Siren Season 2 Episode 5 Recap & Review

Moving The Pieces

After several episodes of dramatic mermaid action, Siren slows down this week for a character-building exercise and a brief look ahead at what’s to come in this teen drama. While the theme around ocean pollution continues to be the dominating point for most of the issues this series, it’s the complicated, developing character relationships that really stand out here.

We begin the episode right where we left off from before. Ryn, Ben and Maddie all share a bed together during a brief musical montage. Ryn abruptly exclaims she wants to make love with them both midway through kissing but before anyone can really digest this news, she learns one of the mermaids has gone on the war path. Desperate to find her, Ryn follows in pursuit to find out what’s going on.

As the various mermaids begin to rebel against Ryn’s rule, we catch up with various different mermaids this week all trying desperately to get back to the ocean where they belong. Unfortunately that isn’t going to be an easy fix as Ben soon finds out. It turns out the ship has found oil deep on the ocean floor. This inevitably means the end date of 8 months is wildly out of proportion and with drills being brought in, it’s unknown when the mermaids can return to the water.

We return to Ryn as she catches up with the mermaid who ran off. It turns out she’s simply mourning her mother after she passed away at the end of last season. After visiting her grave together, Ryn is powerless to stop the grief this mermaid is experiencing and she runs off, lusting for revenge over who was responsible. 

While Ben and Levi decide on the next course of action, Xander appears and poses an idea to Ben that may help them get rid of the tanker. As they put their plan into action, Maddie visits her Mum who’s clearly torn up after falling back into old ways and taking drugs. After introducing her to Ryn, Maddie’s Mum realizes she’s left her ring at a hotel room and Maddie, being the ever helpful daughter, decides to go find it, unbeknownst to her the dangers that lie in wait.

For the most part, this episode doesn’t feature much in the way of development. With 16 episodes this time around, thus far this season things haven’t quite matched up to the first. A lot of what we’ve seen this has been an act of repetition as the mermaids mirror Ryn’s journey in learning the ways of humans but I’m sure that will change going forward.

Given the more complicated character relationships developing here and the drama that looks set to kick off down the line, it’ll be interesting to see where Siren goes from here. In the meantime, this episode serves as little more than light characterization. Hopefully things pick up next week but for now, Siren’s fifth episode happily bobs along in the water waiting for the next sonic blast to really kick things into gear.