Netflix’s Black Summer Season Two Review

For anyone who hasn’t seen Black Summer, it is essentially a fast-paced, post-apocalyptic TV series about different groups of survivors banding together against flesh-eating zombies. Each episode is broken up into different “chapters”. These chapters might highlight a particular person or group of people. Or the chapter might refer to something that a character says. Each chapter is relatively short, so viewers could sit through several of these chapters within one episode. This format puts a unique spin on the over-saturated “zombie apocalypse” genre of film and television and it works.

This season focuses again on two survivors – Rose (King) and her daughter Anna (Zoe Marlett). Picking up directly from the end of the first season, Rose and Anna are now the only ones left from their group of survivors from the previous season. It is going to be a hard struggle to stay safe without the numbers they once had. Highlighted several times throughout the season, survival is the only thing that matters. The harshness of winter provides a new element this season to push our mother and daughter team to extremes. As the season progresses, it jumps from Rose and Anna to other bands of people struggling to survive, fighting and dying for necessities like food and water.

To say Black Summer is bleak would be an understatement. It often seems that just as something positive happens, there are suddenly many things that go wrong all at once. This forces some characters beyond their breaking point, committing heinous crimes against other people, all in the name of survival. As a result, it doesn’t pay to get attached to characters in this series. Fans of The Walking Dead, will most likely enjoy Black Summer as it focuses more on the survival aspects than the comradery and relationships between characters that the former does so well while giving it a unique touch.

There’s a sustained sense of desperation that gives the series an edge compared to others in the same genre. It’s almost too real at times. There’s gore and brutality of all descriptions while characters shoot each other all over the place. One of the highlights of this season involves roughly 30 characters simply shooting their guns at anything that moves, including each other! And this is also where we meet a woman named Sun (Christine Lee), who is featured throughout the season as another survivor to watch. Her story is even more harrowing than Rose and Anna’s.

One of the best things about this series is that viewers never know what will happen next. Each chapter brings an entirely new challenge to the survivors: the weather, the zombies, or just other people trying to survive. In the end, it makes total sense why Black Summer returned for a second season, and here’s to hoping that there will still be many more survival stories to tell.

Hopefully Black Summer gets renewed for a third season.

still courtesy of Netflix

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