Only a few months ago, Netflix's dour Polish mystery series Signs, or Znaki, premiered its first season. It was a flawed but watchful endeavor, mainly involving two simultaneous mysteries — a murder of the present day, and an age-old Nazi plot.
On both of these narrative threads, the second season, all eight episodes of which premiered internationally today, follows up on both of these narrative threads, but also adds a few more, including several new characters, and attempts to get far too cute for its own gain with time, structure, and genre.
This season's general feeling is, it's a mess. Characters fade in and out of sight, we skip back and forth through time, and the show starts to change radically about halfway through. It was always strange, but a kind of weird, grounded, one informed by religious fanaticism and evil.
Those things remain to some extent here, but crucial elements of the first season’s plot are left to fester in the background while we focus instead on knitting together a new missing person’s case with the unresolved Nazi UFO business from the first season — among other things, including local politics.
Following the kidnapping of Nina (Magdalena Zak) at the end of the first season by Krzysztof Sobczyk (Piotr Trojan) and his mentally stunted accomplice Dorota (Paulina Galazka), Commissioner Trela (Andrzej Konopka) has gone way off the rails. He’s drunk all the time, and Ada (Helena Sujecka) is having no choice but to try and cover for him while he continues to live in her house.
Meanwhile, Mayor Antoni Paszke (Miroslaw Kropielnicki) is confined to a wheelchair, being cared for alternately by Agata (Helena Englert) and Zofia (Malgorzata Hajewska) while he attempts to secure his re-election, though that task is made suddenly more difficult by Blazej (Michal Czernecki) running in opposition to him, considerably aided — financially and otherwise — by Kaja (Barbara Wypych) and Twerski (Rafal Mohr), representatives of a consultancy firm with seemingly bottomless pockets and clearly ulterior motives.
This is a lot on its own, but there’s more to it. Kasia, daughter of the town drunk Pawel (Robert Gulaczyk), goes missing, as do the parents of a young child whom Zofia finds wandering the road and mistakes for her dead daughter, Laura. The phones are out, Father Roman (Rafal Cieszynski) is still grappling with his faith, and the lingering mystery of what exactly the Nazis left buried in the Owl Mountains at the end of the war continues to be of considerable interest to several interested parties.
Even with so much going on, Signs Season 2 nonetheless seems more interested in showing off rather than balancing the competing plotlines properly. It regularly indulges in flashbacks, and occasionally breaks into split-screen and musical accompaniment for scenes that don’t particularly warrant it.
Seemingly important aspects like Jonasz (Andrzej Mastalerz) and his “cult”, including their drugged-up holy water operation, are left almost completely alone, while we get a ton of focus on a lopsided mayoral race, endless scenes of drunk men wandering through the woods, and several other scenes and subplots that aren’t half as interesting as the show seems to think they are.
Ultimately it raises more questions than it could possibly provide answers for, and a midpoint shift into slightly different genre territory feels as if it comes out of nowhere. There’s still a lot to like in Signs Season 2 since it can build suspense when necessary and includes its fair share of relatively shocking moments. Its characters, too, are compelling, even if painfully few are relatable.
But it’s difficult to argue that this story has been conceived with any kind of long-term plan in mind, so random and inconsistent does it end up being, and this follow-up outing quickly squanders a lot of the goodwill earned by the first season’s last-minute twist and cliffhanger with an inferior continuation.
