Season Review: Pantheon Season Two

What do you get when you have a series that had an absolute banger of a first season, had a second season advertised on the same network, only to be made exclusive outside of the US?

If I didn’t know, I would say that this entire shit pile of a scenario was something akin to Nickelodeon, or Cartoon Network…screwing us out of a conclusion of an fantastic of a show. However, this comes from AMC+ of all places. AMC+ ended up cancelling all original programming, even taking everything off of the service. Hope you love getting endless content from The Walking Dead.

Even with all of the nightmares that had arisen in the release of the next chapter that was the grand opus of Pantheon, season two feels like a disjointed mess whence compared to the brilliant first season that you can read our review for here. Season two’s first six episodes delivered expected answers, like Holstrom emerging as the (somewhat anticlimactic) UI mastermind. Unfortunately, the big battle for the climax paled in comparison to the epic David vs. Chanda showdown that capped season one.

That’s just the very beginning of the issues here and I would be more apologetic if the season had some sort of cohesion. The first six episodes of this season felt more like it belonged to season one and were the best part of the show complete with apt progression but then the series tapers off.

Once Caspian’s UI was corrupted by Safe-Surf when he took over Holstrom, that should have been the end of it and it would have wrapped the series into a neat bow. When I finished “Apokalypsis,” I thought the series was done, and though I was let down by the fight and obvious animation flaws, overall I was happy with where the narrative ended only to be reminded that I can’t have nice things.

I can’t begin to tell you how pissed off I was with the last two episodes. We got a rushed two episodes that didn’t have a single thing explained probably brought on by the fact that production knew that the franchise wasn’t going to end how it was supposed to, and rushed the series’ finale.  Time skips mid-season can be tricky all by themselves, and I understand why some viewers might find them jarring. For example, I struggled to get past the first five episodes of Demon Slayer because the three time skips crammed into episode two felt disorienting and broke my connection to the characters. Pantheon gave us something just as egregious. The final two episodes made me feel like there was no weight of consequence for anything.  In total, there were about four time skips in between the two episodes, and none of them accomplished anything.

The overall feeling I’ve had with Pantheon is a story of the two seasons. Whereas season one captivated me, and motivated me to get Ken Liu’s short story book to read the source material, season two has me almost disgusted. The animation was definitely a step down clearly showing Titmouse had its budget cut somewhere during the production featuring spots where there was little to no detail in the animation, and faces were poorly animated.

I’ve been trying to piece together how exactly I felt with season two, especially with how much I loved the first season. There isn’t much of anything to hang my hat on. The narrative was a gigantic step down and everything felt disjointed, rushed, and didn’t give the same weight of action we had in the first season. Hell, the fight between Holstrom and Caspian, nor the fight with the Safe Surf controlled robots with the humans were nowhere near as captivating as the fight between Dave and Chanda. The 20 year time skip disconnected me from the characters, and just made me not care about what happened.

At the end of it all, Pantheon season two killed my love and joy for the first season. It went right to a Game of Thrones style disaster, where the second season absolutely destroyed any good will the first season accumulated. Thankfully, there isn’t another season to suffer from, because I would only get even more depressed.