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'Atiye' aka 'The Gift' Season 2 Review: Netflix's Turkish original delivers another exciting round of stories

It is easy to make the first season of a show exciting, to invoke the same kind of excitement in the show's second season is a difficult task

Spoiler Alert for 'Atiye' aka 'The Gift' Season 2

When it comes to international original series, Netflix does pretty well. Take its German original 'Dark' for instance. The supernatural drama blew away viewers with three seasons, each growing more complicated than the last. But that's not what we are here to talk about. Netflix's second Turkish original 'Atiye' aka 'The Gift' is somewhat similar to 'Dark' in that there are multiple dimensions involved. But hey, at least there's no incest involved.

It is easy to make the first season of a show exciting — the concept within the show is new, the characters are new as are their dynamics. To invoke the same kind of excitement in the show's second season is a difficult task — and 'The Gift' manages to do that. By the end of the first season, the lead character Atiye (Beren Saat) made the choice to use her powers to bring her sister Cansu (Melisa Senolsun) back. In doing so, Atiye transported herself to another dimension, one in which she was never born because her parents never met. There are other things different in the universe as well.

However, the most exceptional thing 'The Gift' has done with the second season is to humanize Serdar (Tim Seyfi), Ozan's (Metin Akdulger) father who was hellbent on getting Atiye to open the door in the first season, often resorting to degradation, humiliation, and physical abuse of his son to get what he wanted. Let's not forget that it was Serdar who killed Cansu as well. The second season gives us more Serdar content and we begin to understand why he did what he did. Besides showing him as the power-hungry, cold father that we have known him to be — we learn that Serdar did many of the things he did to bring a dead loved one back. 

This is not to say that we are led to completely sympathize with Serdar. He still does cruel things and manipulates the people around him until the very end. Another character that was similarly one-dimensional in the first season is also fleshed out here. Hannah (Hazal Turesan) plays a much bigger role in the current season.

Of all the characters, it is Ozan who is the most complicated. After the first season, we did not know whether to hate him or sympathize with him and it is more or less the same in the new set of episodes. While his screentime is reduced from the previous season, how the second season ends sets up a large role for him in Season 3. We still cannot make up our minds whether he is truly evil or not, but we are certainly curious to see where his story ends.

There were questionable elements in the second season — with the mythology stating that "man and woman" need to come together to save the Earth. This is especially disturbing when such content comes from a country where the LGBT community faces discrimination and reduced political protection. Another thing that bothered us is Atiye being told that she was going to be what she was always meant to be when her child is being born. Similarly, we learn Elif (Cansu in the new world) is pregnant as well. Again, in a country that has made international news for femicide, when a show depicts women as mostly liberated but then being made either a villain (Hannah) or reduced to what conservative countries think women are for, it leaves a sour taste. 

'Atiye'/'The Gift' Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.