BBC America’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency premiered a very short clip from the second season of the show. Showrunner Robert Cooper said that the genre of season one may have been time travel, this season is very “something else”—a something else creator Max Landis said they couldn’t say at comic con or “people freak out.”
Season one ended with Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett) captured by government agent Hugo Friedkin (Dustin Milligan) and his agency, which the new scene follows up on. Landis described what happens to Dirk as Friedkin wanting to “put him in a box and dissect his brain” which is then Dirk “wakes up in that box.”
While most shows have dreamworlds that are very obviously not reality, Dirk’s dream—gorilla and giraffe masks included—isn’t really that much stranger than the real world seen in the show.
The second scene (also from the first episode) shows Ken (Mpho Koaho) in the hands of Friedkin, in a taxi, with the corgi. Friedkin wants to know what power Ken has, and electroshocks him whenever he can’t give them an answer. Ken must have one, says Friedkin, because he survived so long with Bart the “holistic assassin” who kills everyone. Friedkin then complains that Project Blackwing used to get to deal with people with cool powers—invisibility, shapeshifting—and now it sucks. The vampires are nuts and Dirk’s... Dirk. Ken still insists he has no powers and, in possibly the best moment from the show I’ve seen, is asked how the corgi “works,” to his complete befuddlement.
This whole situation, said Landis, was to use “this weird under-serviced military plot” from the last season.
In addition to moving out of the city and to a rural location in Burgsburg, Montana, there’s a huge magic and fantasy element this year. Two other locations also play a part: the military Project Blackwing HQ, and a fantastical land called, I think, “Wendemere.” (I am guessing at the spelling.) And yet, the cast all say this season is easier to follow than the first one.
It almost has to be, right?