Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wednesday Season 2: Part 1.
Everyone’s favorite gloomy teen outcast Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) has finally returned to our screens after a nearly three-year-long hiatus—and she certainly didn’t waste any time wading back into dangerous waters in Part 1 of Wednesday Season 2.
After arriving at Nevermore Academy for her second year at the magical boarding school following a summer of psychic serial killer hunting, Wednesday quickly found herself investigating a new supernatural mystery involving a vision of the untimely death of her werewolf roommate/best friend Enid (Emma Myers), a secret outcast experimentation program, and an unidentified murderous avian (an outcast with the ability to control birds).
Since only four episodes of Season 2 are currently available on Netflix—Part 2 (Episodes 5-8) will hit streaming on Sept. 3—we don’t have all the answers to the questions laid out in the first half of Wednesday’s sophomore installment. But let’s break down everything that was revealed during the Episode 4 showdown at Willow Hill Psychiatric Hospital and what it means for Wednesday going forward.
What went down at Willow Hill?
Following the transfer of one Laurel Gates (Christina Ricci) to Willow Hill, the former Nevermore dorm mom and botany teacher—who previously went by the alias Marilyn Thornhill—thought she could win an angry Tyler (Hunter Doohan) back to her side. But it turned out her Hyde prodigy-turned-prisoner wasn’t so eager to forgive his crazed master for her Season 1 manipulations.
Meanwhile, Wednesday began making some headway in her investigation into the deceased Willow Hill outcast patients when she discovered the urns supposedly containing their remains were actually filled with animal ashes. However, the one-eyed crow following Wednesday at the command of her avian rival swiftly swooped in to steal the obituaries she had collected as evidence.
Wednesday then recruited her Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) to get himself committed at Willow Hill so he could try to find “Lois,” the name written at the top of the detective board connecting all the dead outcasts’ obituaries that she found at the late Sheriff Galpin’s cabin in the third episode. Thanks to a tip-off from her Grandmama Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley) and some sleuthing by her stalker-turned assistant Agnes (Evie Templeton), Wednesday learned the person who had signed the outcasts’ death certificates was former Nevermore normie science teacher Augustus Stonehurst (Philip Philmar), a previous head doctor at Willow Hill who was later confined to the asylum as a patient after suffering a psychotic break. Thing (Victor Dorobantu) then snuck into Willow Hill to let Fester in on this fact, prompting him to find Stonehurst and electrocute his parrot Ozzie until she gave up the numbers 51971 in relation to Lois.
After Wednesday also broke into Willow Hill, she and Fester realized the numeric sequence was the security code to enter a maintenance room that Stonehurst had indicated would lead them to Lois. However, it quickly came to light that Lois wasn’t a person, but rather an acronym for “Long-term Outcast Integration Study,” a secret program designed to extract the abilities of outcasts so they could be shared with normies. Wednesday and Fester followed a hidden passageway that led them to a block of cells where all the outcasts who were believed to be dead were being held. But it was then that the oh-so-elusive avian finally showed up and at long last revealed their identity.
Who is the avian?
As it turned out, the mysterious avian was Augustus Stonehurst’s daughter, Judi (Heather Matarazzo), the woman we knew as the executive assistant of Willow Hill’s chief psychiatrist, Dr. Rachael Fairburn (Thandiwe Newton). Judi proceeded to explain to Wednesday and Fester that she had recruited Fairburn to be the public face of Willow Hill so she could continue her father’s work, as Judi herself was Stonehurst’s first successful experiment.
After Fester fried the hospital’s power grid, allowing the LOIS patients to escape and begin attacking Judi, Wednesday noticed that one female patient was hanging back. Could this nameless woman Wednesday was drawn to be none other than Morticia’s long-lost sister Ophelia? Considering that, in Episode 3, Morticia told Wednesday her overconfidence in her psychic ability was making her sound like Ophelia, who was apparently similarly impatient and strong-willed, and ultimately allowed her powers to drive her to madness, it seems plausible.
As for Fairburn and Stonehurst, amid the chaos, zombie Slurp (Owen Painter) broke into the former’s office and made quick work of chowing down on the pair, gaining the ability to speak in the process. Meanwhile, Laurel managed to free Tyler. However, he proceeded to transform into the Hyde and run her through with his claws before seemingly leaving her for dead. Hyde Tyler then also encountered Wednesday, but appeared to second-guess himself and simply tossed her through a window, knocking her unconscious instead of killing her.
A new teaser for Wednesday Season 2: Part 2 reveals that Wednesday will still be in a coma at the start of Episode 5. But it seems she’ll soon awaken and have to deal with both the fallout from the Willow Hill breakout and the evil still at large. As a voice that sounds like it could perhaps be Ophelia’s laments in a voiceover quoting Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
