Summary
A slightly messy episode eventually bridges the gap between seasons and delivers a mission statement of an action sequence to close things out.
This recap of Warrior Nun season 2, episode 1, “Galatians 6:4-5”, contains spoilers.
Here’s an obvious downside of the binge-watch model that Netflix popularized and that virtually every streaming platform has enthusiastically embraced ever since — when you power through a whole show in a single day, by the time the next season rolls around, you’ve forgotten all about it. Perhaps this is more of a problem for me than the average person, but it’s a problem that Warrior Nun Season 2 anticipates nonetheless. After ending on a giant cliffhanger in the first season finale, “Galatians 6:4-5” simply picks up a couple of months later and gradually fills in the context from there.
As a result, this episode is absolutely all over the place, jumping between different characters and locations as we play catch-up and fill in the blanks of the time between seasons, so let’s try and keep everything together.
Warrior Nun season 2, episode 1 recap
So, the whole Vatican City debacle made the news. Adriel’s emergence has been heralded as an angelic second-coming, and he has since amassed a sizeable cult-like following — they hand out flyers — thanks to his miraculous healing of a face-rotting illness. His adherents are called the First-Born Children, or FBC, and they’re being opposed by a group calling themselves the Samaritans (no, not those Samaritans), who want to expose the whole thing as a sham. We’ll come back to this.
Ava is hiding out in Switzerland with Beatrice, tending a small bar and living her best teen-drama life, but she’s struggling to remain low-key and is prone to sticking her nose in the local gossip, chatting up handsome customers, and sending Adriel’s pious marketers flying through restaurant tables. One of her locals, Miguel, is a Samaritan and keeps pushing Ava to help him expose the rot underpinning Adriel’s fanaticism. On a night out, Ava and Beatrice intervene in his being jumped by a bunch of FBC goons, and he suggests that they accompany him to a secret FBC meeting so that they can covertly gather intel about Adriel. Ava, who is itching to get back into the fight before Adriel is able to accumulate too much strength, agrees, and Beatrice reluctantly tags along.
Elsewhere, Camila and Mother Superior are in Spain continuing the work of The Order of the Cruciform Sword, whose specialist services are needed in London to determine if a Cabinet minister is possessed by a wraith demon (bet he is), and Father Vincent is staggering around Portugal, trying to stop Lilith from ripping his head off. Everyone is wondering where Mary is, and Vincent, who claims she’s alive and in Toledo, is hoping to use his knowledge of her whereabouts to keep him alive. Thus, he and Lilith head there.
Meanwhile, in Vatican City, a woman named Yasmine, posing as a reporter for The Economist who has been tracing lost Christan artifacts, confronts Duretti, now Pope, about the connection between the debacle at the Vatican and the OCS, whose existence and history with Adriel has been uncovered as part of her research. Duretti downplays it, but she’s really there to bug his phone so that when Mother Superion calls him later asking what the OCS plans to do about Adriel, she’s privy to the conversation.
But as Mother Superior claimed during that call, the Vatican’s response has been too slow, and Adriel has been allowed to amass too much power. In a blink, a coordinated attack takes out virtually all of the OCS’s global outposts, including the one in Spain where Camila and Mother Superion are stationed. They both survive, but everyone else is silently stabbed to death. The only surviving light on the world map is the chapter in Madrid, which continues to steadily blink with signs of a survivor.
Jillian is also still obsessing over the Arc, and while she does that she has appointed Kristian as head of Arq-Tech, an opportunity he’s using to try and broker an alliance between the company, Adriel, and the Catholic Church. Duretti tells him to get lost for now, but this is something to keep an eye on as we progress.
The end of “Galatians 6:4-5” at least delivers on some of the action, gore, and special effects that helped to set the first season apart. When Vincent and Lilith get to the castle where he claims Mary is being held, Vincent betrays Lilith, claiming Mary is dead and siccing some of Adriel’s goons on her. Naturally, she uses her teleporting powers and super-sharp nails to absolutely lay waste to everyone in a flurry of torn-off body parts and screams. Lovely. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does next.
