Carnival Row Season 2 Review: Reckoning and Original Sins

Carnival Row season 2 episodes 5 and 6, explained

Carnival Row season 2 is the show's last, and the midpoint of that final run is where its direction became clear. Amazon announced in November 2022 that the second season would close the story, and the ten episodes ran in pairs on Prime Video from February 17 to March 17, 2023. Episodes 5 and 6 sit at the exact middle of that run, which makes them the point where the season has to prove what it is actually about.

The two hours answer that in two different ways. The first ends on a creature attack that rearranges the board. The second spends most of its time getting the characters into new positions to react to it. The review's reading of the pair is simple: the best material is the last ten minutes of episode 5, and the weakest is the habit of sending the central couple to jail and out again.

A quick orientation for anyone arriving mid-season: Orlando Bloom plays Philo, a human detective who is secretly part fae, and Cara Delevingne plays Vignette, a fae rebel. Tamzin Merchant and David Gyasi play Imogen and Agreus, a mixed couple who start the season on the run. René Echevarria and Travis Beacham created the series, and its world of human and fae refugees in a Victorian-style city is the engine behind everything that follows.

Episode 5, "Reckoning"

Directed by Julian Holmes, "Reckoning" opens with Vignette sentenced to die. Philo fights off a Raven named Kaine and then recruits him to help stage a breakout, and Tourmaline, the seer played by Karla Crome, warns that the execution will happen that night. Elsewhere, Jonah finds evidence that his stepsister Sophie holds a large stake in the armament factories, and he has her arrested for treason.

Then comes the execution scene. A monster tears through the guards and kills Jonah, Vignette vanishes in the chaos, the creature escapes, and Philo and Kaine are the ones left standing over the bodies, which means they are arrested. It is the first time the season shows its villain, and the review called the design a winged, grotesque final boss that looks like a vampire crossed with every end-of-game monster.

The review also noted something quieter. For the first half of the hour the episode plays like filler, with Simon McBurney's Millworthy keeping wartime supplies moving and Tourmaline working through her magic. Both threads turn out to matter, but only because the finale sequence yanks them into the main plot. That is a structure a viewer can forgive, and the review did.

Episode 6, "Original Sins"

"Original Sins" begins on the anniversary of the revolution that Imogen and Agreus have been living under, and the pair plan their escape. Agreus confronts Leonora, the woman who holds them, and ends up sparing her hostage Ezra, which makes Ezra his and Imogen's responsibility. Imogen resents it, since Ezra is her brother and the reason their quiet life has been spoiled.

The other half of the hour is Philo's. Imprisoned and interrogated, he remembers the war and a shapeshifting creature that let him live because he is part pixie. Experts identify the beast as a Sparas, a monster everyone assumed was extinct. Berwick suspects that it is behind the killings and that someone is using it to inflame hatred between humans and fae, Millworthy accepts a seat in the interim government, and Dombey offers to release Philo if he helps catch the creature.

The flashback matters because it ties Philo's guilt to the show's central question. The review read his repeated line about helping the police and hurting the fae as the strongest idea of the hour, and noted that the season's writing overlapped with the racial-justice protests of 2020, which gives the line extra weight. The scenes work best when Philo is alone with that guilt, and worst when they hand him the same ultimatum the show has already given him once.

Performances worth noting

The review singled out two supporting players. Simon McBurney, as Millworthy, comes across as the show's most likable figure: a clever man stuck inside other people's politics, managing wartime supplies and then offered a seat in a government he never asked to join. Karla Crome, as Tourmaline, gets the other compliment, as the best supporting actor in the cast, a source of guidance and wisdom whom the two leads keep neglecting.

Bloom and Delevingne are given less to work with in these two hours. Their best moments come from separation, with Bloom locked in a cell turning over his history and Delevingne on the run, because that is when each is the only person on screen who cares about the other. Together, the show keeps handing them the same argument. Anyone watching Carnival Row season 2 for the acting should look at the supporting players first.

The Sparas design is the clearest production achievement of the pair. The review described it as a gruesome winged monstrosity, grotesque from head to toe, and its first appearance is brutal enough that the reveal lands even after an hour of slow setup.

Where the politics go

The review's main worry about the midseason is that the class and race politics that made the first season distinctive get crowded out by romance. Philo and Vignette have broken up, reunited, and swapped roles as hunter and hunted several times in a short run, and Imogen and Agreus's debate over whether to stay in Ragusa feels like a pause button on the real story.

It is a fair complaint about a two-season show. When a series has only twenty hours in total, a looping relationship arc costs more than it would on a ten-season drama. The more interesting threads are the ones the review wanted more of: parliament's failures, the police as an instigator of the very unrest they claim to suppress, and Millworthy as the sane man in a collapsing government.

Carnival Row season 2: the ten episodes

Source: Wikipedia's Carnival Row article. Episodes were released two at a time on Fridays.

Carnival Row season 2 midseason review and verdict

The original review landed at 3.5 out of 5 for the pair, and that number still reads as fair. "Reckoning" earns most of it. The Sparas reveal is the rare mid-season twist that changes what every character wants, and a shapeshifting predator that can wear any face gives the paranoid politics of the Row something concrete to be paranoid about. "Original Sins" is the lesser hour, a setup episode with one strong flashback.

Seen from 2026, the midseason is also a preview of how the season was received. Rotten Tomatoes lists season 2 at 44 percent approval from 16 reviews, and the complaints about circling romance plots are the same ones the review raised in March 2023. The finale closed the story in a single episode named for the city itself, and Rough Cut Review's reaction to it is on its own page, linked below.

The practical advice for anyone revisiting Carnival Row season 2 is to watch for the Sparas and for Philo's war flashback, and to treat the Imogen and Agreus Ragusa plot as the part to be patient with. For viewers who liked the first season for its worldbuilding, the second pays off the premise that the city's cruelty was always a manufactured thing. For viewers who came for the romance, it supplies more of it than the plot needs.

Sources

• Carnival Row, Wikipedia — episode titles, release dates, directors, cancellation timeline and Rotten Tomatoes figure