Fate Season 2 of The Winx Saga is here and it has a lot of new characters, drama and explanations, some more than others, which sometimes takes away from the show’s magic.
The Netflix show is based on Iginio Straffi’s popular Nickelodeon cartoon Winx Club.
Brian Young is the creator of Fate: The Winx Saga produced by Archery Pictures and Rainbow. He is also showrunner and executive producer. Abigail Cowen plays Bloom Peters, Hannah van der Westhuysen plays Stella, Precious Mustapha plays Aisha, Eliot Salt plays Terra Harvey, Elisha Applebaum plays Musa, Danny Griffin plays Sky, Sadie Soverall plays Beatrix, Freddie Thorp plays Riven, Eva Birthistle plays Vanessa Peters, Robert James-Collier plays Saul Silva, Eve Best plays Farah Dowling and many more.
There are seven episodes in the second season of the show. Each episode is between 40 and 50 minutes long.
Too much is happening in Season 2 of Fate: The Winx Saga
Well, the audience didn’t really like the first season of Fate: The Winx Saga. Still, there will be a second season because the ending of the first season was such a painful cliffhanger that it really called for a second chance to remake the popular cult animated series. And while season two stands out brilliantly as a young adult story, it lacks the conviction and essential plot to be exciting as a fantasy show.
In Season 2 of Fate: The Winx Saga, Rosalind is healthy and back at the helm of Alfea. Andreas is back too, and while Silva is awaiting trial, he has taken Silva’s place as the leader of the Specialists. Bloom, Aisha, Musa, Stella and Terra still go to school in Alfea, but things have changed and are even dangerous. With Rosalind far away and the girls still unaware of Dowling’s death, the chaos is real.
Fairies have been missing since Rosalind became Headmistress and started following Beatrix everywhere. Sky and Sam are clearly not doing well, but Riven and Dane are really upping their game. So, yes, some characters have mental health issues while others are doing fine in the new Alfea world.
The Burned Ones don’t seem to be in the new season. Does that mean Bloom and her friends are safe? Certainly not! A new Shadow, or Shadow of Danger, is just around the corner, and while the Winx test these murky waters, things start to go wrong for our cunning fairies, especially Bloom, who is the only one who knows how to wield the Ancient Dragon Flame used.
Destiny The second season of The Winx Saga begins with a good plot and good intentions. Some of the side stories are romantic, others mysterious. But eventually the show starts to trick us a lot, and it ends up being too busy for us to really focus on the magic. Adding new characters like Flora who is Terra’s cousin, Gray who is Aisha’s love interest and others doesn’t help the situation.
In the second season there are too many explanations and revelations that always happen at the wrong time. It keeps bringing up the question of who Bloom’s parents are without getting us anywhere. It adds the Blood Witches subplot without telling us where they come from or why they do what they do. The villains change every few seconds, making it difficult to keep track of who’s who.
While the story is full of ups and downs, there’s one thing that shines through: friendship and camaraderie. Especially the new bonds that are being formed, like those between Musa and Riven, Stella and Beatrix, and to some extent Flora and others. Character growth, on the other hand, is shallow. For example, Bloom seems very confident with her dragon flame because she talks about it all the time. Although she does it out of kindness, it gets old after a while. Aisha’s love life seems to be going nowhere and only exists to bring Gray into the picture, while Dane’s role in the show is still unclear.
One of the strongest and smartest characters on the show, Beatrix has some of the strangest plot twists, and some of the sparks of friendship between Stella and Sky or Musa and Dane were so faint that you wonder why they were even on the show.
Overall, Fate: The Winx Saga Season 2 does a good job of making people laugh and building a world. It could have gone better, but the way this season ended makes it inevitable that there will be a third. There’s a good chance this Netflix fantasy show will get better the third time around.
Fairies, welcome back to Alfea! A lot has changed for Bloom (Abigail Cowen), Stella (Hannah van der Westhuysen), Terra (Eliot Salt), Aisha (Precious Mustapha) and Musa (Elisha Applebaum) at Fate since we last saw the fairies of the Otherworld : The Winx Saga Season 2. Now that Headmistress Dowling (Eve Best) is no longer in charge, almost everything about the school is very different from when she was in charge. This time, however, Terra’s cousin Flora (Paulina Chávez), who has been away for a while, has returned to Alfea and joined the girls. Although I was a huge fan of Iginio Straffi’s original series and loved how crazy the first season was, the second season made me feel a lot of different things. This is unlike anything we’ve seen before… which isn’t always good (for the fairies and for the viewers).
Honestly the biggest problem of the season is that it all feels very confusing because the cast is even bigger than the first season and there is only one episode left. Flora is the latest character to join the other Winx girls. Riven (Freddie Thorp) and Beatrix (Sadie Soverall) also play bigger and more important roles. Dowling’s role of Rosalind is now played by Miranda Richardson, who is now a full-time member of the cast. Rosalind is now a more important character. Andreas (Ken Duken) takes over the Specialist chair, but Silva (Robert James-Collier) is still there and Sky (Danny Griffin) is stuck between them. Gray (Brandon Grace) and Sebastian (Éanna Hardwicke), who are new to the show, also get a lot of attention. There are a few escapes, too, but they don’t do nearly enough to even out the cast. Almost every story feels half-baked because there isn’t enough time to explore them all in depth. Even if the show got 13 episodes instead of the current six or seven, there wouldn’t be enough time to do justice to these characters.
This in turn hurts the characters the show should focus on because their growth has to be sacrificed in favor of the growth of the cast. Bloom is the only one of the Winx girls who gets a decent amount of attention, which can be annoying since the series is meant to revolve around them all. This season, both Terra and Stella feel like afterthoughts, while Aisha is close behind but a little more involved in the action. So the fact that Flora is joining the Winx girls is something to be excited about. The way the popular character is portrayed on the show is interesting and unexpected, but it makes her role on Alfea and in the Winx suite more exciting and mysterious.
It’s a shame the writers didn’t involve Flora from the start as there wasn’t much time to show how she got along with the others and how she fit into the group. It’s rushed and she goes from Terra’s cousin to her best friend overnight, so we don’t see the same relationship building and natural progression that we saw with the other characters in season one. Also, the question of Flora joining the series is how the show could work with Flora and Terra, both of whom are earth fairies with abilities very similar to Flora’s. Season 2 doesn’t seem to answer that question. But while Terra doesn’t do much over the course of the seven episodes, she does make strides that will be very exciting when the show picks up for another season. Likewise, what we see of Flora is great, and by the end of the season, she’s probably my favorite fairy.
Not only are there too many characters to keep track of, but the main stories of this season aren’t very interesting either. Rosalind, for example, isn’t the interesting and charming villain she was in season one (when she was played by Lesley Sharp). Richardson’s perspective and the new path Rosalind is taking from the writers this season are both kind of disappointing. So much potential is lost in a story that doesn’t feel as good as what we’ve seen from Rosalind before. In the same vein, Andreas doesn’t add anything funny or new to the show. He is like Rosalind in many ways, but he has neither the strength nor the knowledge to do any good. Since the last episode of the first season ended with Rosalind and Andreas taking the lead from Alfea, which was a shocking and unthinkable turn of events, the sequel is not at all satisfying. Neither of them contribute much to the story aside from lame ways of being evil, which are completely overshadowed by Beatrix, who is a better villain than both combined in half the time.
Though it had issues, the first season of Fate: The Winx Saga told a compelling story that moved well, took a logical direction, and ended on a satisfying note. It also balanced the Winx girls while still focusing on Bloom. None of that happens in season two. It doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere. It’s lost in the chaos it’s caused and doesn’t know what to do with too many of the main characters or how to include it. The main plot is so boring that it’s hard to care or keep up with it until about the fifth episode of the season. Though the world still revolves around Bloom, the other Winx girls aren’t getting their due. This is disrespectful to the original series which prided itself on showing the stories and strengths of all the Winx girls. While characters like Sky, Dane, and Riven can be interesting, there’s no reason why their stories should be more important or take center stage than those of the Winx fairies. But they are, especially Sky’s.
In short, the show seems to have forgotten what it is and what it was meant to be this season. It reminds this writer of Prime Video’s The Wilds, which was canceled after a much-criticized second season that forgot what viewers even liked about it. Fate: The Winx Saga Season 2 is still a good show to watch all at once and it has some great moments, but it probably won’t engage people in the same way that Season 1 did.