Welcome to The Afterparty season two, Vulture readers! Or should we call it the Afterparty After-Party? Hmmm, we’ll workshop that. Anyway, Apple TV+’s genre-bending murder-mystery comedy series is back for round two and kicking things off with the aptly named season-two premiere: “Aniq 2: The Sequel.â€
If you haven’t seen season one of The Afterparty, the show is not here to hold your hand through the second season’s premiere by connecting many of the season-to-season holdover dots for you. It’s worth going back to watch it if you missed it and somehow decided to start season two anyway and now find yourself confused. But really — the salient details you need to know going into season two are these: Aniq (Sam Richardson) and Zoë (Zoë Chao) went to high school together, and at the after-party of their high-school reunion, a former classmate–current pop star named Xavier (Dave Franco) was murdered, and Aniq (who designs escape rooms for a living) was instrumental in helping Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) solve the murder. Also, Aniq had a crush on Zoë in high school, and they reconnected romantically at that murderous reunion after-party.
Also, each episode of this show is stylized as a different film genre (this is because Danner refers to people’s statements about the events of the evening as their “mind moviesâ€). Hence the season-two premiere, which is presented as Aniq’s rom-com-ish sequel, continues his and Zoë’s love story but also catches us and No-Longer-Detective Danner up on the latest murder that Aniq finds himself adjacent to: Zoë’s sister Grace’s (Poppy Liu) groom, Edgar (Zach Woods), on their wedding night. Edgar was seemingly poisoned, and it appears as though whoever came for him accidentally got a two-for-one murder deal: His pet lizard, Roxana, is also dead. Aniq points out to Zoë that Edgar shares everything with Roxana, so he likely drank/ate whatever was poisoned and shared it with Roxana. Was this by design by the murderer or an accidental double killing? We shall see!
Much like a rom-com sequel, this episode of The Afterparty does not quite capture the magic of the original. But I have hope for the season as a whole. There’s necessarily a lot of setup going on here, introducing and catching us up with all the characters and the whole murder thing. Since this episode is mostly about getting us (and Danner) situated, plus showing us the many ways Aniq’s rom-com is a comedy of errors, just for this first episode, let’s recap by running down all the characters as well as what we know about them — and how suspicious they seem — so far:
Aniq: Our trusted entry point into this story, wholesome escape-room designer, and often awkward star of his own rom-com. He and Zoë seem happy one year into coupledom (they take turns giving each other shoulder massages and it’s so cute!), and we know he wants to use Zoë’s sister’s wedding weekend — his first time meeting Zoë’s parents — to get their blessing to propose to Zoë … and maybe propose to Zoë? The show seems to forget which one he wants to do at various points, but proposing to the maid of honor at a wedding seems like a kind of dickish and un-Aniq-like move. Regardless, impressing the parents is not going super-well for Aniq: He picks up the wrong group of Chinese and Korean visitors at the hotel, accidentally crashes his car into Feng’s food truck, spits camel milk all over Vivian, and more. He’s also repeatedly subjected to the wealthy white family members at this wedding insinuating he uses drugs and stole Isabel’s purse, which WTF? Poor Aniq.
Zoë: Maid of Honor, Grace’s sister. She is concerned that her sister doesn’t want to go through with the wedding and isn’t happy, but she could also be projecting her own experience with her first marriage (to Ike Barinholtz’s Brett) onto her sister and Edgar. She told Grace not to marry Edgar right before the wedding ceremony, leading to a fight between the sisters. She is very protective of Grace and wants to clear her name of murder ASAP.
Grace: The bride! And now widow. She loves antiques and “unnecessary knitting.†She seems kind and quirky and is the one to find her dead husband the morning after the wedding, which is awful.
Edgar: The murdered groom. An eccentric Silicon Valley megawealthy nerd with a pet lizard that travels the world on Edgar’s shoulder. He is shy in front of crowds and often awkwardly says out loud exactly what he’s thinking, but he has a sweet bond with Aniq when they geek out about the fact that white chocolate (“The Bernie Madoff of dessertsâ€) does not actually contain any cacao and therefore is not technically chocolate.
Feng (Ken Jeong): Grace and Zoë’s dad, a.k.a. the King of Bing. He runs a Taiwanese shaved-ice company with a social-media intern named Kyler. He and his wife did not like Brett, Zoë’s ex-husband, and so far Feng doesn’t seem all that impressed with Aniq, either.
Vivian (Vivian Wu): Grace and Zoë’s mom. She doesn’t get much to do in the first episode but also hated Brett and seems not-totally-enamored with Aniq.
Isabel (Elizabeth Perkins): Edgar and Hannah’s mother. An extremely eccentric, cold, and rude wealthy woman who thinks Grace poisoned her son and is friendly with the local sheriff but, after whispering with Sebastian, decides to hold off on calling the authorities until some business-y things are tied up with regard to Edgar’s death. She’s one to watch, for sure.
Hannah (Anna Konkle): Edgar’s adopted sister, the “adopted†part being important for her to state whenever she’s introduced. She designed the floral arrangements at the rehearsal dinner and seems like an odd duck.
Sebastian (Jack Whitehall): Edgar’s English “business partner†in an as-yet-unexplained way. Clearly hates Roxana the lizard and for sure knows where all of Edgar’s crypto keys are stored and how much they’re worth. He seems too smooth and charming to be true.
Travis (Paul Walter Hauser): Grace’s ex-boyfriend who dresses and acts like an old-school gumshoe and is a Reddit true-crime guy. Earlier in the weekend, he told Aniq they needed to “save†Grace.
“Funcle†Ulysses (John Cho): Grace and Zoë’s long-lost fun uncle (a.k.a. funcle), brother of Feng’s. He enters the rehearsal dinner on a white horse and tries to get Grace and Edgar to drink camel milk. Grace and Zoë seem to adore him, but he had been absent from their lives for a long time — until Edgar tracked him down as a wedding gift to Grace. Aniq sees Ulysses, Feng, and Vivian fighting the night before the wedding.
Danner: The former detective who solved Xavier’s murder in season one. Good at collecting everyone’s stories/witness statements to look for clues. She quit the force to write a book about the Xavier case, though it doesn’t seem like she’s getting much writing done. She has a soft spot for Aniq and is a major Aniq-Zoë shipper. She even brought Aniq some nuggets from her drive-through stop while she was driving to the wedding venue!
Roxana: Edgar’s beloved pet lizard. Loves white chocolate. RIP, Roxana.
Since every episode presents a different character’s perspective, it’s possible and likely that information will twist and things that seem to be true in one episode will be invalidated in the next. Even Aniq reveals himself as a not-totally-reliable narrator at the end of the episode, when he tells Danner he saw Grace put something in Edgar’s drink before the wedding’s after-party. Who and what seems suspicious to you all so far? It’s early days, but my Scooby-Doo antennae are tingling whenever Sebastian appears onscreen. I’m no reptile fan myself, but he seems to have a visceral hatred for Roxana … and he doesn’t seem to like his own business partner, Edgar, that much either.
Clues, Clues, Clues
• Okay, this isn’t really a section just for clues; it’s for fun extras! Starting with … Why are the murdered guys on The Afterparty always the funniest? Franco’s Xavier was hilarious in season one, and Woods gets some of the best lines and has such good comedic delivery in this season-two premiere.
• It’s hard to pick Edgar’s best line, but I think the winner is this, which he yells drunkenly when being escorted out of the after-party by Grace: “The world will little note nor remember what we say here … Lincoln … READ A BOOK!â€
• And speaking of … despite all the setup in this episode, I spy some promising comedic performances waiting on the horizon. I can’t wait to see what these cast members do with their allotted “mind movie†episodes.
• It’s really cute that Aniq and Zoë are still together and so happy and that he wants to propose. Fingers crossed nothing comes out over the course of this murder investigation to mess that up. I’m a little bit afraid that their pinky swear to have a “fun and relaxing†weekend jinxed everything.
• Let me know who you think might have murdered Edgar (and Roxana) in the comments, and thanks for joining me on this recap journey!