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 is the crux of the show, and Velma’s supposed primary motivation. And yet, the genital-mutilating killer now on the loose in Crystal Cove constantly takes a backseat to a dozen other story threads that smack of writers painting themselves into a corner. Daphne’s two adoptive mothers are running to be elected co-sheriffs! Norville is still having visions! Fred is upset about what happened to his mother at the end of Season 1! It’s all very tiring when all you want to do is see the plot unfold in a logical manner. But Velma can’t even do that right.
Instead, Season 2 is full of mostly unfunny gags from the same cast of characters that struggled to work with similar material last season. One minute, there’s more of the ridiculous “explanation” for why Norville is transforming into the Shaggy we know and love from 55 years of Scooby-Doo cartoons. The next, Velma wastes time trying to convince classmates that Daphne isn’t the Wiccan novice she claims to be. None of these moments are particularly well-written or satisfying. Not when there’s so much more to explore.
These distractions come at the expense of new characters like the mysterious Amber (Sara Ramirez). Instead of spending more time on their relationship with their mom, former Hex Girl Thorn (Jennifer Hale), the writers would rather throw Amber into an episode-long “Breakfast Club detention” with Velma’s core quartet. Fred still gets some of the funniest moments thanks to Howerton’s unhinged performance, but he’s wasted on pining after his mother and spending time cracking paranormal cases that we don’t even see.
Thankfully, Velma (the character) has become less insufferable. She’s somewhat capable of empathy now and keeps the rapid-fire sarcasm mostly to herself, though most of her dialogue remains wry and ironic, as though she’s aware there’s an invisible audience to please. While the rest of the cast seems oblivious to the outside world, Velma remains fixated on being clever to please others. But one thing remains a constant: She loves Daphne. Or at least she says she does. You’d never know from the way she treats her supposed girlfriend.
Despite Velma fumbling her admission of love for Daphne at the end of Season 1, the couple did share a kiss. It seemed to foreshadow a bright future for their relationship, but instead Season 2 brings us two bickering girls who end up in nonsensical misunderstandings. It’s a constant throughout these 10 episodes. Velma and Daphne have supposedly known each other since they were children. Their mutual romantic feelings have had plenty of time to marinate, so why do they treat each other like strangers? By the time Velma and Daphne come together in a meaningful way, the show’s reached its absolutely ludicrous conclusion, which does nothing to inspire confidence in their future.
This isn’t your parents’ Mystery, Inc. It doesn’t feel like anyone’s, really.
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Velma Season 2 had every shot at taking the fiery feedback from the first season and blossoming into a fun riff on the classic Scooby-Doo heroine. Instead, it seems to have doubled down on everything that made Season 1 so unpalatable. A near-total mess of confusing plot threads, confounding twists, and bad jokes, it seems content to set its source material ablaze in the name of subverting expectations – and not in a good way. It’s no mystery why this follow-up fails to captivate, but if it were, I’m just not sure this version of Velma would even be up to the task of solving it.
