Despite losing Julia Roberts’ “Old Hollywood” clout from season one, her “replacement,” of sorts, by Janelle Monáe makes up in equal measure in terms of performance with the latest installment of Homecoming. What’s missing, however, is the same level of intrigue that was gradually built up to in season one, directed by Sam Esmail, best known for writing and directing another Amazon (by way of USA Network) series, Mr. Robot. It was perhaps turning to a new director for the second season, Kyle Patrick Alvarez (instead best known for directing the ever-devolving 13 Reasons Why), that set a deteriorating precedent. What’s more, the primary writers of the first season, Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz, were largely absent from the seven-episode season. To boot, that the season was reduced to seven episodes instead of the ten allotted for season one also seems like an unfair disadvantage to it. And sure, while it’s all very “shocking” to open on Monáe awakening in a row boat with no memory and eventually finding out her name is Jackie Calico (it is, in fact, Alex) yet having no clear recollection of how she arrived at the boat or what she was doing beforehand, something about the entire narrative comes across as entirely stale and predictable in comparison to its predecessor.
As Alex starts to unravel vague clues about her identity indicating that she is a veteran who served in the Air Force (“Death From Above”), she relies briefly on the “kindness” of a stranger she meets at the hospital who tells her to flee when the doctor notices a needle mark on her arm that he interprets to mean she’s scamming him to get more drugs. After she leaves, the stranger, Lehmann (Chris Ellis), sees her again on the street, offering her a ride. As the two re-trace some of her steps by going to a bar called Skins, they have a conversation, with mostly Lehmann doing the talking, about the evilness of corporations and the people who run them (which feels more than slightly meta considering this show is on Amazon). It is soon after that the bartender recognizes her and they glean that she was belligerent there the other day with a “friend” she was drinking with. Looking through the receipts, Alex and Lehmann find one with the correct order (featuring the same number of beers and whiskies ordered as told to them by the bartender), leading them to the hotel the bar is associated with thanks to the room number that the receipt was signed with (it’s all very convenient clue-gathering, innit?). Inside the room, which Alex gains them access to by faking an urgent need for Lehmann’s meds to the cleaning woman but not having the key to get in, the two discover fistfuls of cash, a credit card, a vial with the Geist logo on it and a picture of Alex with three other army men whose faces are X’d out.
Disoriented by the whole affair, Alex takes to the bathroom to collect herself, noticing that the tattoo on her arm is actually removable as she starts to scrub it off frantically. Coming back out to tell Lehmann of her revelation, she’s knocked over the head as he absconds, dragging his oxygen tank and all, with the cash (which was all too predictable based on the look in his eyes when he first saw it). When she calls him out for betraying her, he shrugs that it’s just “people” (also the title of the episode). It’s what they do. That is to say, act like unapologetic assholes when it suits them.
This much goes for the Geist corporation, run by Leonard Geist (Chris Cooper). Only he isn’t as clued in to what’s happening within his own company as he ought to be–having no awareness of the Homecoming “transitional support center” for veterans that was established on the basis of a fruit-based plant he grows on his land that causes the memory-erasing effects that Geist higher-ups and the Department of Defense thought would be useful in “mitigating” (a.k.a. completely extracting) PTSD among veterans so as to whore them out again for another tour of duty. Obviously, the experiment failed miserably, as evidenced by Walter Cruz (Stephan James), the “wild card”/“loose cannon” that stole Heidi Bergman’s (Roberts) heart in the first season. Enough for her to eat a near lethal dose of memory-erasing pasta in an act of selfless love that sends them both for the stars (it’s got a certain pharmaceutical Romeo and Juliet quality to it, in fact). Of course, afterward, neither of them remembers a thing. But Heidi is told the truth about what happened when a DOD representative named Thomas Carrasco (Shea Whigham) comes poking around four years later to address a formal complaint that was made regarding Walter. It is in 2022 that Heidi’s memory is thus jogged via her taped sessions with him, leading her to search for him in Fish Camp, CA, where Walter mentioned he once went on a road trip. A vague sign that some latent aspect of Walter’s memory is still intact leaves a smile on Heidi’s face as she watches him leave the diner she encounters him at.
In the meantime, Audrey Temple (Hong Chau) has ascended the ranks of power at Geist after making Colin (Bobby Cannavale), Heidi’s former boss, the fall guy for the entire Homecoming “snafu.” Something Leonard is all too happy to oblige in his own sense of outrage for never being informed of the facility in the first place. With a new DOD figure, Francine Bunda (Joan Cusack), catching wind of Audrey’s grand plans for what Geist’s mind-fucking plant could do (ranging from being given to pigs so that their stress levels are reduced to make meat taste better to being offered to psych patients in need of a little pick-me-up by way of memory loss), Audrey rises through the ranks even more quickly. And her ability to do so was all masterminded by her girlfriend, Alex. That’s right, Alex, who still thinks her name is Jackie Calico (the alias she put on her fake veteran ID in homage to their cat).
As ruthless in her position as Audrey, Alex’s entire job is based on getting potentially aggressive clients to back down from filing claims or suing. Hence, her ability to tell heartfelt backstories based on Photoshopped images she uses to suit her purpose of appealing to them through faux sentimentality. The thing about the fruit plant is that when it wipes a “bad” person’s memory, they suddenly seem to be met with the sneaking suspicion that they did, in fact, do something terrible. A conscience-based reckoning that wasn’t there before, when they had all their sense of memory intact. So at least there’s that “positive.” For it makes Alex feel rather disgusted at the notion that she could have ever been with someone so obviously morally bankrupt as Audrey. A revelation that comes crashing down as inevitably as the balloons at the launch party Francine orders Audrey to put on for the “new product.”
Told in the same interspersed past and present method as season one, the eventual “reveal” about how Alex came to be in the boat isn’t all that rewarding in terms of challenging the viewer to do much guesswork. During a final moment that features Walter sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck with a sort of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a movie that the show draws heavily on, at least from a conceptual standpoint) meets Kill Bill-inspired list, he contemplates which one of the soldiers he ought to tell first about their “lost years.” We, in turn, contemplate the value of a third season.
