Wednesday Season 2 Review: Jenna Ortega Returns as the Ghoul — Alongside Startlingly Intense Monsters

At the start of Wednesday season 2 of this engaging, happily gruesome hit, we find Wednesday (Jenna Ortega), inky of hair and of disposition, gagged and bound at the head of a table. The other chairs are occupied by large, moldy dolls.

“It’s been an eventful summer,” she says in voiceover. “I’m tied up in a serial killer’s basement. Who said that nightmares don’t come true?”

She gets out alive, of course, or else we wouldn’t have these four new episodes (the rest of the season launches Sept. 3).

The killer isn’t so lucky, though, coming up against Wednesday’s developing psychic powers. Then summer ends, and she heads back to school at Nevermore, a Gothic pile that looks like Hogwarts — although no one in Harry Potter would be caught dead in blazers that shade of purple.

Soon she’s caught up in a supernatural murder mystery involving fatally beaky crows; dealing with an obsessive, disturbingly round-eyed fan (Evie Templeton); and bickering with mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones, who tends to strike a quiet note that seems almost genuinely mournful).

There’s also a zombie, Slurp, but he’s more of a brain-eating sidekick for brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez).

The show’s monsters can be startlingly intense, in fact, but none of them matches the strangeness of Steve Buscemi, as Nevermore’s new headmaster, dancing to Bruce Springsteen.

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Wednesday is returning for season 2 on Netflix in two parts, first on Aug. 6 and then on Sept. 3.