Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 review: An upswing in the series

Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 recently premiered on Netflix with some significant improvements upon its predecessor, both in terms of its story and its treatment of characters. But do the improvements qualify it as a redemptive instalment?

Story

Season 2 of Fate: The Winx Saga follows Bloom and her friends’ lives under the new regime at Alfea, one that is run by the cryptic and highly suspicious Rosalind.

Bloom and friends help Silva break free from captivity and take refuge at his old friend Sebastian’s house. As the girls try to pry out information about Rosalind’s secret doings, Silva and Sebastian help them remotely.

Sam is angry at the regime change and can’t take it anymore, but Musa helps him calm down, to an increasingly concerning degree when she starts using magic for it.

Terra’s cousin Flora arrives and joins the suite and the group effortlessly, while also putting her chemist talents into making medicine and antidotes.

Bloom takes apprenticeship under Rosalind to pry some more, to little avail. However, she starts to become less and less suspicious of her. Stella’s case is different as she’s awarded, by Rosalind, a magical device that restricts her from leaving school premises.

Aisha gets close with a specialist named Grey, and they hit it off. However, Aisha’s dedication to her books and preparations and group missions come in the way of her first boyfriend.

Sam reaches the tipping point and has to leave school, along with his father. Terra stays, who also comes out to the group as gay, and they all welcome and accept her for who she is.

Bloom and the group find out that Sebastian is a blood witch out on revenge against the fairies. In a struggle against a controlled Andreas, Sky has to kill his biological father to save Silva.

Beatriz continues to do whatever takes to survive, especially after Andreas’ death. One of her decisions breaks her three-way relationship with Dane and Riven.

Sebastian reveals that Rosalind killed Dowling, and upon learning which, Bloom incinerates her with her Flame Dragon — magic that Sebastian wants and will tell Bloom about her parents and the past in exchange.

In the final confrontation, Bloom learns about her mother who was also a Flame Dragon and who had put her in stasis after the war thousand years ago. Her mother then confined herself to the Realm of Darkness and Bloom stayed in stasis until she was found by Sebastian’s father.

Sebastian wants Bloom’s magic to open up a portal to the wretched realm and call upon Shadow — an entity that can resurrect the dead. However, his plan doesn’t pan out and is defeated by the fairies, albeit also inflicting them with one big loss — by killing Beatrix.

Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 ends with Bloom heading inside the portal to close it from the other side, but not before she meets her mother and learns the whole truth about her past.

Performances

Although the performances in Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 are nothing to write home about, they’re fairly competent across the board. Especially for a fantasy teenage drama on Netflix, the performances delivered by the ensemble cast and the supporting ones as well, more than suffices.

Positives

Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 is an improvement upon its predecessor in many ways, one of which is the pacing and the narrative flow.

While the first season struggled with a dozen narratives entangled into a messy spool, season 2 does a better job at distinctly following the different characters and their arcs.

There’s a massive improvement in terms of including socially and culturally resonant commentary into the episodes, instead of shoehorning very misplaced and badly written one-liners like the first show, which ultimately detracted from a progressive point if anything.

Season 2 of Fate: The Winx Saga feels much more like a show based on its source material than its predecessor. There is interesting lore and developments that excite the viewer for what lies ahead.

Even though it’s far from an exemplary case of diverse casting, the second instalment does a way better job adding more diverse characters to the fray.

Negatives

The two big villains of Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 — Rosalind and Sebastian — are ultimately wasted and killed off way earlier than they should have.

While Rosalind’s death might not be that premature, it was certainly very iffy how she was made quick work of. That too, after imbibing the antagonist with so much hype, only to be finessed in a battle of magical strength.

Rosalind’s departure makes way for the next big antagonist in the lineup — Sebastian — to take her place. However, he was ultimately met with an unremarkable send-off as well, despite it being the final confrontation where the girls get to enjoy their fairy wings for a while.

Thanks to such a big cast of characters, there’s not an ample amount of time to flesh each one out properly. Even Terra’s coming out feels rushed where it should have been panned out over a couple of episodes as she struggles to overcome her anxieties and questions about her identity.

Verdict

All things considered, Fate: The Winx Saga has definitely taken the series to an incline. With several things that made the first season an uncomfortable experience to sit through being improved in the second one, the Netflix series shows good promise for future instalments.

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Also Read: Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 ending explained: What is the Realm of Darkness