Taken season 2 premiere review: Does NBC’s action series still deliver?

The road to Taken season 2 was a spotty one in some ways. The show revamped its entire cast moving into the new season save for Jennifer Beals and Clive Standen, and to go along with that the show was delayed to cultivate the story after new showrunner Greg Plageman took over.

So how did season 2 pick up? For starters, we got a reminder of the bond that is there between Bryan Mills and Christina Hart. Even though Bryan started off the season imprisoned, as the episode went along we saw Christina do everything that she could in order to rescue him. She hired a new team including Santana (Jessica Camacho from The Flash), and made it very clear that she had intentions far beyond just busting Bryan out. She knew the value that he held to the country and to her new investigative team, one designed to fill some of the cracks left behind elsewhere.

Obviously, it was zero surprise at all that in the closing minutes of the episode, a newly-shaven Bryan (he had a chance to clean up after spending most of the hiatus locked away) decided that he was ready to fight alongside her — but in a different way than last season, one in which he could operate under more of his own rules. Bryan had an opportunity to take more control, and hopefully is setting himself up for a little more of a stable future than he had in season 1 — though to be fair, we’re not sure how it’s even possible to have a stable future when you think about some of what he does for a living.

We know that Taken viewers are probably watching for one thing just as much as the story, and that’s the action. This premiere delivered in spades!! You had fist-fights, car chases, and explosions, and we like to think of this almost as the holy trinity for craziness with this show. Taken did a great job of delivering on every thing that we could have wanted from it for a premiere — it established the new cast, what the next chapter of the story will be with Bryan and Christina working together, and also how intense some of the action is going to be. As expected, Clive Standen remains perfect in the Bryan role (but we do still miss him as Rollo on Vikings as well – can we just clone him please?).

Final Verdict

Do we miss some of the old cast members? Sure, but clearly Taken felt like it had a new iteration of the story to tell. We have a lot of faith in Plageman, an established producer from Person of Interest, to be able to deliver what fans of the movie franchise expect — of course we want to see Bryan Mills kick butt and take names, but there should also be more than that. We have to see what drives Bryan Mills and work a little ways into his soul. The Taken season 2 premiere offered that, and this has us all the more excited for what could be coming up the rest of the way.

Related – Preview what’s coming on Taken next week

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