes they do. Maybe their biggest crime is maintaining the everlasting feud.

After the events of the first season of The Tourist, the McDonnells, who’d been searching for Elliot, I guess, figured out a ruse to get him back to Ireland. It worked, which is how we got the second season. I think the McDonnells wanted Elliot so they could use him as leverage against Niamh, but I’m not totally clear on that part.

Elliot’s arrival is incidental to all of this, since Helen is the real detective here. Looking for answers about Elliot’s past, she winds up solving a few other mysteries, like: how the original Elliot Stanley died during his dive with Niamh, who her Elliot’s father was, who knows about Fergal’s backstory, and what the smell is coming out of Rauri’s house. Above all, Helen discovered what Niamh worked so hard to hide all those years: the fact that the McDonnells and the Cassidys are, in fact, one big messy family.

The important thing is that none of this matters. All of the backstory and feuding and lies were just a hook to hang the actual plot on: figuring out who “Elliot” is.


The Emotional Plot:

What did Elliot learn? The same thing, I think, that Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan learned in the second-season finale of Angel: he had to go back home to realize he didn’t actually need to go back home.

Elliot learned he has a kid. He learned from Claire that he’ll do anything to protect the people he cares about. He learned that he’s invested in his relationship with Helen, which he already knew. And he got some catharsis on how to deal with what he knows of his own violent history.

After the events that took up most of the season, some unknown person sent Elliot his “file,” which he decided not to open. The glimpse we got of it—that Elliot is a secret agent with Interpol under deep cover—helps us understand how he’s cool under pressure, has knowledge about car chases, and is good with guns. Elliot seemed to feel freer after burning the file unread, so now we know more than him.

Helen was supportive but clearly uncomfortable with that choice. (Acting props to Danielle Macdonald.) She’s made peace with Elliot’s past, but, my goodness, wouldn’t she be so happier if she’d known what was in that file? If there’s a third season, I hope we get to see her using her detective skills to figure out the real truth, if only because it will put her mind at ease.

The Show’s Appeal:

I loved the first season of The Tourist for its constant unexpectedness and quirky characters who never devolved into outright parody. I can’t say I loved this season’s unexpectedness, mostly because it was just so darn hard to parse, but I still love the character work.

For example: Ethan Krum, who has moved from toxic masculinity to toxic male wokeness. He’s given a few NedTalks. He mansplains mansplaining to Helen at one point. He calls attention to his own chivalry far too often to actually be chivalrous. He’s still really annoying, but now I mostly feel amused disdain rather than outright rage at his actions. (It helps that Helen clearly sees him for who he is.)

Ruari Slater (Conor MacNeill) was a fun addition. And by “fun” I mean “somehow this show made a man keeping his wife’s corpse in his basement into a joke.” The episode where Ruari held Helen captive went on way too long, in my opinion. It was too disturbing. But the other bits—like his fixation on pork and beans, “Piano Man,” and eventually Ethan himself—made Rauri a character that it’s enjoyable to dislike.

There are a few repetitions and callbacks to the first season. This season’s plot, for instance, also hinges on finding something buried. The wide open spaces of the Australian Outback in the first season and the “endless fields” of rural Ireland in this season allow characters to wander around beyond the attention of... well, pretty much anybody. In the first season, the fifth episode was Elliot's hallucinations. In this season, Helen hallucinated calling in a private detective. (Her hallucinations are more productive than Elliot's.)

My favorite callback is a bit odd. In the first season, Ethan made Helen take dancing lessons to prepare for their wedding. In this season, Ruari forces Helen to dance to Billy Joel. But this season ends with Elliot realizing he is, as his mother promised, an amazing ballet dancer. So he dances for Helen, on stage, in a spotlight, and brings her great joy.

Elliot is not a perfect boyfriend, but that he dances for her, rather than demanding that she dance with him, helps us understand why he’s better than Ethan and Ruari. A low bar, of course, but one he manages to clear with a lovely jeté.

In an interview with Netflix, Jamie Dornan explained that dancing scene (after admitting that he’s not a good dancer and used a double): “There’s very few shows that could get away with an ending like that, but I think they’re allowed [it] because of the unhinged, off-kilterness of the whole entire arc of the show — you grant them that strangeness of that dance at the end.”

The Tourist has always been an unhinged, off-kilter, and strange show, and although this season wasn’t as good as the first, for that reason I still award it:

Three out of four Ethan Krum Backrubs. They’re delish!

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

2 comments:

  1. Thank you so much, Josie! I found this season soooo confusing, but you're right -- it doesn't matter. Because Elliot and Helen still have each other. There is something so delightful about the two of them as a couple.

    And Josie, you did such a good job describing and explaining Ethan, who annoyed the crap out of me. When he turned up in the second season, I immediately said, no no no! But then they made it funny. I especially loved the mansplaining mansplaining. :)

    If there is a third season, I'll watch it. I got the impression that the second season not being quite as good might keep us from getting a third, but who knows these days?

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  2. It's been a while since I saw this. My main recollection (other than having exactly the same reaction as Billie to the return of Ethan) is that I really didn't like the last two episodes except for the dancing at the very end.

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