Rectify Season 2 Premiere Review: Wake Up, Partner

[AsAp]

Most of the elements that made SundanceTV's Rectify one of the best series of 2013remain in place in Season 2. In fact, really the only thing that's changed is the swap-out of Season 1's excellent licensed music that I'd always immediately download for an excellent original score that I will absolutely download; the acting is superb, the slow crawl of the story is riveting, and by the end of the Season 2 premiere, "Running With the Bull," I was a blubbering mess. (Only Rectify and Friday Night Lights are guaranteed to squeeze my eyeballs dry with each episode.)

I'm on the record as hating the TV trope where one character or hallucination tells another character who's in some unconscious state to "JUST WAKE UP!" But in the tender hands of Rectify, the struggle that played out in Daniel Holden's comatose mind was a thing of beauty. "Running With the Bull" opened with a trick: Kerwin was alive in Daniel's flashback, the authorities having "changed their minds" about sentencing him to death. But Kerwin's jail-cell door was left suspiciously open, and it soon became obvious that we'd entered Daniel's subconscious as he fought for his life. 

That was the main topic of the episode. After taking a beating from Bobby Dean and a gang of goons in the Season 1 finale, and spending the five previous episodes in Paulie, Georgia—where everyone wants to throw Daniel back into his 7x9—Daniel wondered whether he even wanted to continue on. It makes sense—and is incredibly depressing—that Daniel would mentally retreat to his life in jail and remember both the good (Kerwin) and the bad (his masturbating neighbor) while in a coma. Despite the travesties he experienced on the inside, it's a world he knows better than the land of the free. The world outside of prison rejected him, and the mind-as-a-prison metaphor is spot-on in this case.

So when Kerwin and Daniel were walking through Daniel's memory of the grove in the final scene of the episode, it was incredibly powerful stuff. Kerwin always believed that Daniel would get out, and was elated to hear that he did. One of the series most lovable and honest characters, Kerwin lived vicariously through the hope Daniel would be sprung, and even though he's dead and this version of him was imagined, he seemed more alive than ever. But the idea that Daniel wasn't sure whether he wanted to wake up from his coma—the idea that he might give up on this precious life he'd been gifted—didn't sit right with Kerwin. And he told Daniel as much in the most Kerwin way possible. 

"If you're lying in a coma and you just can't deal with it anymore and you're just too tired and you're ready to see what's on the other side, it's just not my place to tell you what to do, brother," Ghost Kerwin told Coma Daniel. "It's just not my place. But whatever you decide, I'll still love you, D. Always. Forever and always." 

God I LOVE Kerwin. This scene was a heart-punching, eye-wringing testament to the incredible friendship that Daniel and Kerwin shared on the inside, and Daniel felt it so hard that he too was crying. (Along with myself and probably many of you.) When Kerwin commented on how beautiful it was just to be outside and asked Daniel if, post-coma, he could visit this spot every day, this spot with its brown grass and leafless trees that were so gorgeous to a man who hadn't been able to see them in so long, and Daniel responded, "In theory," Kerwin killed us all with a bit of honest advice.

"I dont know, D. That's worth something. All I'm saying. All I'm saying. All I'm saying."

And that's when we knew that Daniel would wake up, against the wishes of 99 percent of Paulie, and that he'd do it for the love of his friend Kerwin, who helped him see the miracle in life. All I'm saying.