Summary
Control Z season 2 rejoins the same characters but exchanges some of its technological topicality for a by-the-numbers revenge plot.
This review of Control Z season 2 is spoiler-free.
The first season of Netflix’s Mexican original series Control Z was about, among other things, social media, and the power of secrets and lies to live in every Instagram DM and Twitter trend. The premise saw an unknown hacker finding a treasure trove of personal information about various high-school students and disseminating that information in ways that made for good cliffhangers; it was easy to binge but difficult to find much reason to care about. The same is true of the second season, which is out today, though it’s admittedly slightly less enticing a binge-watch proposition for how it abandons a lot of its always-online topicality in favor of a largely uninteresting revenge plot.
It does, admittedly, pick things up where we left them, with — spoiler alert! — Raul having been revealed as the hacker and Javi having been accidentally shot. With a lot of the first season’s major storylines tied up, then, Control Z season 2 heads in a new direction, with an unknown “avenger” terrorizing those who’re responsible for what happened to Luis. This isn’t necessarily a bad setup, but it is kind of a boring one, especially since the format of the first season allowed each of the hacker’s targets to be fleshed out and have their backstories explored as their secrets came often very publicly to light.
This time around, targets of the mysterious avenger — all people we already know — are just unceremoniously offed or saved at the last minute by returning heroine Sofia, who is sometimes a master of Holmesian deductive reasoning and sometimes a complete moron, depending on what the plot requires. A lot of the enjoyably soapy high-school drama has been abandoned in favor of more immediate, life-or-death thrills, and while that’s okay in theory, in execution it ends up feeling a lot more contrived and generic than is wanted.
There is some of that high-school drama, though, and many of the relationships are fleshed out more in light of the higher stakes. The phenomenally unlikeable Gerry gets a perhaps ill-advised amount of focus, but some of the other supporting characters are well-served too, including perhaps my favorite, Natalia, whose continuing money problems lead her to increasingly risky decisions.
It’s not bad, in all honesty, but it’s so run-of-the-mill that it’s hard to recommend Control Z season 2 as anything other than a curio for those who really liked the first outing. We’re unlikely to see any more of it either way.
