One of the most surprisingly enjoyable series to debut last spring was MTV’s Scream (you can check out my review of the first season here), so I’ve been anxiously awaiting the second season to see if the show could have as successful of a sophomore year as it did in the beginning. The wait is finally over, though, so let’s take a look at what happened in the season two premiere, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
The season opens with an incredibly ditsy girl looking around her house for her missing cat. She’s alone in the house, but the attic door is open for some reason. Knowing that her cat must be there, she heads upstairs, only to fall victim to a killer hiding in her attic.
As it turns out, though, this scene was from a movie-within-the-show (explaining the actually atrocious acting), and it’s playing at the theater in which Audrey is working. She gets a call from Noah (who is still clearly obsessed with figuring out who the second killer was), and they make plans to go to Emma’s welcome home party. It seems that Emma has been away for a while since shortly after the events of last season, but she’s finally returning to Lakewood. After locking up the theater, though, Audrey is surprised by someone new wearing the infamous mask of Ghostface, and she retaliates in the way anyone would — she stabs the masked man. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the masked Ghostface was really just trying to pull a prank on Audrey (even livestreaming the event with a chest-cam), getting the police involved in the situation. Audrey gets off clean (it was self-defense, after all, and the guy was only slightly injured), but the man’s accomplice is extremely angry about the lack of punishment.
After all of the police business is taken care of, the whole Lakewood Six (the remaining main characters from season 1) reunite for Emma’s return. It’s surprisingly heartwarming to see all of these people together and happy after knowing all that they went through last year, so I know it’s going to be rough when the bad starts happening all over again. Before the end of the party, Noah asks Emma if he can interview her for his podcast, but she declines after reiterating that she just wants to let all of her past go.
Back in her car, Audrey receives a mysterious phone call from someone who seems to know much more about her than she would like, and it begins a slow progression of really messing with her head. She does a bit of investigating to see if the couple from the theater incident have anything to do with it, but Noah’s insistence that it’s all connected with the events from last year doesn’t ease her growing discomfort at all. Brooke and Emma, meanwhile, are both busy dealing with relationship drama, and Emma is working to balance this with the additional PTSD that she’s going through because of everything that went down with Piper. One particularly great moment (from an audience perspective) is a dream/hallucination that she has while sleeping with Kieran the night after returning to Lakewood. It’s just a brief scene, but it gives me the impression that this season is going to have a bit of an emphasis on this sort of “trippiness,” and I’m definitely looking forward to that possibility.
The rest of the season premiere gives us an introduction to a few of the new characters for season two, and I’m looking forward to getting to know these newbies. Scream is the type of show that will frequently be killing off both its main and recurring characters, so it’s going to be important for the writers to make us quickly connect to them so that the deaths will resonate if they’re chosen to meet a swift demise. Speaking of killing off characters, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” continues this trend by ending the life of someone we’ve known since the beginning of the series, and the fallout and healing from this death is surely going to be a catalyst for some character arcs this summer. It works pretty well, in my opinion, since it’s a character that we know well, so the death feels more powerful than it would have with a guest star.
It’s a brief thing, but I want to mention how much I loved Noah’s meta-horror commentary in psychology class around halfway through the episode. Just like with the film series, Scream: The TV Series benefits greatly from these meta moments, and John Karna continues to be my favorite actor on the show. I hope we get a ton more of this (naturally) throughout the season.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” is a fantastic season premiere for Scream that builds perfectly off the setup and story from the first season while creating something new and, possibly, even more fun than anything the show’s provided before. I feel like this is going to be a great run for the show, and it’s definitely a show to keep an eye on this summer.
What did you think about the season premiere of Scream? Do you have any early theories? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!
[Photo Credit: MTV]
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