'The Returned' Returns To Answer All Your Dead Questions
The Returned comes back for a second season on Halloween night, a return that is itself almost a surprise. It seemed as though this French production (originally titled Les Revenants, and not to be confused with the wan, Americanized, A&E-aired version of The Returned) had given us a full arc of story in its first season on Sundance TV. We took leave of the little town, with its people returned-from-the-dead, about to submerge as the nearby dam broke and flooded.
Yet here is the grave, mostly-silent little boy Victor, now talking more, and we learn of his true parentage: It’s no spoiler to say that his mother appears here — because she just increases the mystery of the returned population. New characters are introduced, such as a craggily handsome architect named Berg (Laurent Lucas), who serves as our outsider asking questions we want to know about how and why that dam broke, and why parts of the town remain underwater.
I can’t say that The Returned, created by Fabrice Gobert, is the most inviting of shows. I spent the first hour of the new season trying to recall the events of the previous season, dimly remembering plot strands the show assumes we’ll have firm in our memories. A mere six months have passed in the story’s time-frame. Ah, yes, there’s Adele, ripely pregnant by Simon with her zombie-spawn; she in an ambulance, and her belly seems to be sending out frantic signals, little eruptions in her flesh, that are scarier than most TV horror stories.
The achievement of The Returned is that it creates its frights chiefly from an atmosphere of the quietly uncanny. Indeed, the show is at its best when it’s impossible to tell who is more dead: the returned population, or the living whose souls have expired from despair. This is pre-Stephen-King-era scary storytelling, reaching back to writers that influenced King, such as Richard Matheson and a previous generation — H.P. Lovecraft and, especially, M.R. James.
The Returned is TV fright-fiction for people put off by the blood and jokes of the new Ash Vs. Evil Dead. Or, if your appetite for this genre is as insatiable as a zombie’s for flesh, think of The Returned as a nice complement to that show, as well as being the subtler step-sister to The Walking Dead.
The Returned airs on Sundance TV Saturday nights at 10 p.m. ET.
