Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Tourist’ Season 2 On Netflix, Where Jamie Dornan’s Amnesia-Riddled Character Returns Home To Ireland

The first season of The Tourist surprised us with a sense of humor that paired well with a character study about a person who lost his memory but knows he did bad things in his life, just by the fact that there are lots of people who want to see him dead. Season 2 takes the show out of the heat of Australia and to the chill of Ireland, where Jamie Dornan’s nameless character is from.

THE TOURIST SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: On a train, an officer sees smoke coming out of one of the sleeper cabins.

The Gist: When the officer knocks, a bearded man (Jamie Dornan) opens. He’s in there with his girlfriend, Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), enjoying a little weed. After escaping the people who have been after him in Australia, Helen and the man she calls “Elliot” — when they met in Australia, his memory was in tatters and he has no idea who he was or why people are after him — have been taking a train through Asia.

In their moment of bliss, Helen gives Elliot a letter addressed to an “Elliot Stanley” that was sent to the police station where she worked as he was recovering from the accident that robbed him of his memory. It’s from Ireland, and the letter included a picture of Elliot and a man named Tommy from when both were younger. “Maybe it’s time you find out who you really are,” she says to him.

The next time we see the couple, they’re beside a lake in Ireland; Elliot has agreed to meet Tommy at that location. After an awkward encounter with a stranger who wasn’t Tommy, Helen tells him that maybe he should shave down his massive beard to help Tommy recognize him. He walks back to the bathroom and does just that; that’s when three people in masks walk into the bathroom and grab him. He puts up a fight, but they manage to subdue him and throw him in the back of a van.

As The Pretenders play in the van, Elliot figures out how to free himself via some broken whiskey bottles and busts his way out of the back. The van chases him through fields and hills, and just when Elliot thinks he’s lost them, they catch up to him and grab him again.

A worried Helen finds the mess in the men’s room and calls the police, and a Guarda detective named Ruairi Slater (Conor MacNeill) responds — after having a crying jag in the station’s bathroom where he throws his wedding ring in the toilet. He seems intrigued by Helen and is disappointed when she’s reporting that her boyfriend is missing. Her police-trained instincts lead her to tell him what she thinks happened. They find the broken whiskey bottles on the road leading away from the lake.

At the police station, an older woman meets with Detective Slater; it turns out that the woman, Nimah Cassidy (Olwen Fouéré) is Elliot’s mother. She received a picture of an unconscious Elliot from the people who grabbed him; Helen introduces herself to Nimah and tells her about Elliot’s amnesia. When Nimah sees the picture of the broken whiskey bottles, the label gives her a clue as to where he might be.

Elliot comes to and finds out that the people who captured him — Donal McDonnell (Diarmaid Murtagh), and his siblings Orla (Nessa Matthews) and Fergal (Mark McKenna) — know him and want revenge for what he’s done. Of course, Elliot has no idea what that is, and Donal won’t tell him. Elliot’s resourcefulness helps him escape, but as Orla tells a mystery person on the phone, he has nowhere to go.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? When the first season of The Tourist streamed on its previous home at Max, we said it reminded us of a combination of Memento and Fargo. We’ll stick with that.

Our Take: It’s interesting that the second-season story that Harry and Jack Williams have written for The Tourist has strong connections back to the first-season happenings in Australia, but is more than accessible for people coming to the show for the first time. That’s due to Elliot’s memory loss. Yes, knowing how he and Helen became a couple would be helpful — he did kidnap her back in Australia, after all! — but it does seem like the Williams brothers are structuring Season 2 as its own story, with its own quirkiness.

The saving grace of The Tourist has been its sense of humor, which is more up front this season than it was at the beginning of the first season. It’s there because otherwise the story of Elliot trying to piece his life together would be awfully grim to watch. We know he’s done some bad stuff in his life, and Elliot knows that too, even if he doesn’t know what that bad stuff was. He seems like he’s turned the other cheek with his memory being wiped, but he also still has the skills that helped him do that bad stuff.

The show’s humor comes from the fact that Elliot’s current persona is so divergent from the bad guy he once was, but it’s also because the people whom he used to associate with aren’t exactly master criminals. At one point, the McDonnells communicate with Elliot via a baby monitor with dolphin stickers on it, for instance. And Elliot has no problem laughing at the people who torment him, joking about Donal McDonnell’s rhyming name by saying “that would be like my name being Elliot McElliot.”

But there are also moments when the show means business, like when Niamh goes to the distillery run by the family that captured Elliot. Helen follows her there, and sees that Nimah isn’t exactly a kindly old lady missing her son. How that affects how Helen goes about looking for Elliot should be interesting to watch. We’re still charmed by Macdonald as Helen, especially now that she’s found herself and her purpose. It seems that her former fiancé, Ethan (Greg Larsen), hasn’t given up on them, but we like seeing her character in a better place with Elliot, even if that place is much more dangerous.

What we wonder is if the second season is going to collapse under its quirkiness. Detective Slater’s home life is, um, a bit complicated, strange and depressing, to say the least. And we’re not sure if throwing Ethan back into the mix, even if he somehow gets tangled up with the people chasing after Elliot, is the best idea, either. But there’s more than enough good stuff going on in Season 2 to override those concerns, at least for right now.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After a diving “accident”, a woman goes into a phone booth, makes a call and says “Elliot Stanley’s dead.”

Sleeper Star: Despite some of the reservations we may have about his backstory, we do like Conor MacNeill as the awkward, lovelorn Detective Slater.

Most Pilot-y Line: Ethan talks to a fellow bowler about his trying to apologize to Helen during a public “Ned Talk” while bowling gutter balls. That’s a funny scene but feels quite unnecessary, given what’s going on in Ireland.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Tourist continues to be an interesting story about a man running from a past he has no idea about, with quirky characters and funny moments to go along with the action and character drama.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.