SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2 Part 1 of “Wednesday.”
After defeating an evil resurrected pilgrim, a hyde and its master in Season 1 of “Wednesday,” the Addams family heroine (Jenna Ortega) finds herself at the center of an even more urgent mystery in Season 2. There’s been a new string of murders in Jericho, and according to one of Wednesday’s psychic visions, her roommate, Enid (Emma Myers), might be next.
Wednesday quickly figures out that she’s dealing with an avian, someone with the ability to control birds who is using them to kill people. She was too late to save Sheriff Galpin (Jamie McShane), who was in the middle of his own investigation when he died, but is able to recover some of his evidence: the obituaries of several outcasts who were patients at the Willow Hill Psychiatric Hospital. Each newspaper clipping is connected on a bulletin board to the name Lois.
In “If These Woes Could Talk,” the fourth and final episode of Season 2 Part 1, Wednesday and her grandmother, Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley), analyze the ashes of the supposedly cremated outcasts from the obituaries. They discover that the urns contain no human remains, so Wednesday enlists her Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) to infiltrate Willow Hill and look for clues about Lois. Meanwhile, Wednesday’s protégée, Agnes (Evie Templeton), discovers that the outcasts’ fake death certificates were signed by Augustus Stonehurst, a normie who used to teach at Nevermore and later became the head doctor at Willow Hill before losing his mind and being institutionalized himself.
After a freakish bird attack on campus at Nevermore that almost kills Thing (Victor Dorobantu), Wednesday chases a hooded figure that she believes to be the murderous avian, but she doesn’t catch them in time. Instead, she happens upon her suspicious new music teacher, Miss Capri (Billie Piper) having a meeting with current Willow Hill head doctor Dr. Fairburn (Thandiwe Newton), but they say they’re simply setting up a new music class at the asylum. Meanwhile, Thing breaks into Willow Hill to tell Fester to find Stonehurst, and he does. Stonehurst is old and nonverbal now, but his talking parrot gives Fester a list of numbers to use to find Lois. In the process, though, he gets spotted by Marilyn Thornhill aka Laurel Gates (Christina Ricci), who was using Tyler’s (Hunter Doohan) hyde persona to try to eradicate outcasts last season. Hoping to be allowed to see Tyler, who is chained in solitary confinement, Thornhill tells Dr. Fairburn that Fester is there to snoop on Wednesday’s behalf. Fester gets locked up too.
When Thing tells Wednesday that Fester has been discovered, she decides to break into Willow Hill by hiding in Miss Capri’s car as she drives to the hospital for music class. Inside the asylum, Wednesday finds and frees Fester, and the two of them search for Lois together. Using the numbers from the parrot as the code to get through a mysterious door, they find a secret basement with the acronym L.O.I.S. written on the wall: Long-term Outcast Integration Study. Deeper in the basement, they find all the outcasts from the obituaries alive and locked in individual cells, where they’re being kept and experimented on. Wednesday deduces that Sheriff Galpin had discovered the project and was worried that Tyler, his son, would be the next patient to have his death faked.
Soon, Wednesday and Fester run into the hooded figure from before: It’s Judi (Heather Matarazzo), Dr. Fairburn’s assistant, who is really Augustus Stonehurt’s daughter. She reveals that Dr. Fairburn is only the public-facing leader of Willow Hill; in truth, Judi has been continuing her father’s work behind the scenes. Stonehurst wanted to be an outcast, and was developing a method to extract their abilities and give them to normies. Case in point: Judi was born a normie, but her father turned her into an avian.
Using his electric superpower, Fester causes an explosion that frees the L.O.I.S. subjects from their cells. All of them immediately attack Judi except for a quiet, fearful woman played by Frances O’Connor. Wednesday encourages Fester to escape while she stays behind to help the woman. The asylum has gone into high alert, and Thornhill sneaks into Tyler’s dungeon amid the chaos to free him. Instead of embracing his master, he kills her. Slurp (Owen Painter), the zombie Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) reanimated earlier in the season who was sent to Willow Hill after killing a normie, also gets freed. He eats Dr. Fairburn’s brain, then calls Stonehurst “old friend” and kills him too.
As Wednesday tries to walk the mysterious outcast out of Willow Hill, she runs into Tyler in full hyde form. The woman with Wednesday escapes, but Tyler picks Wednesday up and throws her through a window as cops arrive on the scene. They shoot at Tyler, but he escapes, unharmed.
Over a shot of Wednesday’s bloodied, unconscious body on the ground outside of the asylum, she says in voiceover, “I’ve always dreamed of looking death in the face. But in my final moments, all I hear is my mother’s words ringing in my ears: Maybe I have made everything worse. Much worse.”
Of course, we know that these aren’t really Wednesday’s final moments. A teaser for Part 2 of Season 2, premiering on Sept. 3, shows Wednesday comatose in bed before waking up, wide-eyed. There are also shots of Slurp wandering through a Christmas carnival, Tyler hiding in what appears to be a sewer before emerging back into civilization in a cloak, and Enid nervously wielding a sword.
Still, so many questions remain ahead of Season 2’s final episodes. What does Tyler want now that he’s free, and how will he manage his monstrous abilties now that he’s murdered his master? How will Wednesday solve the mystery with her injuries and the loss of her psychic ability? Will her mother, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), finally help her harness and understand her visions? And who is the woman Wednesday rescued from L.O.I.S.?
We don’t have any answers yet, but one thing is for sure: As Morticia says in voiceover during the teaser, “Something wicked this way comes.”