The survivors start to adapt to their new reality.

I hugely enjoyed Netflix’s first season of Belgian sci-fi drama Into The Night, which like Snowpiercer, was predicated on the need to keep whizzing round the planet to stay alive for some implausible apocalyptic reason – in this case to avoid the sun from rising, which has become, randomly, deadly to all life. It was daft as the proverbial brush but as its premise demanded, it had a certain compelling momentum, and it was fun to see how the programme makers spun the idea out for six whole episodes.

At the end of Season 1, the handful of survivors found refuge in a NATO bunker in Bulgaria, and Season 2 picks up nine days later when it’s already starting to go a bit Mad Max. Aside from that, they’ve all started speaking a lot of English for some reason; there’s something about a fire, and running out of food and going to Norway to find seeds; a couple of the characters from season 1 get stuck in a generator room (because it doesn’t have a door handle on the inside??) and they need a blow torch to get them out or the temperature will rise and bake them all alive; there’s an earthquake; there’s something going on with the rats; there’s some very unpleasant snogging; and some rushing around on the surface at night and discovering that the ‘earthquake’ wasn’t an earthquake after all… oh yes, and there are some flashbacks to before the apocalypse.

So, lots of ‘stuff’ is happening, but this reviewer hadn’t got a clue what was actually going on. There are lots of new characters but it isn’t at all clear whose story we are supposed to be following, and this reviewer was struggling to tell them apart, or to care about any of them.

All in all, a disappointingly alienating watch. Into The Night has swapped the daft simplicity of its original premise for a multi-stranded mishmash, firing off in all directions at once, as if the creative team has got a bit giddy at getting their series renewed and being a bit of a hit on Netflix, but has forgotten the basics of storytelling.

I hope it settles down, but as the autumn season kicks in and the platforms and terrestrial schedules start filling up with quality stuff I can actually understand, I’m not sure I have the patience for this. 5/10

Martin Jameson