The Flight Attendant follows up a smooth ascent with a rough descent in two seasons

Please make sure your seat is upright, tray table stowed and seatbelt fastened — before you begin streaming the curated in-flight entertainment of the week: The Flight Attendant. Two eight-episode seasons for the to and fro. The first takes off trouble-free, soars to cruising speed, builds its mystery in a pressurised cabin of a plot, and makes a smooth landing. The second takes off well enough, some bumps in the tarmac notwithstanding, runs into more turbulence than one can stomach, and makes a bumpy landing.

Captaining the whole operation is an enthralling Kaley Cuoco as alcoholic stewardess Cassie Bowden. A one-night stand turns into an endless nightmare for Cassie in the first season. She wakes up next to a dead body in a Bangkok hotel room, gets caught in a vast criminal conspiracy involving American money launderers, North Korean spies and British assassins, gives in to her worst alcohol-fuelled impulses, and descends down a vertiginous spiral of anxiety and paranoia that affects her relationship with close friends, co-workers and family. But she somehow solves the mystery to make it out alive. At the end of it, she also confronts her self-destructive tendencies rooted in unresolved childhood trauma: the death of her father who introduced her to alcohol.

Just when you think Cassie’s got her inner demons in her control, Season 2 puts her on a fresh collision course with them, along with multiple doppelgängers, obsessive podcasters, bounty hunters, and rogue CIA agents in a much knottier conspiracy. Murder, mystery and mushrooms are added for flavour. Steve Yockey developed the first season from the novel by Chris Bohjalian. With the second, he is forced to build a whole new adventure for Cassie without the luxury of a source material to rely on. This presents a whole host of problems. The most significant one: too many moving parts rob the narrative of its efficiency.

Not to say the story coasts along on autopilot. The jaunty camerawork, split-screen images and editing keep the pacing brisk. Blake Neely does a pretty solid Bernard Hermann impression, while still making the score his own. Simple but sophisticated piano motifs with jagged rhythms and edgy scherzos capture the paranoia of a chase. Alas, the show doesn’t always groove to the same vibes. Season 2 takes some big leaps, as it careens from Cassie’s private nightmare to conspiracy thriller to jet-setting caper. But the sudden plunges in altitude take us out of the story. By the end, it is carrying a little too heavy cargo of incredulity.

When we left Cassie last season, she had been to a couple of AA meetings. Now, she is nearing a year of sobriety. On moving across the country from New York to Los Angeles, she has gotten herself a handsome photographer boyfriend in Marco (Santiago Cabrera) and a side-hustle as a civilian asset for the CIA in addition to the titular job. This season’s mystery comes into play when Cassie tails a mark during a layover in Berlin — only for him to get blown up in a car explosion. Shit soon hits the fan from there, as a mysterious woman who looks like Cassie steals her luggage and her identity in what appears like an effort to frame her, putting her in a tight spot with the CIA. Again, it is up to her — and her friends — to get her out of it.

In a performance of manic intensity, Cuoco doubles down on the Season 1 frustrations of a woman trying to be a better person despite her dysfunction and a universe that refuses to give her a break. Cassie may have faced her childhood trauma but her inner demons continue to linger around, urging her to find respite in the bottle. The idea of CIA hiring an untrained civilian to do high-stakes surveillance work is scarcely credible. Never mind someone who attracts catastrophe like a moth to a flame. But Cuoco brings a comical fidelity to how the average person may have handled the pressures of such a life-and-death job. Hell, even James Bond is an alcoholic sex addict, even if a high-functioning one.

“You’re telling me your life is some John le Carré novel now?” wonders Cassie’s lawyer best friend Annie (Zosia Mamet) after she confesses her LA life isn’t as perfect as it seems. Cassie and her hacker fiancé Max (Deniz Akdeniz) relocate to LA too with the goal to start a new life together. The couple, while crashing at Cassie’s, get pulled into her investigation and a tangential caper involving a bounty-hunting couple (Joseph Julian Sora and Callie Hernandez). Cassie, in a needless detour, goes to Iceland to rescue co-worker Megan (Rosie Perez), who is on the lam after having sold corporate secrets to North Korea. In hot pursuit is Shane (Griffin Matthews), Cassie’s other co-worker who is an undercover agent for the CIA. Cassie’s icy foe-turned-friend Miranda (Michelle Gomez) comes to the rescue at one point, playing the role of the deus ex machina, as she herself describes it.

If the corporate espionage plot of Season 1 was tied to codes in a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Cassie’s turmoil and refusal to reckon with her past this season mirrors the attitude of the protagonist in Dean Koontz’s Dark Rivers of the Heart — a book laid out on the table of her LA apartment. The show is not just about Cassie’s struggle with alcoholism, but how it impacts those closest to her. In one of the season’s most powerful moments, Cassie’s AA sponsor Brenda (Shohreh Aghdashloo) drops some sobering wisdom about the importance of “rigorous honesty” in the process towards recovery (“You tell the truth even when it’s easier to lie.”). In another scene of “rigorous honesty”, Cassie’s brother Davey (TR Knight) engineers a reunion with her estranged mother Lisa (Sharon Stone). It’s a fraught confrontation that brings the dramatic talents of Cuoco and Stone to the forefront. Rounding out the new additions are Jessie Ennis as fellow recovering alcoholic Jenny, Mae Martin as flight attendant Grace St. James and Cheryl Hines as CIA boss Dot Karlson — all three of whom have secrets of their own and add to the intrigue.

In the first season, Cassie’s inner conflicts are depicted with the camera zooming into her face and entering a mind palace where Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman), the dead man she woke up next to, played the role of sounding board/conscience. In this season, a dead Alex is replaced with multiple subconscious avatars of herself: as the teenager who shared a special bond with her dad, the hard-partying adult in a gold sequined dress, the rock-bottom counterpart and a mirror image whose facade of perfection is cracking. These inner voices act as the shoulder devil and angel, tempting Cassie into going back to her old ways or urging her not to. The show goes all in on the hallucinatory set pieces this season to show a woman who is her own worst enemy and often battling herself. By the end, Cassie is haunted by teddy bears repeating “easy does it” and synchronized swimmers. The problem is these sequences start to feel like fillers after a while.

Granted, Yockey and the writers are as interested in the psychological underpinnings of Cassie’s story as all the mystery and the mile-high thrills. But the mind palace device is used so frequently it halts narrative flow, and often so clumsily in the middle of a tense sequence, the fun leaks out. No doubt when all the engines are well-oiled and firing, The Flight Attendant can be a hell of a trip. However, its propulsive pace can’t help but skirt around its shortcomings. Before it drifts into the void of oblivion where shows that have overstayed their welcome go to die, it’s best to ground it.

The Flight Attendant is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.