I had mixed feelings when I started watching this season, because the ending of season 1 was amazing and written in a way that in my eyes didn’t easily allow for a sequel that wouldn’t ruin the story. Turns out, season 2 was in part an improvement over its predecessor, although it unfortunately also had some weaknesses.

There was one major problem with this season: it was packed with a variety of characters and many complex storylines, but the storytelling was extremely rushed. Without having researched the production details of this season, I strongly assume that something went wrong during production, forcing them either to radically cut scenes that had originally been filmed or to skip parts of the screenplay already during filming. Probably GMMTV had to rearrange their schedule due to the pandemic and this series ended up in an airing spot it was not designed for. In my opinion, the screenplay was probably aiming at a format similar to “Who Are You”, with 18 episodes à 60 minutes (maybe a little less, 16 episodes or so). That would explain why many characters were underused, there were huge gaps between scenes, many developments lacked explanation and the opening credits were left out or radically shortened. It’s a shame, because what ultimately ended up in the series was extremely promising and exciting, only disturbed by the rushed storytelling. 13 episodes of this length are a joke for this story.

With that being said, the material that we got to see was great. They seemingly were not afraid to push their criticism of the Thai education system even further, digging deeper in the political environment allowing for all of this to happen in the first place. Including the gruesome red drum killings from Thai history was not something I would have expected from a kids’ show. The story was pretty strong, with many unexpected plot twist (which actually made sense, unlike those in “Blacklist”), a healthy level of tension throughout and an interesting shift of “leadership” between several characters. The antagonist was again very convincing, while on the side of the protagonists the roles of various characters were rather “blurred”; this made it a little hard to sympathise with the kids, but in the context of the story it still worked. The acting was generally fine, although I felt like Nanon was a little spaced out sometimes. As an improvement over season 1, I liked that the story didn’t need several slow introducing episodes, but started right away. On the other hand, the ending, while still strong and unpredictable, lacked the kind of build-up of the finale of season 1, probably due to the overall rush.

In short: this is an extremely strong second season! If the director had been given enough time to tell all of the story and that in a proper pace, it could have been a 10/10 for me; like this it is still 9*, as I can't find anything to criticise besides the rushed storytelling.