Netflix’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is back with a new mystery and higher stakes for a nail-biting second season.
I have good news and bad news. The good news is, season two is great! It’s stressful and interesting and there are plenty of crimes, clues, and suspects to go around. The stakes are higher because Pip (Emma Myers) not only finds herself knee-deep in danger from all her Scooby Doo-ing, but also because her obsession with justice and the truth is starting to affect those around her, too. Like her queer best friend Cara (Asha Banks) and her boyfriend Ravi (Zain Iqbal).
The bad news about season two is that there is even less queerness than the brief blip we got in season one. Now, Cara is still around, though because of a fight with Pip, she does end up not being part of the group shenanigans nearly as much, which is a bummer. Also, despite her fling from season one Ruby (Orla Hill) returning this season, the two are never seen together, and there’s no mention if they’re still kissing occasionally or what. I don’t know if Cara is in this season less because Asha Banks is in a feature film trilogy and it was a filming schedule thing, or maybe she just doesn’t make as much of an appearance in the book this season was based on (Good Girl, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson), or some secret third thing, but I was disappointed to see less of her. Cara was really going through it this season, and I think it would have been nice for her to have a girlfriend to support her when Pip couldn’t. At the very least, I would have loved to see more of her, our lone queer person in the core cast. Especially because her friendship with Pip was such a key part of season one.
Obviously not being in a relationship doesn’t discount Cara’s queerness (if it did, I would have had to turn in my card years ago), but in this day and age when LGBTQ+ representation is in a rapid decline, it would have been nice to have a reminder that her or Ruby are queer, especially since it has been two years since season one came out. It fails what I call the “dad test” which is basically, if someone’s straight dad (namely mine, but it is a theoretical test) watches this show and wouldn’t be able to tell (or, in this case, wouldn’t remember) a character is queer, I can hardly give the show too much credit for having great queer representation. Cara is a great character, played by a great actress, but she’s only queer representation by a technicality at this point, in my opinion.
Despite that disappointment, it’s still a great season of television. A six-episode mystery that covers two crimes. One leftover from last season sees rich asshole Max Hastings (Henry Ashton) standing trial for raping two girls when he was in high school, and one brand new: Pip’s friend’s brother Jamie (Eden H. Davies) is missing. And despite the dangers she faced and the havoc she wreaked trying to solve the murder of the first season, Pip can’t help herself and has to find out the truth.
Pip’s desperation gets to an all-time high this season, and we really get to see her struggle with right and wrong, and whether she can still be a “good girl” in a world that’s full of such awful people who are doing such awful things…and sometimes getting away with it. Not to mention she’s still dealing with the ramifications of what she uncovered last season, and how that’s affecting her community, especially Cara.
Along the way, she continues to learn the lesson she started learning in season one and that all girl detectives before her, from Harriet the Spy to Nancy Drew, have had to learn before her: life isn’t a game. These crimes are more than a school project or podcast fodder, there are real people involved and real danger at hand. Also, for someone so smart, Pip also learns another lesson she should have learned years ago: the justice system isn’t always just at all, and sometimes bad guys get away with doing bad things because they’re rich and white and powerful. So she has to decide how much justice she’s comfortable taking into her own hands.
I do hope we get another season of this show—after all, there is a third book in the novel series, plus a novella—and I hope it gets a little more queer with the next one, giving Cara a little more screentime and maybe a gal pal.
All episodes of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder are currently available on Netflix.
