When you come at the Khan, you best not miss.
This is a full, non-spoiler review for all 10 episodes of Marco Polo: Season 2, now available on Netflix. For those who've already binged the entire season and want to read my thoughts about the way it all ended, along with some other notable story elements, head over to the Marco Polo: Season 2 Spoiler Discussion Page.
Marco Polo has returned to Netflix with several improvements made over its first season, the most notable of which is the significant sidelining of the show's titular character - Marco Polo (Lorenzo Richelmy) - who continues to be the show's weakest, least interesting character. But here, in Season 2, even more so than the show's initial outing, the focus has shifted primarily to the drama and dynamic of Kublai Khan's court and once again Benedict Wong's performance as Kublai remains the true heart and center of the series.
And perhaps the show was always meant to feel this way, given how Kublai surrounds himself with followers, sons, and foreigners he's collected like they were all part of his menagerie, but this season you'll really start to wonder why the show is called "Marco Polo" given how demoted Polo feels. That's not to say he's out of the picture, he's just the least important cog now, and anything remotely intriguing about him that remains is due to lingering elements from the first season - like his affection for Kokachin and his strained relationship with his banished and branded father.
Driving the show this year, in far more effective ways, is Kublai himself - full of doubt, love, anger, stubbornness, and vulnerability. With his cousin Kaidu (Rick Yune) challenging him for the Khan-ship -- through an official all hands vote called the Kurultai -- Kublai finds himself being betrayed from behind his own walls - a conspirator in the form of his conquered "son" Ahmad (Mahesh Jadu), which was the seditious swerve that hit us right at the tail end of Season 1.
Still not a great series, Marco Polo continued to impress with its grandeur and scope and the production levels are still a big notch in the plus column. Sweeping grasslands, hugely populated bazaars and cities, and hair-raising fight sequences immediately help draw you into a world not commonly showcased on TV or in movies. The topics and cultures shown here are not ones not readily told and the more this series continues the more if feels like the Marco Polo character was a trojan horse meant to draw us into the complex world of ancient Chinese and Mongolian history, designed to be an initial decoy and then get pushed off to the side.
Looking back, a lot of the first season was dosed out to us through Polo's eyes. He was our surrogate - and a big reason the first 10 episodes had issues. That's no longer required. We can watch the series without his presence, his reactions, or judgement. That's not to say the first three episodes don't focus somewhat on re-establishing Kublai's relationship with Polo, but after that Polo is free to more or less drift while characters like Prince Jingim (Remy Hill), Byamba (Uli Latukefu), Khutulun (Claudia Kim) and more take the reins and drive the story on their own.
Rick Yune finds himself in a much more elevated role this year as Kaidu's challenging of Kublai's authority forms the spine of the season, as does Kaidu's own crumbling morals as his noble intentions quickly dissolve into desperate and regrettable measures. Because as Kublai finds himself sabotaged on several fronts, Kaidu's soul begins to darken thanks to the bitter agenda of his own scheming mother (Jacqueline Chan).
Meanwhile Joan Chen's Chabi, Kublai's loyal and resolute wife, focuses her energies on procuring the Khan an heir. In fact, the first episode back - "Hunter and the Sable Weaver" - does a good job of setting up the primary themes of the season as it not only features the marriage of panicking pretender Kukachin to Prince Jingim, but also a flashback showing Genghis favoring Kaidu over Kublai during an attack that features ten thousand flaming swallows soaring over a walled city.
The most noteworthy newcomer this year is Michelle Yeoh's Lotus - a fierce and fighting part of the Song Dynasty's underground rebellion and a character who figures heavily into the backstory of Tom Wu's Hundred Eyes. And fans who were excited to see Yeoh on the final season of Strike Back but were then perhaps let down by her lack of fight scenes won't be disappointed here as Lotus takes on just about everyone in her singular, savage crusade.
Also new to the scene is Ron Yuan's Nayan, Kublai's Christian uncle who figures heavily into the Khan feud as well as the curious storyline with Pope Gregory X (Gabriel Byrne) - an angle that looks like it may be explored even further next season. Nayan unwittingly joins Ahmad's motley crew of betrayers and plotters as the Vice Regent attempts to secretly strike at Kublai from all sides. And Ahmad himself, though the villain of the season, still gets gets rounded out and further explored as a character so that the audience can more understand his motives for trying to stage a coup-de-Khan.
Zhu Zhu as Kokachin.
Despite Season 2's admirable attempts to improve things, Marco Polo still remains a somewhat standard series and things play out as expected for the most part, with no real surprises - and, again, if there are big moments of drama, key scenes that really grip you, you can bet they don't involve Polo. They involve Kublai, Chabi, Mei Lin, Kokachin, Jingim, or any of the other more interesting characters, who've almost all become more engaging since last season.
In closing, and this is a random point, I re-read my review of Marco Polo: Season 1 before writing this and saw that I mentioned the show's opening credits theme getting stuck in my head. I then thought to myself, "How good could it have been when I don't even remember the tune now?" Well, it's stuck in my head again. It's a damn fine piece by Daniele Luppi.
The Verdict
Marco Polo returned to us with a clearer focus on Kublai Khan and his court, relying less on the Polo character to act as our surrogate or gateway into the world. And the series improved because of it. Still, quite often the scenery, scope, and score impressed more than the actual story which is, overall, a fairly standard power struggle saga.
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