While the show is not outright bad in any way, it's also most certainly not as good as Hill House for probably the same reason that most "Second Things" usually suck. For one, when you're making your first book, your first album, TV show, whatever it is, you generally have what amounts to Infinite Time to create that thing. It's a success, and now you have... 8-10 months to create the follow up.
Where before it may have been a story, a song, whatever, that you were sitting on for ages, maybe almost your whole life, now an executive is holding a bag of money and saying "Do it again". AND WHEW. So maybe you rely on your writing tics a little more. Maybe kind of wallow back into the same sort of tropes your familiar with. Looking for a bit of comfort in the process.
This is a lot of what you see with Bly Manor. One thing, certainly to note, is that it's lost its intense sense of direction. This show isn't aimless by any means, but it attempts to juggle a number of stories with little to no additional benefit to the show overall. No further example of this is needed other than that of GOOD OL' UNCLE HENRY.
So, Henry is a failing lawyer of some sort or another. Please bear with me on this. It's convoluted but that's my exact criticism. Henry's brother, and Henry's brother's wife are dead. They died in an airplane crash while attempting to re-do their honeymoon when it was discovered by Henry's brother that Henry was doin' his wife and his wife had his daughter.
Henry sinks into debt and alcoholism afterwards and is guilt ridden over the fact that he kind of sort of inadvertently caused the actions that led to their deaths. He eventually overcomes his alcoholism and, in the end, .... doesn't really do anything. He has a great life with his daughter and nephew. The end.
Okay, so what was the point of Uncle Henry here. Well, the show, as its predecessor did, uses ghosts 'n ghouls as a metaphor for the sorts of things we carry with us. Whether they be guilt, shame, lies, etc etc. Henry gets haunted by... an evil twin version of himself in his run down office building while he drinks. At one point he is in a memory of himself getting a blowjob from his brothers' wife while his evil doppleganger looks on with delight.
This is not played for laughs. It's very tragic, or at least thats what the soundtrack wants us to believe (It's VERY funny).
So what the fuck is going on here? Why is this character in this story? He serves initially as a function to get the main character, Danielle, into the Bly Manor, and then periodically just wastes screen time. He dies at one point in the show and then comes back moments later because ghost magic. He does not effect the story at all, nor does he add to it in any meaningful way other than his function as a plot point, so, I don't know. But this is all part of what I mean by the story, and consequently, this blog post, not being as efficient with its storytelling.
Ultimately the time we spend on the parents' deaths is used only to really enhance Henrys' story, which as I've just said, has no real bearing on what this story is really about at all.
At its most basic level, this is a love story about a nanny and a gardener falling in love one summer at a mansion while the overwhelming hatred generated by sin and rejection overwhelm those living in the present.
The love story is given approx. 12 scenes overall towards the last half of the series' run, and the horror of this old pain from phantoms long dead is wrapped up in about 45 seconds once the main characters get involved. There is a whole other supplementary love story weaved in between two other characters whose story also does not have any real central meaning, only additional "Love can be toxic, love can be cruel" sort of subtext thrown in the spice up the "Love can be life, love is what we live for" message the rest of the story carries.
There is one really truly great episode, "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes", which just quite reaches some of the fantastic elements from last season. It's essentially a Victorian ghost story in which a vengeful bride overcomes the grasp of death itself in order to extract from the living that which she demands. This, of course, being their lives. It's fantastic.
This woman, confined to the literal empty space of a promise she made in life, continues to hunt for those she loved in death to the point where she becomes nothing but hatred incarnate. A function of a function, acting out of a habit she can no longer remember forming, abandoned by all, time and death included. It's so great. It's too good. There's a lot of talk here about the gravity of events, about the gravity of how people live and move through the world, perfectly framed by this simple, beautiful ghost story.
Of course how this story concludes is a whole other thing.
In the final episode, our main character, who previous to this was tied up by the clown squad of Skeleton Key bad guys, IE: literal children possessed by former lovers, overhears the ghosts say "not me, not you, us" as in invitation to the dead to occupy the bodies of the living, decides in the spur of the moment to save a child from being drowned, to shout, NOT ME, NOT YOU, US at the ghost. This of course, invokes the spirit to occupy her body for the course of about 15 years before eventually drowning her in a lake.
In a literal, up front story-telling perspective, this is, to put it eloquently, fuckin' stupid. What the show is going for, allegorically, is that many people find themselves with partners who are haunted by the spirits of those they let live within them previously in their lives. Or, perhaps, simply depression. Dani talks about this thing within her continually taking pieces of her away. Haunted by a sadness felt but never seen, within and never shown.
Except of course, in the actual events presented to us in the show itself, its a faceless water zombie that eventually literally drowns her in a lake and keeps her from passing on to the next world. Or, doesn't, it's hard to say.
So the shows story didn't work. It has pieces that do. Hannah as "ghost who doesn't know she's dead" is fine, the weird C-tier Skeleton Key rip off story sucks, but at certain points their story is at least interesting on a human level.
The problem with this season is that it wants so badly for its ghosts to not be literal, but they are EXETREMELY LITERAL. We see like six people get killed by a water dwelling nightmare ghost, but also she is a metaphor, and also she will LITERALLY KILL YOU. She dwells within you like a mental illness, but she will also LITERALLY POSSESS YOUR BODY AND DRIVE YOU ACROSS THE GLOBE TO DROWN YOU IN A VERY SPECIFIC LAKE.
You could make the same criticism of the last season, I think, but the storytelling was so tightly focused around this family and the choices they made and how they all relate to each other that the wrapper story about a haunted house added nothing but further suspense as to "How they got to be the way that they were". Why did this one bad night with your mom in an evil demon mansion ruin every member of this family in very, very, specific ways.
Whereas here, in Bly Manor, it's why did this long bad Victorian marriage result in a lesbian couple in the 1980's experiencing marital tragedy 15 years into their relationship. Do you see what I'm saying here? There are elements at play that I'm simplifying, for sure, but the tragedy is not that Dani died, the tragedy as the story presents it, is that a woman opened up a box of clothes in her attic 400 years ago. These are not the same.
Anyway, 6/10 I'll watch the next one.
PS I really did love Episode 8 so much as a "The Origins of Ghosts" kind of thing. This is a whole other topic for me, but boy fuckin' alive did I love it. Also, if the whole season had been about the romance between Dani and the gardener, I would have liked it much more. But it wasn't.
PPS I didn't even talk about the fact that Dani is haunted by the guilt she holds for her ex-fiance who got killed by a bus which is whole-heartedly dropped after the mid-point when Dani accepts that she is attracted to women.