The second season is quite a bit weaker than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Not that the first season was great, but it felt more like an MI-6 spy story. The story here does not follow any real story that closely and feels fake, but many characters are based on real characters. I also feel the story is just more boring and pointless overall. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was set in the circus, MI-6 offices. So we saw British spies do some spy work and plan events. Mostly failing and Smiley bailing them out by finding the double-agent. You felt a bit like watching a real MI-6 agency. But the big error in that show were the initial episodes that had side characters as the main characters. So overall too many episodes focused on insignificant people just setting up the story. Here they fixed that initially, we start with the main events and Smiley. Smiley is told about a dead body and is told to investigate it and keep it quiet as MI-6 doesn't want anything to leak to the press for PR reasons. So initially this season is a bit better structured, but soon it slows down to a boring pace. Smiley needs to find out why this Estonian general was killed in UK. He's one of the characters based on a real person and this part feels interesting. Soon Smiley discovers that the general received a photo of a USSR agent with an Estonian friendly agent in a bed with naked women. The USSR agent got killed too because the video of him with prostitutes was used to extract info from him. The Estonian guy who extracted the info is also killed. All by Karla the big villain from season 1. He's a boss of the USSR spy network. He gets people killed left and right. But Smiley figures out that these killings were done for personal reasons. He has an insane daughter in the West and killed these people to hide the secret from USSR and his bosses. He uses government money to fund her stay in a Western insane asylum ergo stealing from the state. Basically that's that. Smiley reveals it and Karla escapes to the West into Smiley's capture in the last minute of the show. There is no great info revealed and we don't know if Karla tells the West anything whatsoever. We just uncover this story very slowly and about 20% of the scenes make no sense. We just see 5 minute long discussions we don't fully get and often the actors are overacting so much that you cringe. There is no agent to be caught and no organization in danger. Smiley works for himself not MI-6 so it feels like he is just some old boring man walking around. It doesn't feel like a big season with actual spy work. And most characters are very creepy. Sweaty, dirty, sleezy, drinking a lot, never telling the story clearly. It's a giant mess.
There are side stories with other characters. A woman is about to get killed by Karla's men and then... nothing much. She doesn't get killed and that's that. Her story goes nowhere at all. We see full episodes with her, but her final scenes are just her safe in a farm in France. Did she know any secrets? Nope. Did she advance the plot? Nope. It seems like maybe Karla used her to find the general, but even that is not fully clear. You could cut out over an hour of her from these 6 episodes and lose no relevant plot. Overall the season is fairly focused on the goal and keeps you watching, but it leaves you dissatisfied when you discover that there is no payout whatsoever. It feels like nothing happened. I was waiting them to connect the various plots into one. The woman would be used for some further progress? And the daughter would be saved somehow? Instead it's just a show with 50 different interviews. Smiley constantly meets people and asks them questions, but Smiley himself is very boring. And the people he interviews are often bad actors or boring too. It's all shown via interviews. You constantly want to see stuff happen, but you are told via words. The cheap and boring way to tell the story. It all feels like it should have been way better. A letdown at the end.
It's higher quality video than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and it cuts to the story much faster. But the budget feels like half that. And the plot is way more boring and feels a bit pointless. It's a low-budget show where everything looks dirty and cheap and the acting is lacking. The real MI-6 stuff is not seen in season 2 leaving me with very little to enjoy when I look back at it.
There are side stories with other characters. A woman is about to get killed by Karla's men and then... nothing much. She doesn't get killed and that's that. Her story goes nowhere at all. We see full episodes with her, but her final scenes are just her safe in a farm in France. Did she know any secrets? Nope. Did she advance the plot? Nope. It seems like maybe Karla used her to find the general, but even that is not fully clear. You could cut out over an hour of her from these 6 episodes and lose no relevant plot. Overall the season is fairly focused on the goal and keeps you watching, but it leaves you dissatisfied when you discover that there is no payout whatsoever. It feels like nothing happened. I was waiting them to connect the various plots into one. The woman would be used for some further progress? And the daughter would be saved somehow? Instead it's just a show with 50 different interviews. Smiley constantly meets people and asks them questions, but Smiley himself is very boring. And the people he interviews are often bad actors or boring too. It's all shown via interviews. You constantly want to see stuff happen, but you are told via words. The cheap and boring way to tell the story. It all feels like it should have been way better. A letdown at the end.
It's higher quality video than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and it cuts to the story much faster. But the budget feels like half that. And the plot is way more boring and feels a bit pointless. It's a low-budget show where everything looks dirty and cheap and the acting is lacking. The real MI-6 stuff is not seen in season 2 leaving me with very little to enjoy when I look back at it.