Fun season. The expansion from 6 to 10 episodes offered a larger and longer look into the Badlands that I liked a lot. We got to see much more of the world, many more locations and outside set pieces. Last year I can’t remember too many locations that were far from Baron compounds.
This season took off a few months after the end of the last where Quinn is considered dead, his son has taken his place, Sunny is locked up and MK is in some kind of monetary hiding to learn how to control his power.
The Widow is more or less the main focus as she upended the Baron power structure. Her aspirations to change the world, to essentially eliminate slavery, is an admirable one but she gets a lot of pushback from the other Barons. Then Quinn makes his presence known and throws everything into to disarray. Surprisingly, MK takes much more of a back seat for this run. While we see him in training, his arc is pretty simple and he comes in and out of the story in bursts, the point where he has little to do with the season finale.
Sunny’s whole push is to get to his wife and son which is quite the journey. Nick Frost plays the new character, Bajie, who was a great addition. You first meet him and think he’s just another prisoner, but they intertwine him well. All the scenes he’s in are mostly great and getting to see him fight is a blast.
Speaking of fights, I want to say there were more (or longer) fights per episode last season than in this one. That’s how I remember it but I’m probably wrong. While there are great sequences throughout, the real standouts are in episode 9 and 10. There’s some truly amazing choreography in the finale. The wire work is especially good. It’s superhuman but it still maintains a sense of real world weight.
The show is always drop dead gorgeous. Some of the best cinematography around and the action blocking and editing is second to none on TV. One of my favorite things about Into the Badlands is that there is no other show like it on TV. I like the world, the characters, the actors and the feeling of being somewhere familiar but ultimately new. Great set up for next season which is getting another bump in episode size.