East West 101 - Season Two
Season two of this award-winning Australian drama starts off with a bang. Literally. A car bomb wreaks havoc in the suburbs of Sydney, leaving two people dead, and an apparently racially-motivated crime to be solved.
Less morally black-and-white and more emotionally engaging, this series will hold your attention from the first episode to the last. Malik is still fairly self-righteous, but the political correctness of the first series has been toned down a tad, to allow for more realistic and dramatically gratifying moral and ethical complexities. The storylines involve people from diverse cultures, and there are good and not-so-good elements in each of them. This makes a nice change from the rather too clear-cut moral divides in the first series.
Malik's nemesis from the first series is replaced here by an agent from the NSO (National Security Organisation), Richard Skerritt. The NSO has joined forces with the Major Crime Squad to solve the politically motivated crime of the bombing.
Again, his character is a little too one-dimensional. He just looks like a baddie. It's a shame, really, but only a small matter.
The writers have chosen well, to give central character Zane Malik's colleagues more airtime. Indeed, one of the most interesting and moving storylines involves his boss, Patricia Wright (Susie Porter), who finds herself involved in a family drama that unleashes ghosts from her past. Making a recurrent appearance is Australian TV's man of the moment, Gyton Grantley, as her brother.
Timely themes such as cultural paranoia and the suffering of political refugees at the hands of unscrupulous people smugglers form the backdrop to this series, which ends on a dramatic note.