Velma Season 2 Review

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In Velma Season 2, a group of lobotomized high school girls (now brains in jars) puts on a death metal show. Velma Dinkley (Mindy Kaling) likens a Beyoncé concert to a religious experience while hanging out with her newly Wiccan girlfriend Daphne Blake (Constance Wu). Norville "Shaggy" Rogers (Sam Richardson) is terrorized by visions of the dead, while Fred Jones (Glenn Howerton) converts to Catholicism to attract more customers to his "spooky stuff hunting business". Those, uh, meddling kids? This isn’t your parents’ Mystery, Inc. It doesn’t feel like anyone’s, really. It’s hard to say who the latest, meandering installment of Charlie Grandy’s acerbic Scooby-Doo update is for. While it succeeds at making its titular heroine slightly more tolerable, Season 2 of Velma takes several, irreversible steps backward.

Solving mysteries forms the backbone of the series and should be Velma’s main focal point. Yet now there’s a genital-mutilating killer on the loose in Crystal Cove who seems to constantly take a backseat to half a dozen other story threads that suggest writers have been painting themselves into corners. Daphne’s two adoptive mothers are running for election as co-sheriffs! Norville is still having visions! Fred is still upset about what happened to his mother at the end of Season 1! It’s all very tiresome when you’re just desperate for things to make some sort of logical sense. But logic isn’t something Velma can even do right.

Instead we get season two: mostly unfunny gags from largely the same cast working with similar material that fell flat last year. One minute you’ve got more of that ridiculous “explanation” for why Norville is transforming into the Shaggy we know and love from 55 years of Scooby-Doo cartoons. Next, Velma is wasting time trying to convince classmates that Daphne isn’t the Wiccan novice she claims to be. None of it’s particularly well-written or satisfying. Not when there’s so much more to dig into.

These distractions come at the expense of new characters like Amber (Sara Ramirez), who remains shrouded in mystery for far too long. Instead of fleshing out their relationship with mom/former Hex Girl Thorn (Jennifer Hale), the writers throw Amber into an episode-long “Breakfast Club detention” with Velma’s core quartet that doesn’t even feel earned. Fred still gets some of the funniest moments thanks to Howerton’s unhinged performance, but he's wasted on pining after his mother and solving paranormal cases offscreen.

Thankfully, Velma (the character) is less insufferable than before. She’s vaguely capable of empathy now and keeps most of her rapid-fire sarcasm to herself, although her dialogue — like everyone else’s — remains wry and ironic as if aware there's an invisible audience to satisfy. While the rest of the cast seems unaware there’s a world outside their own minds, Velma remains fixated on being clever for others’ sake. But one thing stays constant: She loves Daphne. Or at least says she does; you’d never know by how she treats her supposed girlfriend.

Although Velma didn't know how to express her love for Daphne at the end of Season 1, they did kiss. You'd think that would bode well for them as a couple, but instead we get two girls who spend all of Season 2 arguing with each other over nonsensical misunderstandings. It never lets up in these 10 episodes: They're supposed to have known each other since they were kids, and they've had what should be plenty of time for their mutual romantic feelings to marinate — so why do they act like strangers? And by the time they finally come together in any meaningful way, the show is barreling toward its batshit conclusion, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence in their future.

With Season 2,Velma had every opportunity to take the scorching feedback from critics and fans alike about its first outing as an unpalatable addition to Scooby-Doo canon and turn it into something fun — something that riffed off the classic structure of a Scooby-Doo mystery through Velma's eyes. But instead, it feels like Velma has just doubled down on everything that made Season 1 such a mess. It's a total mess this year, in fact; I can't decide if "confusing" or "bad" is more apt for what it does with its plots (there are many), or why most twists seem confounding not because of some clever sleight-of-hand but because it doesn't understand how basic story logic works half the time either. The jokes are flat — but also so bad you can see them coming from orbit; I swear I saw one hurtling towards me from outside our solar system at one point — while setting fire to your source material for subverting expectations' sake might work once in a blue moon if done well...but let's just say this ain't no moon.

Velma Season 2 fails to captivate, and it's not hard to see why. This follow-up is a mess that can’t solve itself, and I wouldn't trust this version of Velma to solve the mystery of why it’s such a failure if the answer were staring her in the face.

Final Verdict

Velma Season 2 is an unfocused slog that only makes things worse. If you thought Season 1 was a bad mix of confusing storytelling, flat jokes, and attempts at subverting expectations gone wrong, you ain't seen nothing yet: Season 2 takes all those problems and compounds them into something truly incoherent and unfunny —and it tosses away Velma and Daphne's now-canon relationship like an afterthought. This adaptation of the classic Hanna-Barbera character is content to turn its back on everything that made Velma great but has no idea where to go next.

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