I’m as surprised as you are, but Season 2 of Fatal Seduction is pretty good. It’s certainly a major improvement over the first season, even if that’s faint praise, since it features a more coherent plot and less try-hard salacious softcore shenanigans. Also, unlike the first season, which was needlessly divided into two volumes, it runs for ten episodes and has the decency to end. It remains full of soapy twists and turns, though, and luckily, I’m on hand to break them all down.
Let’s get on with it, shall we?
Episode 1, “The Sins of the Father”
As Season 2 of Fatal Seduction begins, Nandi is still languishing in prison after taking the rap for Zinhle stabbing Leonard. She’s faring okay under the protection of Phila, but when Phila is paroled, she’s left vulnerable to the advances of some of the less savoury inmates. To make matters worse, Zhinle’s life is threatened to push Nandi into talking Vuyo out of investigating Minister Vilakazi.
Not good, then. Of course, Vuyo, who put Nandi in prison in the first place, believes she’s precisely where she deserves to be and is reluctant to step back from Vilakazi, who attends dodgy underground sex clubs and has his own personal fetishes that involve getting whipped by Precious. Never a good sign.
But the threats on Zinhle are to be taken seriously. Towards the end of the premiere, she’s involved in a hit-and-run that badly injures her, right after finding out that Brenda called Vuyo before she took her own life. Within one episode, her life is already in jeopardy, so this season doesn’t seem to be pulling any punches.
Episode 2, “Tearing Down the Walls”
After her hit-and-run, Zinhle wakes up in the hospital and only wants to see her mother. That’s a bit problematic considering that Nandi is still in prison, so Vuyo does Vuyo things, infiltrating a sex club and blackmailing Langa into dropping all the charges. Just like that, Nandi is a free woman. It doesn’t go unnoticed how easily Vuyo pulled her release off, though, and by extension how long he left her to unnecessarily rot.
This isn’t a happy family deal, though. Nandi continues to have sex dreams about Jacob — who remains local, as we see later — and is understandably hostile to Vuyo, since getting her out of prison doesn’t quite make up for putting her in there in the first place. But she also needs to compel him to leave Vilakazi alone, lest Zinhle be in more danger, but with Vilakazi on the cusp of securing the deputy president position, Vuyo isn’t keen on the idea of leaving him be.
In fact, Vuyo is convinced that Vilakazi’s power play will push him to eliminate all of the remaining loose ends. He believes that the only way to protect Zinhle is to take Vilakazi down, and he works with Moses to try and do so, but it becomes pretty clear that things aren’t going to be quite so easy.
Episode 3, “Sand Through the Fingers”
Things take a much more dangerous and direct turn in Episode 3 of Fatal Seduction Season 2. This is largely thanks to the reintroduction of Phila. Hester calls her from prison to tell her that Nandi is now free, and it seems like she’s being floated as a potential antagonist, but not quite — or at least not yet. Instead, she volunteers to kill Vilakazi at his sex club to protect Nandi, and Nandi, feeling she has no other option, agrees.
You can understand Nandi’s point of view since Zinhle is rebelling against both of her parents and disappearing with Clinton and Laura. Vilakazi isn’t shy about reminding Nandi that he’s keeping an eye on her, and despite Vuyo having a valid explanation for what happened to Moses — he was lured to the warehouse on the pretense of a meet, and then Moses was killed by someone else in front of him — Nandi isn’t convinced that he has dropped the issue. Phila seems like the most viable option.
Vuyo disagrees and sends Nandi with a membership card to go in and stop her. He’s right — Vilakazi spots her immediately, and she’s forced to flee. Nandi tells him that Vuyo sent Phila, but also that Vuyo has evidence that may be disseminated if Vuyo is hurt. Nandi offers to get Vilakazi the evidence in exchange for Zinhle being left alone. He gives her 24 hours to do it.
Episode 4, “Twenty Four Hours”
With Vilakazi’s deadline looming over her, Nandi spends the entirety of Episode 4 trying to figure out where Vuyo’s stash of evidence is. Despite the fact that he seems to be sincere in his desire to leave the matter alone for the sake of Zinhle’s safety, Nandi has made a promise she has to keep, and if she doesn’t come through within the titular twenty-four hours, Zinhle will be in more danger than ever.
And things are looking up for Zinhle, at least romantically, since she goes to bed with Laura, and while there seems to be a bit of jealousy over Clinton floating around, both seem happy enough with the arrangement. Phila also seems thrilled to be helping Nandi with her search, since she’s adamant that it was Vuyo who tipped off Valikazi about the assassination attempt. They manage to find the kompromat at Brenda’s place, where Nandi briefly reminisces about the “best night of her life”, and deliver it to Vilakazi, who promises that Zinhle is safe from him just so long as Vuyo is kept on a short leash.
Meanwhile, Precious refuses to accept that Jacob moving in next door to her is a coincidence, which I’m sure is just a minor step on the way to the inevitable relationship that is brewing between the two, and in a surprise turn at the very end of the episode, Leonard wakes up from his coma after a visit from Nandi.
Episode 5, “Remember to Forget”
It’s Christmas in Episode 5 of Fatal Seduction Season 2, which is an ideal time for a family reunion. This is perhaps just as well, since with Leonard awake from his coma and his memory stuck back around the time of Zinhle’s eleventh birthday, he’s dead set on the idea of being around his loved ones, having no recollection of anything that has happened in between. This is, in a word, awkward.
The happy families thing annoys Phila, too. I did say we should keep an eye on how she acts when her usefulness has run out, and it turns out not very well. When Nandi starts ignoring her calls, she breaks in and angrily stalks around the house during dinner, discovering Nandi’s sex club mask, which tips her off to the whole thing having been a setup of her design. At the end of the episode, she even confronts Zinhle with a knife. The girl is just destined to be in danger.
Meanwhile, Jacob and Precious go on a date that involves beating up some thugs in a parking lot, having a couple of drinks, and then attending to Jacob’s mother during one of her “episodes”. You wouldn’t think that was especially romantic, but it does land both of them in bed with each other, so what do I know?
A still from Fatal Seduction Season 2 | Image via Netflix
Episode 6, “Behind The Mask”
Plenty goes down in “Behind the Mask”, which finds Season 2 of Fatal Seduction kicking into a higher gear. It starts with Phila summoning Nandi into the bathroom with Zinhle held at knifepoint, but Nandi shows her manipulative bona fides by talking her down. She pretends to despise Leonard and Vuyo and be in love with Phila, promising an appalled Zinhle later that she’ll deal with the problem. And she does — she goes to Vilakazi to have Phila arrested. But the favours are mounting up, and she’s leveraging her promise of keeping Vuyo under control in a dangerous way.
Vuyo, it turns out, is working directly with Jacob and the journalist, Yusuf, to take down Vilakazi. This, of course, means that it was no coincidence that Jacob moved in next door to Precious, and their relationship is just a con. Then again, that’s how his relationship with Nandi started in Season 1, so you can’t rely on this guy not to get attached. But Precious wants to keep their relationship a secret from Vilakazi, since brief flashbacks imply they have some kind of weird psychosexual co-dependency relationship that stretches all the way back to her youth.
Oh, and in case it wasn’t obvious, Leonard’s amnesia is completely bogus. He’s very good at keeping up the pretense in front of Nandi and Zinhle, but when Yusuf confronts him at a restaurant, we can see it’s a ruse. He later meets with Yusuf and ends up confessing to framing Jiba for the death of Valikazi’s daughter to protect his family, which Yusuf records. Not one to be threatened, Leonard batters Yusuf to death with his walking cane.
Episode 7, “The Boy Next Door”
Reassuringly, Leonard is the bad guy again. Sort of. After killing Yusuf at the end of the previous episode, he takes his tell-all manuscript to Vilakazi and also explains how he paid off the doctor to push the amnesia agenda. Vilakazi needs to clean up the crime scene and dispose of the evidence, but Leonard is visibly struggling with the violence of murdering Yusuf.
Naturally, Vilakazi goes to Precious for help with the clean-up, and almost discovers her with Jacob. With a bit of slapping from mistress, she thinks she has adequately distracted him, but it’s clear he’s still wise to what she’s up to. Nevertheless, she goes to Yusuf’s place and almost catches Vuyo there, but he’s able to limp out without being seen and contact Jacob.
Jacob poses as an evangelist to get close to Vilakazi’s wife and drug her so he can snoop around. He doesn’t find the manuscript, but he does come up with a plan, which, based on the end of the episode, seems to be having sex with Precious near the window, knowing Vilakazi is furiously spying on them from across the street. Whatever works.
Episode 8, “The Deputy President”
There aren’t many new revelations in Episode 8 of Fatal Seduction Season 2, but the plot does move in some interesting and potentially deadly directions, especially as far as Jacob is concerned. The unmistakable feeling is of the truth coming out, which seems to be happening everywhere. We learn that Precious’s mother, Ivy, was married to Vilakazi’s driver and was going to testify in defense of Jiba before she disappeared. It’s a little bit more background to help us piece together what happened to Busi, which is the root of everything.
In the meantime, Jacob’s plan worked. Vilakazi saw him having sex with Precious and looked into him, digging up his phone records, which reveal he called Vuyo, Yusuf, and, importantly, Nandi. As a result, Vilakazi thinks Nandi put him up to seducing Precious, which leads Nandi back to Jacob. They share a moment, but Nandi is still adamant that he needs to drop the idea of avenging his father, since it’s putting her and her family’s lives in danger.
Speaking of which, it’s also revealed that Clinton is working for Vilakazi. After the hit and run, the minister blackmailed him into seducing Zinhle, which has proven difficult because when she started a relationship with Laura, she became jealous of Clinton and asked Zinhle not to spend any more time with him. Now, though, they’ve fallen out because Laura told her mother about Jacob, allowing Clinton to worm his way in and seduce her.
At the end of the episode, Vilakazi tells Precious that Jacob has been conspiring with Vuyo and Yusuf. She confronts him and pistol-whips him unconscious. The next thing we see, she’s burying his body in the woods. And while she presumably has a plan, Vilakazi arrives with a saw, explaining that they need to prevent identification of the body by cutting off his arms and head.
Episode 9, “A Happy New Year”
We’re getting into the juicy territory now we’ve hit the penultimate episode of Fatal Seduction Season 2. We’re finally starting to get some answers, though crucially not the main one, and the sense of jeopardy is very much rising. Unsurprisingly, based on the climax of the previous episode, Precious hadn’t really killed Jacob, but by the end, she probably wishes she had.
When Vuyo goes to see Precious’s mother, Ivy, we get a bit more backstory. Ivy was Busi’s nanny, and her husband was Vilakazi’s driver. They’d take Precious to work with them, and when she was 16, Vilakazi began to groom her for sex. The assumption is that Precious’s father killed Busi, but that’s not confirmed. However, it does seem very much like Vilakazi killed Precious’s father, who was abusive, explaining her loyalty to him. She later tells Jacob that he “saved her life”.
Vilakazi wants Leonard to set Vuyo up so he can kill him. However, he’s distracted by the fact that Jacob kidnaps his wife and demands that he give a press conference revealing what really happened to Busi, exonerating his father. In response, Vilakazi calls Clinton and tells him to bring Zinhle to his club so that he can force Nandi into talking Jacob down.
Episode 10, “Pain”
As ever, the ending deserved its own detailed explanation, so to that end, I’ve written an entire article about it. Please check that out for the full skinny on what went down.
