Here's the Thing About Centaurworld Season Two (part one)

Centaurworld returned about a week ago for its second and final season, something that somehow caught me completely off guard. Maybe it was the quick turnaround time on the last eight episodes, or that I had missed the news of a second season entirely, but my anxiety skyrocketed when I saw that thumbnail on my Netflix home screen. Then I remembered that it was definitely just the fact that the first season ended the way that it did.

Before we go any further, I'd just like to remind everyone that yes, there will be spoilers after this point. If you'd like to avoid them but want to see what I had to say about season one of the show, you can click these links right here. Otherwise, let's dive into the first four episodes of Centaurworld season two.

The first episode of season two, "Horsatia Wighair Beansz?," sees Horse and the rest of the herd right almost right where they left off the previous season. Knowing that the Nowhere King is still out there and growing stronger, not to mention the fact that the worlds are now connected once more, Horse sets out recruiting centaurs of all shapes and sizes to form the army they so desperately need. This all takes the form of an opening musical number that recaps recent events for both the sake of the audience and Horse's would be soldiers, one which hits all of the same beautiful and awkward notes that fans of the series have grown to love and/or tolerate. Unfortunately, it ends in immediate rejection, which largely sets the tone for the first half of the second season.

Horse's attempt to recruit the aristocratic yet musclebound "Centaurs TM" touch on themes of social inequality and the ways in which wealth disconnects those who have it from the rest of society, but it is the rejection which stings the most. As much as it helps the war effort that subsequent missions to win over other groups of centaurs prove successful, the fact that it is the other members of her Herd who achieve those victories only reinforces the crippling self doubt that Horse is suffering from. Leaving Rider behind to rally the human troops in a dangerous wasteland without having anything of her own to show for it hurts all the more when Horse can't truly celebrate the wins her friends are racking up. All of this culminates in a crushing case of imposter syndrome for our four-legged protagonist, and for how deeply it impacts the story, it is one of the few things that isn't explicitly called out over the course of the season.

Each of the groups of centaurs that are recruited over the course of the second, third, and fourth episodes have some overt quirk or coping mechanism that is core to the struggle of convincing them to join in the fight. The Birdtaurs are comprised of social media obsessed fanboys who are distressingly ignorant at best and dangerously unhinged at their worst, and everyone including some of their own are fully aware of it. The Coldtaurs have projected their fears and personal inadequacies onto others, causing them to preemptively take up arms in the name of the Nowhere King until Glendale puts on her mock turtleneck and changes their lives with a rousing speech about their shared traumas (plus a song about breathing into a bag). By the time Wammawink has convinced the various Holetaurs to set aside their differences in the name of a grand hootenanny, Centaurworld's army is looking like it might have a fighting chance, and everyone's issues have been directly referenced save for Horse's. It is the revelation that Rider has now found another steed in the human world that pushes Horse over the edge, and it is only then that she comes clean about the weight she has been bearing.

As much as it makes sense for Horse to have been feeling like a failure in her mission to rally the troops, it's also understandable that the other members of the Herd wouldn't see things in quite the same way. All of them have seen the Nowhere King at this point, and they are fully aware of the threat that he poses to their world. Even if they have largely maintained their absurdly cartoonish demeanors, there is no longer any question about what has to be done. There are plenty of reminders of this for the audience as well in the form of glimpses into the action on the other side of the Rift, where the human world is fleshed out in further detail alongside the Nowhere King's grotesque machinations. By the end of the fourth episode, "Holes: Part 3," the Nowhere King's army has gained some horrifying new additions, Centaurworld's own is still untrained and incomplete, and the Horse that should be leading it is lying emotionally shattered at the bottom of a pit.

Centaurworld's second season definitely starts rough in spite of the usual musical numbers and impressive strides made by the Herd, yet it manages to do so without creating any major shift in the tone that the show had already established. Considering how deliberate those types of transitions felt across the entirety of the first season, this both reaffirms what the show is all about at its core and amps up the tension during each scene involving the Nowhere King or human world, as those are the only two things that have consistently been able to cut through Centaurworld's obnoxiously cute atmosphere. If you want to know about my thoughts regarding how the Nowhere King and human world cut through actual centaurs, come back tomorrow for the next part of my overly long review of Centaurworld season two.

John Dodge spends most of his time writing about comic books over at CBR.com. He doesn't spend nearly enough of it writing about other stuff here on Vocal. If you'd like to support his work directly, you can subscribe, leave a tip, or even schedule a monthly pledge right here. If you'd like to click some buttons and feel good about yourself for setting off his phone notifications at an unreasonable hour, you can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.