Dr. Bright continues to help her patients while she plans to save her brother. Her current patients include the empath Caleb, the time traveler Sam, the mind reader Chloe, and Damian, who can plant commands in people's minds. Her goal is to undermine The AM, a manipulative and dangerous company that experiments and spies on atypicals (or people with special abilites).
The Bright Sessions is a podcast that is usually confined to therapy sessions with her patients. The world opens up in this season with different modes of story telling, new characters interactions, and a plot outside of simple therapy. The audio recordings do include therapy sessions and expand to voice messages, recorded conversations in person and by phone, and verbal notes from several characters. I especially enjoyed learning more about each character, seeing them meet each other, and forming their own relationships. Sam and Chloe become good friends while both of them agree to help Dr. Bright in her quest. Caleb and his boyfriend Adam decide to stake out Dr. Bright's office to see other atypicals and meet all the other patients. Everyone becomes good friends except for Damian.
Damian was only mentioned in the previous season. From the impression on Chloe and Dr. Bright as well as his name, I expected an ice cold sociopathic murderer. He's not the most pleasant person and delights in forcing people to do his will, but his power could be abused much worse than he uses it. He gets things he wants like attention without crossing major lines. I grew to begrudgingly like him a little bit even through his smarmy nature and manipulation because his lonely interior is exposed underneath the annoying bravado. That all is obliterated with his actions at the very end of the season. Damian is the only main character with a grey morality that brings something else along with his awful personality.
The AM is delved into during this season as well. It's supposedly a non-profit organization that works with government agencies. However, they use therapists like Dr. Bright to keep tabs on atypicals, assess their usefulness, and basically kidnap them to perform experiments. Dr. Bright's brother Mark was one of these with the unique ability to replicate anyone else's ability. As a result of their cruel experiment, his consciousness was stranded in time while his body stays comatose in the present. Dr. Bright is forced to continue to give the AM information on her patients, but she tries to manipulate it to make them seem less unique than they are to avoid their attention. Her past relationship with Agent Green complicates things further and brings more drama than expected.
I devoured the second season of The Bright Sessions in a few days. It has some bizarre episodes, some infuriating episodes, and some heartbreaking episodes. I highly recommend this different view of people with special abilities and I can't wait to see what happens in the next season. The episodes are fairly short and lend well to binge listening.
My rating: 5/5 fishmuffins
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