Quickfire round: Trinkets (Season 2)

Much worse than the first one, this final season of the show about an unlikely trio of friends who bond over court-mandated visits to Shoplifters Anonymous was full of terrible writing and sketchy plots. Still, the cast are amazing and the finale was strong.

At the start of the season, the trio walk into school together for the first time.

Trinkets is essentially a story of friendship. Three characters from school (Tabitha, the rich and popular one, Moe, the smart but scatty one, and Elodie, the shy newbie) bump into each other at a meeting of Shoplifters Anonymous. The story is funny but quite emotional – it’s clear that Elodie shoplifts because she misses her recently deceased mother, and Tabitha because her parents are divorced and her boyfriend is physically abusing her. As for Moe, well, that one’s quite the spoiler.

The show’s first season was really quite good. The trio break down the barriers of social interaction between different groups of people in high school and form an unlikely – and mostly secretive – bond. They even get matching tattoos (of a triangle, no less). They help each other overcome their problems of relationships or abuse or loneliness, with plenty of shoplifting along the way.

It all ended with Elodie running away from home to join a singer on tour whom she was clearly enamoured with. The problem with that ending is that they needed her to come back for the second season, so her position gets abruptly reversed. That’s the problem here – many scenes in the show are just… weird. In some scenes, characters make a big deal out of nothing, while other scenes there seems to be a set up for bigger drama down the road only for that story arc to fizzle out into nothing.

The cast make the most of the bad writing and you do feel invested in the characters themselves, it’s just a shame that the shoddy writing cuts through and is more noticeable than in other shows I have seen this year, and certainly more so than in the previous season.

So, although I was ultimately enough of a fan to binge the second season, I can’t say I particularly recommend Trinkets to anyone who doesn’t feel immediately captivated by the synopsis.

366w