Summary
Drops of God returns for Season 2 with a beautiful, sumptuously shot premiere. “An Unexpected Gift” boasts the structure of a mystery but remains fascinatingly character-driven.
Just in case you thought Drops of God might have lost a step in the almost three years it has been away, just peep the opening scene of the Season 2 premiere. Name me another show that can deliver such a beautiful-looking sequence with almost no light and sound, and I’ll give you a cookie. It’s a remarkable feat. And a lot of Episode 1, “An Unexpected Gift”, is like this; relative mundanity elevated into profound beauty by sheer craftsmanship.
But it isn’t style over substance. This remains a richly character-driven story. Consider that opening scene again. Why would Issei be free diving in the waters of Okinawa, going so deep into the darkness that he now fears that he passes out on his way back to the surface? The purpose that he’s searching for down there is integral to his arc; a way to fill the void he’s experiencing in the wake of losing the competition to Camille in Season 1.
Camille has her own problems. She and Thomas are turning the Chassangre Estate in Provence into a sustainable vineyard, but she’s unable to escape the looming spectre of her late father, and Issei’s morose demeanour doesn’t help. He and his father, Hirokazu, are there to celebrate his and Camille’s birthday, but their relationship is strained thanks to Issei’s simmering resentment. This dynamic is made even more fractious when Talion presents his birthday gift — a bottle of wine that Alexandre instructed to be delivered to the winner of the competition. Talion debated ignoring those instructions, letting sleeping dogs lie, but it wouldn’t have been fair given the contents.
The ambrosia of the gods, Alexandre calls it in an attached note. The perfect wine. It was his life’s mission to discover its provenance, and his greatest failing was that he never did. Now he’s passing the quest on to the winner of the competition, such that they might be able to finally outshine him and prove they’re better than he was. Camille pretends not to be interested. But she can’t quite hide that she is, and Issei doesn’t even try.
That night, both wearing the hideous matching pyjamas they saw at the London Wine Fair in May and both gifted each other for their respective birthdays, Issei and Camille sit down to sample the wine. Both are amazed by it. This is one of those scenes that Drops of God Season 2, Episode 1 presents with maximal artistry, for no reason at all. It’s two people discussing the aroma and flavour of wine, yet it feels momentous, and the beautiful transition as Issei takes a sip and segues into a vision of the Sea of Tranquility as he bobs in a body of water is award-worthy stuff.
To Issei, that vision means something (and the fact he’s yanked under the water is presumably more significant still). He has been pursuing the rumours of visions that free divers report to have experienced at the ocean’s murkiest depths, and hunting down the provenance of this wine might fulfill him where his inability to dive beyond 50 metres has failed. He’s immediately determined to find out where the wine comes from. Camille is less convinced. After giving a journalist a tour of the vineyard and being insulted by her line of questioning about her father, she uncorks the bottle and pours the whole lot down the sink.
But from here, Drops of God adopts a mystery-style format, with Issei pursuing leads like a detective chasing a suspect across the world. From Talion, he learns that the bottle was acquired from an auctioneer in Paris named Xavier Lecretois, and the auction records then direct him to the Lopez vineyard in Sanlucar de Barrameda, where Mr. Lopez recalls the secretive red being sold by the late Monsieur Poulenc, a rich collector who supposedly went mad and killed himself. In the aftermath of his death, Poulenc’s nephews sold everything off and confined his surviving wife, Audrey, to a nursing home. Issei goes to see her next.
Audrey identifies all of her purloined belongings in the auction guide. She recalls the bottles, too, retrieved by her husband on a big trip, the destination of which she can’t remember. With his investigation having reached a dead end, Issei reaches out to Dai, who puts him in contact with a woman named Natasha in Marseille who can take him diving. Issei is obsessed with diving, and with conquering what he believes to be a childlike fear of the darkness, or whatever may loom at him from it.
Natasha makes a good point that the visions experienced by divers are caused by a lack of oxygen shortly before their brains explode — it’s not exactly desirable. But Issei’s experiences don’t seem related to depth. Natasha takes him only 17 metres down to explore a scenic cave system, and he once again loses consciousness, this time far enough down that by the time Natasha has dragged him to the surface, he needs to be hospitalised.
At the end of “An Unexpected Gift”, Camille visits Issei in the hospital and resolves to help him find the wine. She might not care about it herself, but she cares about him, and if this is something he has to do, they might as well do it together, as siblings. Though something tells me it won’t be quite that simple.
