"I want to fuck a priest": Fleabag Season 2 Review

Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) in her iconic jumpsuit. Amazon Video

A sequel can ruin the beauty of the original. Follow-ups can dilute the creativity, seem messy, or hastily scraped together in order to gain more views or more money. After the success of their first season plus Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s rise to fame, I feared Fleabag’s second season would suffer a similar fate.

Season One, comprising six short episodes, follows Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) a young woman living in London desperately trying to find her way after losing her best friend and her mother. Uncomfortable and vulnerable describe Fleabag’s struggle to connect with her estranged family members, keep a business afloat, and navigate grief. I finished the season content with the story and surprised by the character development. Then I started Season Two, anxious for a wonderfully written piece plummeting into a bad sequel.

That did not happen.

The second season exists as its own entity. It remains messier than the first, a feat I thought impossible. Rumpled. Witty. Heartbreaking. The second season of Fleabag delivers everything a sequel ought to. It possesses a story of its own, building on the characters we left in Season One.

The opening image reveals a year passed since we last made eye contact with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. This season Fleabag’s business flourishes with regular customers. She eats avocado toast. She seems well, making this a very different Fleabag compared to last season. United in a very awkward relationship, her passive-aggressive Godmother (Olivia Colman) and her simply passive father (Bill Patterson) create an incredibly uncomfortable family dynamic. Accompanied by Fleabag’s stoic elder sister Claire (Sian Clifford) and her sister’s disgusting oaf of a husband (Brett Gelman) family dinners remain incredibly painful for us to watch.

Funnily enough, we pick up at a tense family dinner. Our ragtag cast of characters sit at a restaurant table while Godmother and Father announce their upcoming wedding, much to the dismay of the sisters. Speaking of, Fleabag and her sister haven’t spoken for a year because Claire’s husband claims Fleabag attempted to kiss him (she didn’t). While side glances get thrown between bites of food, a very diligent waitress runs back and forth, desperate to appease the family by constantly trying to fill their water cups. The scene acts like a dance done by toddlers where toes remain constantly stepped on. Fleabag’s jokes are interrupted by Godmother so she may gain control of the room’s attention, something she never lets her future daughter-in-law have. Not soon into dinner, Claire runs to the bathroom only to discover she has miscarried. This scene acts as a perfect example of the dark humor present in Fleabag. The sisters fight about whether to send Claire to the hospital. Claire, ever stoic, says no while Fleabag begs her to reconsider. This tender moment brings the sisters together after a year of radio silence as they decide to drive to see a doctor. The comedy comes in when Fleabag announces to the table that they’re leaving and, needing an excuse, she claims she miscarried.

A new face joins them in this mess, the priest officiating the imminent nuptials.

“I want to fuck a priest,” Fleabag confesses.

Now, this admission might seem shocking if it transpired in another show, but it fits right in with the mayhem of Fleabag.

Enter Sherlock’s, Andrew Scott, clad in clerical collar.​​

The Priest’s character plays a huge part in this season. The opening scene of the show pictures Fleabag standing over a sink tending to a bloody nose. She turns to the camera and says “This is a love story.” She perfectly sets the tone for this season with a simple sentence. Last season focused on Fleabag’s growth and grief. This season focuses on her finding love, both with the hot new priest and for herself.

To counteract her loneliness, Fleabag has lots of sex. A long line of bad lovers make up Fleabag’s dating history, filled with men who don’t truly see her. Yet, at the beginning of Season Two, she decides to stop. Of course, all of that goes up in flames when she finds herself pulled in by The Priest and vice versa. Fleabag, a sexually liberated character, falls in love with a man sworn to celibacy. Despite his faith, he finds himself pulled in just the same. From him, she wants more than sex, although they do have that as well. For the first time, she finds herself seen by someone. This creates quite a messy love triangle between Fleabag, The Priest, and God Himself.

We experience this mayhem firsthand, unlike many shows. Through multiple fourth wall breaks, Fleabag addresses the audience, her “only friends” as she refers to us in her therapy session slash birthday present from her Father. This choice makes Fleabag so definitely quirky. Deliveries to the audience allow us to look into her mind, to gain an intimate perspective on her thoughts. We know her better than her family, better than anyone she shares the screen with. She calls to us, addressing the audience as “you.” Aware that we watch her, we share in Fleabag’s sadness and pain. It creates intimacy, this knowledge, something Fleabag longs for.

The Priest exists as the only character to notice Fleabag speaking to us, a part of what makes their chemistry so amazing. She finally meets her match, someone who also speaks to an invisible person. Throughout the entire first season, no one can tell when she floats away to wink to the camera, but The Priest does. Maybe his relationship to God allows him the ability to see when she speaks to us, her own kind of prayer. He even looks to the camera himself, following her eyeline as she turns over her shoulder. He truly knows her. He pays so much attention that he sees where she “goes off to.”

And wherever Fleabag goes, intense emotion follows. Fleabag scrapes you raw. A big part of this comes from the writing. This show explores each character’s pain while being gut-wrenchingly funny. Grief holds hands with humor. Love walks with loneliness. You follow these characters through the lowest moments of their lives. You look upon affairs and broken marriages. You see what Fleabag hates most about herself. Complex and flawed, Fleabag craves what all of us want, connection. Fleabag feels utterly alone. No one truly understands her dry humor, but this doesn’t stop her from telling jokes. Her Godmother, Father, and Sister view her as a problem that needs solving, but something they can only spend so much energy on.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays this incredibly complicated and flawed character so well. She lingers in the uncomfortable. Fleabag steals from her family. She lies comfortably and regularly. She makes mistakes. Her flaws make her real. We see the worst of ourselves reflected in her. We empathize with the dislike Fleabag holds for herself because of her past mistakes. We remember our own strained relations with our fathers and mothers. Our loneliness seeps through the screen to look directly at us.

Fleabag gets right at the core of adult living. Fleabag tries to navigate life while attempting to make friends at her bakery. She desperately hopes to impress her family and feel seen. Fleabag shows us that despite our past mistakes, we are still worthy. This sequel left me impressed. We saw Fleabag and she saw us. Yet at the same time, we crave more, which could be why this sequel worked so well. In one scene, a businesswoman named Belinda (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells Fleabag that: To try to avoid pain is to exclude everything that comes with it: kindness, consolation, love. Few shows allow both pain and happiness to grow alongside each other in the way Fleabag does and fewer do it well. This second season concludes the story. Her relationship with The Priest ends in a way that crushed my heart, but as she stands up from the bus stop to walk home alone her relationship with us comes to a close. Fleabag turns to face the camera as she has throughout the show, but this time she instructs us to wait, to not follow. We watch as she wanders away, leaving the comfort and friendship of our presence behind. Her days of turning to an invisible friend comes to a close.