Here are my thoughts on the second season of gen:LOCK. To give you some context, I’m an author. I have been published multiple times in anthologies and my first novel was published last year. I also have a patreon with a variety of stories/manuscripts, some behind the paywall and some free for anyone to read. I know from experience that a good story needs good editing and a good overall concept needs good pacing to make it work.
I’m not going to lie, this is going to be long, because I have a lot of thoughts, some you may agree with, some you may not. I will be putting an asterisk before each topic so you can choose what you want to read and what you want to ignore (promise, I won’t get mad. Again, I’m an author, so I can get pretty wordy.) I won’t be posting a TL;DR at the end. If you want just my overall views, those will be first. I originally had examples with spoilers, but decided to remove them, since this is so long. So there may be vague spoilers, rather than specific spoilers.
* Overall: This is where I think people will disagree with me: The first and second seasons were equally bad and equally good, with the first season being slightly better. I’d give the first season a 7 out of 10, and the second season a 6 out of 10. But the reason for that is because of an innate problem with both seasons: both did not give equal time to character building and world building at the right moments. The first season spent so much more time on character building that they didn’t spend enough time on world building, and the second season spent so much time on world building that they dropped the ball on the characters. This created incredibly uneven storytelling, which led to the two seasons feeling drastically different from each other.
I grew up watching mecha anime. I’m definitely an old school otaku (thought I love new stuff as well.) I loved watching Robotech with my brothers, and looking at the popularity of other mecha series, like Gundam and Evangelion, I totally get the appeal. They tend to have themes around human vs. machine, and exploring what it means to be human. That’s definitely what gen:LOCK was trying to do. I could see all of the pieces there. They just weren’t assembled properly. It was like they tried to assemble a puzzle that had multiple missing pieces, and in an attempt to make the puzzle whole, they shoved pieces together that didn’t actually fit or didn’t assemble them in the right order.
Both seasons had all the potential, but just didn’t build well into a whole. And I 100% believe the reason why some people think the second season was trash is because the first season set up an entirely different tone and feel, so the expectations were that the tone would continue, or at least start with the same tone and gradually move darker.
I think the main reason why this all happened was because they were trying to tell too much story in too little time. The main reason why I think this happened? The 8 episode, 30-ish minute structure. Had they doubled the time by either having 16 episodes of 30 minutes each, or 8 episodes that were an hour long, they would have had room for better pacing and build up for emotional moments that kept us, the viewers, invested in what happened next.
I did like that each episode of the season 2 started with a map to show where The Union was in control and where The Polity was in control. That was well done. It’s a simple storytelling piece that says a lot with only one image.
* World Building: Season 2 actually did a great job at world building. I finally felt invested in what the war was, why it was being fought, and the intricacies around where both The Polity and The Union were screwed up. But because they didn’t set things up with world building enough in the first season, everything felt rushed. I should have had enough time to believe that one side was better than the other before just making both sides look problematic.
* Character Building: Season 2 dropped the ball. They spent so much time on character in the first season, that they forgot that you still need that to continue. Most attempts at character building felt tokenized and weak. This made me actively angry, as I tend to be drawn to storytelling that has a strong character base. I loved the characters at the end of the first season. I didn’t care by the end of the second season. They sacrificed character growth to have space for world building, and that shouldn’t have to happen. If that was done more equally among both seasons, it could have worked brilliantly. Again, the pieces were there, but they weren’t assembled correctly.
My favorite character in season 2 was Sinclair. I’m glad that they took his character in that direction. It was unexpected, surprising, and set the idea that there was another option outside of The Union and The Polity.
* Pacing: Both seasons struggled with that. Largely influenced by much of what I mentioned about the uneven use of world and character building. Moments that should have been shocking to the viewer fell flat. Even points where episodes ended felt sudden. Times when there could have been slower moments to establish tone and feel were stunted.
* Battle Sequences/Violence: I’m not great at writing fighting sequences, but even I know that the second season was terrible at that.
* HBO-izing the show: One of the things that gave gen:LOCK its charm was its humor. Where the hell was that in season 2? Any humor fell flat. This gave it a very uneven tone, and again, I blame it on the inconsistencies with world building and character building. Had we known in season 1 what The Union and The Polity’s motives were, we would have seen a better and more even distribution of darkness and humor to the show. And when combined well, humor and darkness can coexist in the same story, and I know this because I write a lot of horror comedy. But because they didn’t establish how disturbing the motivations were on both sides, they ended up with very uneven storytelling.
Part of this has to do with HBO. A lot of production companies will look at past successes and try to apply that formula to new series and shows in an attempt to bank off of what worked before. But the reality is that what works for one story doesn’t always work for another. I’m going to give an example: The Witcher. That show is fantastic, in part because it could have attempted to recreate some of Game of Thrones’ style, but it didn’t. While they seem like series with similar themes and tones, The Witcher rarely adds unnecessary sex to the story telling. They rarely add unnecessary bloodshed to the story telling. They add enough that it helps move the story and plot along. This was a failing of Game of Thrones that they managed to avoid in The Witcher, and it was done well. In season 2 of gen:LOCK, the first sex scene was completely unnecessary for the plot and could have even been replaced with something that could have injected some of the humor back into the show (like a toilet scene instead.) The second scene was actually good in terms of character growth, but the way the rest of the story played out, we didn't get to see the outcome of that character growth because everything happened too fast.
Then there’s the violence/death thing. This season established some great thematic gems in discussing life and death. It could have been handled with intelligence and emotion. But everything was paced so badly that it had way less impact. Deaths were handled so poorly that they didn't even have shock value. I wanted to feel the same way I felt when watching Fullmetal Alchemist when Hughes died. But the pacing/timing was so poor that they felt like a throwaway moments. There's no reason to kill characters off unless it really strengthens the story, and I say this as someone who has killed off characters.
* Suicide: When topics of suicide come up, my radar goes up because I have a degree in clinical psychology. Even with the warnings and the suicide hotline thing, it didn’t have impact. I don’t know if they could have fixed that with music or what, but each time the suicide ritual happened, it didn’t have impact. I’m glad they put the warnings up and everything, but it felt more exploitative than actually providing plot development.
* Music: Music helps set the tone and can kind of cover for editing issues and increase emotional quality. Since I had a hard time caring as much as I usually would (and believe me, I’m a total softie who cries at commercials for pet adoption), I’m thinking the music was bland. I can’t even really remember it, and I’ve had years of music lessons. And darn it to heck, I miss the Battle Tapes theme song of the first season. My guess is they were trying to save money so they didn’t have to give Battle Tapes royalties on the song, but the replacement theme music was relatively forgettable. The first few bars sounded good, but it lapsed into sounding generic.
So yeah. Those are my thoughts. Great idea for a series with a lot of great concepts, art styles, voice actors, and themes, but the execution in total needed work. I could see how someone could even take both seasons, rearrange the edits so that the parts about the history of The Union and The Polity could be more evenly paced among the character building of the first season, and it would be a stronger piece as a whole. In fact, I’d love to see someone do that, because I think it would improve the series a lot as a whole. A lot of the pieces could be salvaged, at the very least, because in sections, there’s a lot that’s good. I can see where this series could go from here, were they to do a third season, but because they essentially messed up the pacing and creating disparate tones between the first two seasons, I think it's better that they stop at this point.
