Over two years later, Netflix’s Raising Dion — based on the comic by Dennis Liu and (a sadly still uncredited) Jason Piperberg — is back for its second season. Picking up in real time, season two sees kid superhero Dion Warren (Ja’Siah Young), and his mother Nicole (Alisha Wainwright) now living a relatively normal life in partnership with the BIONA Initiative. However, the Crooked Man is still out there, and has now bonded with the vengeful boy psychic Brayden (Griffin Robert Faulkner), while toxic sinkholes have appeared wherever the fiend went across the globe.
There will be spoilers in this recap/review, so if you haven’t seen the first episode, please come back for our thoughts after you’ve watched it.
1. Kid Kilgrave
Brayden has developed the power to persuade people into doing whatever he wants, including driving him to Dion’s hometown of Atlanta. Once there, Brayden gets himself enrolled at Dion’s school, and as the audible thoughts of the other children show, there’s something deeply unnerving about the way he’s fixated on our hero, resembling a greasy version of the eerily immaculate demon children you usually see in other media. However, he’s still a little kid, and nowhere as ruthless as David Tennant’s similarly powered megalomaniac from Jessica Jones, expressing skepticism when the Crooked Man kills a would-be mugger, raising (no pun intended) the question of whether Brayden himself has less free will than he thinks.
2. The World’s Youngest Superhero
Dion himself has fully embraced his superhero nature, donning the mantle of Mind Mover to literally clean-up his neighborhood whenever his mom isn’t looking. (His friends Esperanza and Jonathan, who’ve opted to go by Invisible Girl and Admiral Annihilation, act as tech support.) Nicole is well aware of her son’s activities though, and not impressed at the prospect of him risking exposing the existence of Powered people to the outside world; adding tension is her continued wish to drive him to school, when other kids his age take themselves. It’s an important dynamic, reflecting that Dion is a little older and not going to obey his mom all the time, while still too young for her to be supportive the way, say, Aunt May was when she found out her nephew was Spider-Man.
3. The World’s Most Awkward Meet Cute
Poor Nicole: on top of being the single mother of a fledgling superhero, she’s juggling three jobs, including doing graphic design for her old dance studio, and taking on the role of directing the school musical revue chorus (a prospect Dion is adorably terrified about after Esperanza signs him up.) All that, and BIONA’s CEO Suzanne Wu forgets to tell her about Dion’s new trainer, Tevin (Rome Flynn), a former runner and Olympic coach with the ability to create force fields: Nicole has an awkward first encounter with him in BIONA’s cafe, where her initial interest in him is dashed when he protects her from a malfunctioning coffee machine, and she offends after explaining she doesn’t want to date anyone Powered. (Ouch: now just imagine how it would’ve looked if Nicole were white.)
Eventually, Nicole and Suzanne agree Tevin might be a more age appropriate mentor for Dion than his predecessor, Margaret — someone who can come across as a friend, not an elder. She and Tevin agree to a fresh slate, and shake hands: it seems like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and by friendship I mean Tevin could very well wind up becoming Dion’s stepfather. Dion gets on well with the guy, but how would he feel about that? It’s shown later he still believes his father Mark will come back again someday, even if Nicole believes his video messages for him are just his way of processing his grief. (On that note: I would be very surprised if Michael B. Jordan appeared this season.)
4. Pat is Back
Speaking of the men in Nicole’s life, a shaggy-haired Pat returns to the lobby of BIONA at the end of the episode, claiming he is no longer the Crooked Man, and that he wants to help. I knew Pat’s return wasn’t the biggest twist in the season, since it was included in the trailer, but I didn’t expect him to show up again so soon; his return to Atlanta certainly feels very sudden, when you take into account he returns to BIONA on the same night his former alter-ego activates the sinkhole that appeared where he “died.” In any case, as unhinged as Pat was in the first season, the thought of a completely non-human Crooked Man is a major cause for alarm.
Continued below5. Roll Call
Let’s run through the rest of the major characters and introductions from this episode: there’s Gary (Michael Anthony), a kindly school security guard who investigates the nearby sinkhole after the Crooked Man activates it, and gets infected by the mutated spores inside — no doubt whatever is happening to him will be a source of great emotional turmoil for Esperanza, who sees him as a surrogate father figure.
Over at BIONA, we have David Marsh (Josh Ventura), the new VP of Operations; Fernando (David De La Barcena), an employee with a gig he doesn’t want his dad to know about; and Janelle (Aubriana Davis), a troubled Powered youth; while back home, Nicole’s sister Kat unexpectedly returns from a trip to Ghana, now single and without her phone, and looking for a place to stay after selling her home to move to a new job — expect her to play a bigger role this season.
Bonus Material:
– Some local touches include Dion and friends going to Dragon Con, which is held in Atlanta, and the whole scene where items recovered the sinkhole are shown to include musket balls from the Civil War.
– I know Netflix doesn’t mind the self-promotion, but it feels unlikely Nicole’s boss Kwame hasn’t watched The Queen’s Gambit yet.
Overall, Raising Dion‘s second season opener feels more confident and coherent, with less tonal dissonance than the first season; I look forward to seeing how the rest of it pans out.
