Does criticism really matter? For the makers of the Prime Video series Citadel. it would appear so. They seem to have responded to the indifference that greeted the first season in 2023. The seven-episode second season has less off-the-cuff writing, better secondary characters and more evenly balanced action and emotion.
Season one laid out the groundwork for what was meant to be a multi-country franchise. Citadel explores the battle between competing spy agencies. While Citadel hopes to maintain the global order, Manticore, which is funded by the world’s richest eight families, wants to play dirty.
Citadel’s chief Bernard (Stanley Tucci) has come up with a temporary procedure called backstopping that erases agents’ memories. Mason (Richard Madden) is one such backstopped candidate. The wipe-out makes him forget his love for fellow spy Nadia (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Asha, their child. Mason is married to Abby (Ashleigh Cummings) and has a daughter with her too.
It is revealed at the end of the first season that Mason was manipulated into gutting Citadel by Manticore’s chief Dahlia (Lesley Manville), who is his mother.
Season two, created by Josh Applebaum, Bryan Oh and David Weil and executive produced by the Russo brothers, involves a lot of location-hopping, side-switching and deal-making. Bernard assembles a team comprising Nadia, Mason, Citadel associate Frank (Matty Berry), breakaway CIA agent Hutch (Jack Reynor) and Hutch’s partner Celine (Lina El Arabi).
Their target is Manticore funder Braga (Gabriel Leone), who is working on a deadly chip that can control minds and make people into automated assassins.
Dahlia has achieved a bit of this effect already with Mason. She sways her son into doing her bidding. Since Braga has Abby as leverage, Mason goes along with Dahlia’s plans, torn between his loyalty to Abby and his love for Nadia.
This Citadel edition, mostly directed by Joe Russo, comes after two spin-offs, one set in Italy and a prequel set in India, which starred Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Varun Dhawan as Nadia’s parents. Neither the Italy nor India chapters has been integrated into the new show. Even the actor who plays the grown-up Nadia’s mother does not look anything like an older version of Prabhu.
There’s clear flab-cutting at work and a sharper emphasis on continuing the main spy-versus-spy narrative. What survives from the India outing is the emphasis on family as a cushion against the vagaries of agent life.
There are glowering confrontations between Nadia and Mason, their chemistry having evaporated and rancour having replaced trust. More compelling than this track is the reunion between Dahlia and Mason. The great Lesley Manville brings unexpected heft to her scenes, just as Stanley Tucci is hugely effective as the ruthlessly focused Bernard.
Some of the secondary characters are entertaining – the CIA jock Hutch, the journeyman Frank, the French-spouting Celine. Paulo Braga, superbly played by Brazilian actor Gabriel Leone, is a formidable villain, especially in the scenes where he threatens his son’s teacher and complains about his blood-stained furniture.
Citadel S2 works harder than its predecessor on the typical revenge-remorse-redemption trifecta that governs every spy thriller. There is nothing wildly new here, only a more efficient examination of the ways in which adversaries are more similar than they care to admit.
The early episodes have a predicable pattern: a tense stand-off is followed by mayhem. This pattern eases out in the final episodes, making way for a reckoning of the personal cost of world-saving. By upping its game, Citadel rescues itself from oblivion too.
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