The second and final season of Legend of the Seeker picks up immediately where season one left off. The Seeker (Craig Horner) has saved the day, but in doing so he’s created a potentially bigger problem for the world, opening a rift to the underworld and allowing the Keeper to gain a foothold in the land of the living.
Season two of Legend of the Seeker started out a little bit slower than was probably good for it, and may have been one of the contributing factors in the demise of the series. It wasn’t that the action wasn’t there, it was, and the special effects were there too, the storyline just seemed to get a meandering start and it went on to make a few detours along the way.
When I watched the first season of Legend of the Seeker I hadn’t read Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series, but I made the point of reading them during the off season and I highly recommend the entire series to anyone who hasn’t read them, whether you’re a fan of the show or not. The Legend of the Seeker was founded on some extremely good storytelling, and the series brought Goodkind on as a writer. That plus the backing of producers like Kenneth Biller and Sam Raimi should have been enough to ensure it some measure of success.
Where then did it go wrong? There were definitely some very well done episodes this season, and a fair number of guest appearances including John Rhys-Davies, Jolene Blalock, and Emily Foxler, and while I have to admit I had a hard time taking Charisma Carpenter seriously as a Mord'Sith, that wasn’t its downfall. The biggest downfall of the franchise seemed to be its inability to take itself seriously enough. While I agree that every series needs some comic relief, entire episodes of nothing but silliness and almost deliberately bad acting, were ultimately what led to doom.
Having said all of that, the series was far from unredeemable, especially for fans of the books, and the last two disks of the season made watching through the silliness worth it. In the end they managed to wrap the whole series up with a cathartic ending that incorporated most of what I think fans of the books would have wanted to see. It’s a shame the fledgling series didn’t get a chance to mature into the epic it could have become with time and refinement.
ComicsOnline gives the Legend of the Seeker, the second and final season, three Rada’Han’s out of five.
Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
- Actors:Craig Horner, Bruce Spence, Craig Parker
- Region:Region 1 (U.S.and Canada only.Read more about DVD formats.)
- Number of discs:5
- Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
- Studio:ABC Studios
- DVD Release Date:September 28, 2010
- Run Time:946 minutes
