Six fugitives on a train, a bullet wound that has to be patched up without a hospital, and a handful of tracking devices that need to come out of the kids’ ears before the next stop: that is how the second season of “The Institute” begins. It is also a fair summary of the show’s new problem, because escaping the building was the easy part. MGM+ premiered “The Reckoning” on Sunday, November 8th, with new episodes arriving every Sunday after it. The hour has a heavier job than most season openers, since the first season ran through the whole of Stephen King’s novel and everything from here is the show’s own invention. Whether that freedom helps or hurts is the question the premiere keeps circling, and the answer might depend on how much patience a viewer has for people making bad decisions in a hurry.
Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes) and Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman) lead again, and Mary-Louise Parker returns as Ms. Sigsby. Alfie Allen arrives as Nolan Reeves, a tech billionaire who backs the organization financially, while director Jack Bender and writer Benjamin Cavell are back behind the scenes. “We are closer to danger than ever before, arguably more than when we were inside the Institute”, Freeman told TV Insider ahead of the premiere. The first episode spends its running time making that case. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Institute” and for the whole first episode of its second season.
Whether that freedom helps or hurts is the question the premiere keeps circling, and the answer might depend on how much patience a viewer has for people making bad decisions in a hurry.”
The cold open picks up the second the Season 1 finale stops. Tim, Luke, Kalisha (Simone Miller), Nicky (Fionn Laird), Wendy (Hannah Galway) and George (Arlen So) are riding the rails and removing the trackers from the kids’ ears. When the train stops, Luke scatters the devices across other trains to muddy the trail. A raid on an ATM and some improvised surgery on Tim follow. A sympathetic truck driver then helps the group slip away, and the episode jumps four months.
By then the group is living in an abandoned industrial building, biding its time. Tim and Wendy have settled into something like parenthood, which fits what Barnes told Gizmodo before the premiere about Tim’s role, “parenting immediately and on steroids to a teenager with superpowers.” The kids can check a support-group website for parents of missing children and see their families still searching, though Luke has no one to look for, since his parents were killed the night he was taken. The one piece of evidence, Maureen’s flash drive, is missing. Every investigative journalist Tim approaches wants proof before touching a story that sounds far-fetched. According to Digital Mafia Talkies, the reporter who takes a meeting at a pub has found the kids filed as open missing-juvenile cases and the Dennison site written off by the FBI and the CDC as an infectious-disease lab accident. The same recap has him asking for interviews with the children before he will publish, which sends Tim walking out.
Underneath that stalemate, Luke’s nightmares turn out to be visions of the future, which Fangirlish reads as his power growing from telepathy into precognition. He keeps the visions to himself for a while. A vision of an accident finally pulls him out of the building. After a mother waves him off as a creep, according to Digital Mafia Talkies, he stays close enough to pull her and her baby clear when the accident plays out as foreseen. Bystanders film it, the footage goes viral, and Nicky is furious, with good reason in a hideout full of people trying not to be seen. Digital Mafia Talkies has Tim fearing that the few frames showing Luke’s face are enough to expose everyone. In that account, when Luke argues that hiding forever is not an option and that his visions could lead them to the missing drive, Tim’s counteroffer is that he will be the one to fetch it, because Luke is too important to risk.
Ms. Sigsby is alive and on the run. Rotten Tomatoes TV’s exclusive sneak peek for the episode shows the Director (Jeff Fahey), the Man on the Phone from Season 1, telling her he is disappointed that she put her own life ahead of the mission. He adds that she watched her father’s funeral from down the block despite a letter warning the organization not to follow her. She asks whether they would ever take her back, and he answers, “You don’t know who you are without it.” Her reply is “Maybe I just miss the smell of fear”, and his is that she is “the only supervisor to lose an institute.” He asks how anyone can be sure that a video released “in this day and age” would be believed, and when she says the possibility still scares them enough to keep her alive, his answer is “Not enough to let you back in.” The episode also shows her hurting herself, a choice Fangirlish calls unnecessary since it was not in the book.
The Director has already found a different hire. Nolan, who is new to the show and, since Season 1 used up the book, new to King’s story as well, is building an AI meant to do what the Institute’s precogs do, which is look for apocalyptic events before they happen. He tours a new facility where the precogs are older adults rather than children, and he takes a particular interest in the most powerful of them, a woman named Lynne. According to Digital Mafia Talkies, the visions the precogs agree on are merged and fed to his software, the precogs then run simulations with certain people removed, and the resulting list of “Hinges” goes to strike teams. The same account has Dr. Hendricks (Robert Joy), the Dennison survivor, working at the facility. Rotten Tomatoes’ episode listing has the sixth episode of the season titled “Hinge”, which suggests the show intends to stay on that idea. The TV Cave says Allen brings “an unsettling energy” to Nolan.
Another vision finally shows Luke where Sigsby and the drive are, so he slips out alone and catches a bus. Digital Mafia Talkies has him leaving a note and taking the group’s only gun, and has Kalisha trying to reach him telepathically, only to find him too far away. George has gone missing too, off at a store playing video games, which Fangirlish finds hard to believe for kids who are supposed to be staying under the radar. In the Digital Mafia Talkies recap, Tim, Nicky and Kalisha split up to find George while Wendy stays behind in case he comes back. That setup is what makes the ending land. A man posing as a maintenance worker walks into the hideout. Wendy, alone, switches on the porch light that signals danger, so Kalisha and Nicky run, and Tim sends George away before going inside himself, according to Digital Mafia Talkies. By the time he reaches her, the same recap says, she has been shot in the neck, and although Tim fights the attacker, who escapes, Wendy dies.
Luke, at the same time, reaches the spot from his vision and ambushes Sigsby in her car, gun in hand, and that is where the hour stops. Whether the viral rescue or Luke’s solo trip brought the killer to the hideout is a fair question to carry into the next episode. Rotten Tomatoes’ episode listing has the next installment, “The Sanctuary”, arriving November 15th.
Ready Steady Cut writes that the premiere has “a lot of fun energy, though it’s a little difficult to keep up with”, and that “wonky character decision-making isn’t a plot engine that will sustain the whole thing.” Horror Geek Life is harder on it, saying the season has “a lot of work to do to make the new storylines more than throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks.” Fangirlish says it “did a good job of setting the stage for what is to come over the season.” Tom’s Guide, working from screeners, calls the season “an entertaining and ambitious return” that “loses some of the first season’s spark”, though still worth the visit.
What Do You Think? Does Luke deserve the blame for what happens to Wendy, or is Tim’s plan to wait on journalists the bigger problem? Can an AI-powered Institute under Nolan be a scarier villain than Sigsby ever was? And do you want the show to keep building on Hinges and strike teams, or give the kids a real win soon?
See you on the next binge!
