The first season of Master in blue It was mainly about the semi-forbidden romance between an 18-year-old woman and a married musician who was brought to the island of Paxos to organize a music festival. While there were trailers that showed where the season was headed, the entire season was building toward the festival and the violent act that was hinted at in the trailers. Now that all that has happened… now what?
MASTER IN BLUE SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: A well-dressed pregnant woman walks down a street in Athens.
The essence: Alexandra (Stefania Goulioti) is the pregnant woman; She walks to a therapist’s office and wonders where her husband Orestis (Christoforos Papakaliatis) is. It’s supposed to be a couples session and she tells the therapist that, despite everything that’s happened in her marriage, she wants the two of them to raise her daughter together, “at least at first.” .
Meanwhile, on Paxos, Charalambos (Yannis Tsortekis) has disappeared, but there are a small number of people who know exactly what happened to him. First there’s Antonis (Orestis Chalkias), who actually shot the rioter, perhaps in self-defense. Antonis’s mother, Sophia (Marisha Triantafyllidou), is used to keeping secrets, given what she has had to do for her husband Fanis (Fanis Mouratidis), an island businessman who has just been elected mayor. She learned that her son shot Charalambos through the town doctor, Michalis (Antinoos Albanis), who witnessed the shooting; The two have been having an affair for some time now. Fanis helped dispose of the body, as did Orestis.
Even Charalambos’ son Spyros (Yorgos Benos) is involved, given his relationship with Antonis and his desire to get away from his homophobic and abusive father. He buried his father’s rifle, which was the one Antonis used to kill Charalambos. When her mother Maria (Maria Kavoyianni), who still believes her husband is missing, asks where the rifle went, Spyros simply says that his father must have taken it with him.
Another person who doesn’t know what Antonis did is his older sister Klelia (Klelia Andriolatou). She is still heartbroken that Orestis returned to Athens and Alexandra after he finished the music festival that brought him to Paxos. Despite the huge age difference between the two and the fact that Orestis was married, Klelia actually thought he was committed to making the two of them work.
Both Klelia and Antonis will go to university in Athens; Klelia will go to the music conservatory where Orestis is a teacher, so there will be some awkwardness there. But Antonis is still tormented by visions of Charalambos. He goes to Spyros to see if the two of them can deal with this together, but Spyros, who also has visions of his violent father, tells Antonis that he doesn’t want anything to do with him right now.
What shows will it remind you of? During the first season of the show, we said that the show felt like virgin river crossed with Sex/Lifebut now it feels more like How to get away with it.
Our opinion: We had to know that the first season of Master in blue It was going to take the turns it did, because we saw glimpses of Charalambos’ fate in the first episode. So now, what seemed to be a story about a risky romance and a town with secrets now becomes a full-fledged soap opera, with the aftermath of Charalambos’ death affecting several families and pitting the people who know the truth against each other. each other.
Is that really a good thing? We are not sure. The first season worked on the incident that caused Charalambos’ disappearance; Now that it’s happened, we’re spreading the drama across a pretty sizable cast and two locations, with people who may or may not keep what they know a secret. Yes, that leads to some juicy drama, but it’s certainly not as focused as the first season was, and the long running time of some of the second season’s episodes indicates as much.
There is a third aspect of the season that we have not mentioned, and it is a recently retired police colonel who goes on his own to investigate the disappearance of Charalambos. Given the missing man’s “connections” to Italy and Albania, Paxos police likely do not consider his case a high priority; They believe one of his business partners scammed him. But this colonel thinks otherwise, and we bet he has his eyes on the not-so-virtuous Feris.
So now we have a group of people on Paxos trying to keep up the cover-up of Antonis’ act, Antonis continuing to be pursued by the man he killed, Klelia and Orestis dealing with being together again in Athens, and Alexandra trying to keep Orestis in her orbit despite his broken marriage. Its alot. And we’re not sure every story gets the attention it deserves.
Sex and skin: Nothing in the first episode, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be there later in the season.
Parting Shot: The former police colonel leaves his old office with the Charalambos case file in his briefcase.
Sleeping star: We’ll give this to Haris Alexiou as Sophia’s no-nonsense mother, who gives Klelia insight into her own life, which included an unfulfilled romance with a married musician.
Most pilot line: Klelia cuts a few inches of her hair herself and when she walks, it looks as if she had it done in a salon.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. As we said, Master in blue It’s now become a full-fledged soap opera, with the story about the aftermath of Paxos’ death surpassing the romance between Klelia and Orestis, which was basically what drove the first season. It’s got plenty of juicy drama, but we’re not sure it can sustain such a scattered scope.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
