Her alcoholism and recovery are clumsily handled between the Cassie-clone gimmick, an unwieldy mother-daughter backstory, and multiple characters who clock her erratic behavior but either enable or antagonize her out of what appears to be pure malice. Multiple people are after her, someone out there is deliberately framing her, and she constantly finds herself in the wrong place for legal absolution but the right place to fuel rampant main character syndrome. If The Flight Attendant is getting its priorities across, the show only works if you accept that Cassie Bowden is the single most important being (and only blond) on the planet. Michelle Gomez nearly saves the whole season but is tragically only in one episode, knocking joke after joke out of the park and leaving you wondering whether she's the only person who understands the tone of this show or the only one who doesn't. Cabrera finds a lot of dimension with few scenes, but Marco is forged from the purest styrofoam, often absent for long stretches that have us (and Cassie) forgetting he exists and isn't a fake boyfriend she made up from Canada. Zosia Mamet is still the de facto voice of reason as Cassie's best friend Annie, even if she's facing deep-rooted emotional issues this season that show no immediate sign of resolution.

Yet none of these suspicious newbies reveal ulterior motives or even benign ones in the first six episodes sent to critics, while continuing to act completely abnormal. From new flight attendant Grace (Mae Martin) to AA attendee Jenny (Jessie Ennis) to Megan's new friend Utada (Margaret Cho) to Cassie's new boyfriend Marco (Santiago Cabrera), everyone is a suspect in a spy thriller. The rest of the cast does their level best with the material, but the disconnect in The Flight Attendant is that almost no one acts like an actual person, especially the new characters. Cassie plz stop getting caught in webs of criminal activity so we can focus on these two and their relationship! Party Cassie wears the sequinned gold dress from the night of the murder and talks like the kid you shouldn't listen to in a peer pressure PSA (she regularly encourages Cassie to drink and not 'be boring'), while a polished version of her in a new flight attendant uniform shows magical, mature possibilities. In Season 1, this had her returning to the scene of the murder and falling in love with a mental projection of the victim (healthy!) in Season 2, it doubles, triples, and quadruples the number of Cassies on-screen as she confronts various unrealized versions of herself - some of which will never come to be. A quick recap from her handler confirms that Cassie is not, in fact, the ideal stealth operative, that she has repeatedly gotten over-involved in assignments and still balks mightily at the mildest surprise.Д¬uoco dusts off this frenzied, one-note performance, though she does get to push its limits in the recurring narrative device that has Cassie imprisoned in her own mind. That won't last if you remember the most insane twist of the Season 1 finale, which was that the constantly visibly vexed Cassie is now a civilian asset for the CIA, putting her unique resume of 'woke up next to a dead man she didn't murder' to use in the only way that makes sense. She genuinely believes - at least for a few minutes of the premiere - that things are good and normal. 'Things are pretty great,' she says so naively at an AA meeting that another attendee calls her bluff - and even viewers will wonder if this is a front.Д«ut it's not. The first season isn't actually required viewing Season 2 offers a hard reset with Cassie almost one-year sober, living in LA, and dating someone vague and wonderful. If The Flight Attendant wasn't your cup of chilled ginger ale at 30,000 feet in Season 1, not much is going to change in its second outing from creator and showrunner Steve Yockey. I did not understand it in any way exemplifying top-tier television writing, direction, or performance, but nine Emmy nominations and a host of other accolades disagree ( on Blake Neely's win for title music, we agree).

I thought we all tuned in to HBO Max's dark comedy thriller in 2020 because it was fun trash, and everyone deserves that in doses. I never understood the appeal of The Flight Attendant, and I still don't.

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