I wasn’t sure about The Shannara Chronicles’ move from MTV to Spike, but I’m somewhat encouraged after seeing last night’s second season premiere, which didn’t do any of the things that I was worried about but did make some general improvements to the show while functioning as a sort of soft reboot of the series. If you didn’t catch the first season of the show on MTV, “Druid” is a great place to start. It’s exposition-heavy at times, with recapping last season and introducing a new crop of characters added to the main cast, but most of this is deftly done enough that it doesn’t distract overly much from the story, which this season is jumping right into. For the time being, there are several disparate storylines without much overlap, but it seems safe to expect that at least a couple of them will be intersecting soon. All in all, it’s a promising start to the season and an enjoyable hour of television that shows a level of self-assurance and comfort with its material that wasn’t present in the first season of the show.

**Spoilers ahead.**

Eretria & Lyria

Season One ended with Eretria kidnapped and Wil leaving Arborlon in pursuit of her, but instead of following that story the new season skips right past it except for a brief scene in which Eretria is brought to a guy she knows, Cogline, who gives her the option of staying with him or going if she chooses. Though she is certain her friends will be looking for her, she stays, and there’s an immediate time jump to one year later even before the opening credits start.

A year after parting from Wil and Amberle finds Eretria seemingly happily living with Cogline and his people in the ruins of San Francisco, where she helps with scavenging for old technology and has even found a new girlfriend, Lyria, who has a mysterious backstory of her own. One of my concerns about the show’s move to Spike was that Eretria’s sexuality and this relationship would be played up to titillate a presumed male audience, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case. Eretria and Lyria are affectionate with each other and even share a sweet kiss, but so far there’s been none of the half-expected camera leering or hypersexualization of the relationship in general. Instead, there’s just the strong sense that the relationship between the two women is still relatively new and that they are both maintaining some secrecy about their pasts. Lyria doesn’t make an extremely strong impression, and I’m not sold on her costume (what even is that top?), but it’s still early, and what I do like is the easy chemistry and the uncomplicated (so far) relationship between Lyria and Eretria.

There’s a somewhat gratuitous action scene right at the start, when Eretria fights off a group of about a half dozen trolls who come upon the scavengers outside the city. However, it’s nicely executed enough that I can’t complain too much about it, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it provides the opportunity—when Eretria falls through a hole in the desiccated Golden Gate Bridge and into the water below—for Eretria to have a vision of Amberle, who warns her that the world is in danger and tells her to find Wil. Before she goes to find Wil, though, Eretria spends some time weighing her options. She’s got a comfortable life with Cogline, who it turns out was a friend of Eretria’s mother’s, but she can’t stop thinking about her lost friends. In the end, it’s Lyria who pushes Eretria to go when Lyria spills the truth that Cogline has been hiding things from Eretria all along: while Eretria thought all these months that Wil hadn’t come looking for her at all, it turns out that he did but was turned away by Cogline. Cogline claims that he was only protecting Eretria, but by the end of the hour Eretria and Lyria have left the city to head to Arborlon—only to be promptly captured by Rovers.

Bandon & Allanon

Bandon has gone full-on evil and is busy making mord wraiths (imagine if Darth Maul had a baby with a Ringwraith) and tryin

g to resurrect the Warlock Lord at the most amazingly unsubtle EVIL SKULL CASTLE I’ve ever seen on television. It’s kind of absurd, but I love a show that can own that sort of absurdity. The early Shannara books were always highly derivative of Tolkien, and the first season of the show made some missteps in trying to differentiate itself from that history (I’m looking at you, “Utopia.”), but this season seems to be more interested in owning it. The post-apocalyptic touches are still there in the costumes and some of the wide shots of landscapes, but Bandon’s skull fortress is pure 1980s, Tolkien-inspired fantasy, and it’s great. The only thing greater is the prop they use for the Warlock Lord’s mummified heart, which is maybe my favorite TV prop in years. It’s fantastic.

Though Allanon crashes Bandon’s wraith creation and Warlock summoning party, he’s unable to prevent the younger man from creating the wraiths. They argue—with Bandon accusing Allanon of hypocrisy—and then fight—a nicely executed sword fight that nonetheless struggles to feel truly consequential in the first episode of a fresh season—and Bandon defeats his former mentor, leaving Allanon out in the cold (literally) and helplessly watching while Bandon sends his mord wraiths after Wil. Overall, these scenes setting up Bandon’s villainy are well-done, though his motivations are a little shaky. If you watched season one, you know Bandon was corrupted by the Dagda Mor, and there was always an element of choice in that; Bandon was corrupted because he was corruptible. It’s unclear just how the show is going to be exploring that idea. Bandon seems to blame Allanon for all of his problems, but even if it was Allanon’s fault that Bandon was exposed to the Dagda Mor in the first place, it isn’t reasonable that Allanon should be held accountable for all of Bandon’s actions since, especially now that Bandon is no longer possessed.

I’m also curious to see how the show handles what happened with Bandon’s season one love interest Catania. Bandon brings her up here in his railing against Allanon, blaming the druid for Catania’s rejection of Bandon, but what actually happened in season one was that Bandon, possibly under the influence of the Dagda Mor, tried to rape Catania, and she’s terrified of him. While we do get a glimpse of Catania in an Arborlon scene this week, we don’t get any of her perspective on this issue. Considering how poorly this show has treated rape in the past, I’m not sure I trust them to handle it well now. If nothing else, the usefulness of Bandon and Allanon fighting about it is pretty limited without any input from Catania herself. It’s a weird, perfunctory and muddled treatment of the topic that I don’t think shows a great understanding of last season’s events and suggests that some of those events could be retconned or repurposed in service of either Allanon’s or Bandon’s character development without taking into account Catania and what her take on the whole matter might be.

Ander Elessedil & General Riga

In Arborlon, King Ander is working hard to rebuild his kingdom after it was wrecked by demon hordes last year, but it’s tough going with little support from any of his neighbors, who are all at least a little bit happy to see the elves brought low like this. At the same time, a new reactionary movement has sprung up among his own people: The Crimson, led by one General Riga, blame magic for the demon invasion and are terrorizing and murdering anyone suspected of using magic, with a special hatred for those of the Shannara bloodline. To that end, Riga has put a bounty on Wil’s head and is exploring other avenues of hunting him as well, believing that getting rid of the last of the Shannara’s is a way to ensure the safety of the elven kingdom. By the end of the episode, Riga still hasn’t found Wil, but he has tracked down Wil’s uncle, Flick, and burned the town of Shady Vale to the ground trying to get Flick to tell him where Wil is.

Wil & Mareth

Wil finally made it to Storlock, where he’s been training with the gnomes to become a healer, but it’s not going very well for him. He’s still missing Amberle and experiencing something like PTSD symptoms that leaves him with shaking hands that are interfering with his ability to progress in his studies. He’s down to his last chance to succeed as a healer, but he’s got bigger problems, what with the bounty on his head and the posse of mord wraiths coming after him and all. He’s also got a new acquaintance, Mareth, who helps Wil fight off some bounty hunters. Mareth has her own agenda and her own magic, though. She needs will to help her find Allanon because, she says, the druid is her father.

The Wil sections of the episode weren’t terrible, but there isn’t a lot going on here yet. Austin Butler’s acting has improved, and I like his new haircut. Wil’s grief and longing for Amberle could have been conveyed more economically and less creepily; his use of the Elfstones to summon a vision of her so he could try to make out with it was, frankly, offputting. The fight scene with the bounty hunters in the bar was good, and it’s highly encouraging to see the action scenes in the show being of such consistently high quality. I think I love Mareth, who seems smart and tough and funny, though I also am a little skeptical; last season, Eretria and Amberle were often nice foils for each other, and I’d like to see that sort of diversity of female leads’ personalities to continue. That said, I can do without the love triangle dynamic that much of last season had, and I’m really rooting for Eretria and Lyria, which takes some pressure off Mareth to be so vastly different from the other woman in Wil’s life. We’ll see. It’s early yet.

Miscellany:

• I’m not even kidding about how much I love the mummified Warlock Lord heart prop. I was delighted when it started pumping blood all over.
• Could have done without the mord wraith vision effect in a couple of late shots. I get what they were going for, but without Evil Dead’s panache it just felt silly.
• Desmond Chiam is an outrageously beautiful man.