Summary
The Rig gets much bigger and broader in Season 2, but still retains its essential atmosphere and ecological message.
I can’t decide if The Rig sorely needed Season 2 or would have been better off without it. Sure, it ended on a cliffhanger, but it also seemed to embody the atmosphere it cultivated; tight and isolated, building tension in the unknown and a slow sense of discovery that dissipated a little as the show got wilder and more explanatory. Its – arguably overegged – environmental messaging made its point with that ending, and the loose ends notwithstanding, it could have been left there.
But it wasn’t. The Rig and the crew of the Kinloch Bravo return to Prime Video for another six-episode season that is significantly bigger and bolder, and also – this is the surprising bit – slightly better.
Most people probably won’t agree with this, and that’s fine, but I was impressed by how capably The Rig Season 2 transplants the first season’s ample atmosphere onto a much bigger canvas. Following the tsunami caused by the enigmatic Ancestor that ended the first run of episodes, Pictor Energy has transferred the surviving crew of the Kinloch Bravo to ha igh-tech Arctic deep-sea mining facility called the Stac.
And the Stac is a great setting. It has the same stark industrialism of the Kinloch Bravo but with a sleeker, almost sci-fi edge, replete with fancy deep-sea rovers and other more sophisticated equipment. And this is just as well, since within the first couple of episodes we’ve indulged in riveting set-pieces on both the ocean floor and a creaky ice shelf. That enigmatic slow-burn that characterized the opening episodes of Season 1 is not present here.
I thought knowing what was up would ruin things somewhat, but it didn’t for me. The stakes feel more clearly defined from the off. Pictor – represented once again by Mark Addy’s Coake, but also now by Alice Krige’s CEO Morgan Lennox – are the bad guys, and want to expose their involvement in the Ancestor’s discovery by killing it. The Kinloch Bravo crew – including Magnus (Iain Glenn), Rose (Emily Hampshire – Appendage), and Fulmer (Martin Compston), among others – are the good guys, and just want to get back home to their families. In the meantime, though, they have a mystery to solve and a conspiracy to unravel.
And there’s still plenty of mystery. The Ancestor having a name and a clear place of origin now doesn’t tell the characters – or us – everything they need to know about it, and while there’s obviously a cover-up afoot, there are secrets within Pictor that go beyond simply trying to pay people off to keep the disaster under control. An opening gambit from the company to hush things up in exchange for a few quid shuffles some of the old ancillary cast out of the way to make room for new players, including Ross Anderson’s Cameron, a diver with unclear loyalties and a history with Harish (Nikhil Parmar) who is involved in a stand-out early sequence.
Iain Glenn in The Rig | Image via Prime Video
This ploy also shifts Cat (Rochenda Sandall) and Hutton (Owen Teale – Dream Horse) to the mainland, giving us a wider perspective on the devastation that Season 1’s tsunami has wrought, but also delivering the most substantial emotional payoffs in Cat’s search for her missing wife and the surrogate father role Hutton assumes for her. Sandall is brilliant here, as she was in the first outing.
While the new additions fit right in, this does slightly come at the expense of the Season 1 stalwarts. Magnus is a little sidelined, with Rose adopting more of an obvious leadership role here after being put in charge by Lennox, and Fulmer, whose connection to the Ancestor was the most interesting thing about him, grapples with hazy visions and a loosening connection to Rose that feels less engaging. Now that I mention it, I’m not sure that anything to do with Rose comes across all that well in Season 2 of The Rig, but it’s not a dealbreaker.
What counts, I think, are those hard-to-define nebulous qualities that made the first season so engaging and persist here; the chilly atmosphere, the clanking set and audio design, that general sense of unease that is fostered by the lingering fear of an encroaching, unstoppable unknown. The scale is much wider now, but that essential feeling of paranoid isolation – whether it comes from literal sources, like being crushed in a tiny vehicle by the enormous pressure of an indifferent ocean, or figurative ones, like being constantly lied to and manipulated by people who pretend to have your interests in mind – remains.
And it looks good – sometimes even remarkable in wide landscape shots that take in the harsh, stark Arctic or the glow of sentience in the gloomy depths. The close-up CGI is sometimes a little ropey, but that’s forgivable when the broad strokes paint such a pretty picture.
Ultimately the story is also in service of a larger point about the havoc we continue to wreak on the environment and the natural order, which is important and well-made though not, crucially, coming at the expense of actual entertainment. Some might still find The Rig Season 2 a touch preachy, but I didn’t, and I’m generally pretty sensitive to being talked down to. Mileage may vary, but it’s hard not to recommend the show either way. Again.
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