Hanna – Safe

By: Kelly Kearney

The teenage assassin is back in the second installment of Amazon’s break out hit and things are much different for Hanna this time around. After losing her father at the end of Season One we see Hanna flee back to the forest with her new friend Clara, a fellow assassin she rescued from Utrax. With everyone tracking Clara down, Hanna has to use the skills her father, Erik Heller, taught her to try and keep her new friend safe. Utrax is in Hanna’s crosshairs and with the help of a surprising ally she might just destroy the very thing that created her.

Bukovina Forest, Romania

After burying her father in a shallow grave Hanna (Esmé Creed-Miles), along with her new friend 249 A/K/A Clara, head back to the safety of the Romanian forest were Erik Heller (Joel Kinnaman) raised her. The forest is dense and for the most part the two teen girls are isolated from the world outside. That is until they spot a drone flying above them surveying the area. They manage to duck and cover with Clara (Yasmin Monet Prince) hiding under a rock overhang and Hanna holding her breath under water until the threat passes them by.

Next we head to an unidentified location in Ireland where we see a bus full of trainees from Utrax headed towards their new home; a boarding school called The Meadows. Everyone but Hanna and Clara are welcomed to the new phase of their training and The Meadows is a far cry from the last sterile compound they were living in. Here the rules are relaxed, the sedatives forced on each trainee will be reduced and each girl will be given a new life complete with an identity and a family. It is something these girls never had, but is needed if they plan to live in the real world.

Speaking of sterile accommodations, we catch up with Marissa Wiegler (Mireille Enos) at Utrax’s infirmary where she seems to be hiding more than an injured leg a wound that she claims came from Heller’s gun right before he took off with her daughter and another trainee. Stretching her sore muscles, the red head’s leg is healing but the reality of the horrors she unleashed at Utrax still lingers. Moments later she’s met by John Carmichael, (Dermot Mulroney) a high level operative that has been given the mission of finding Hanna and Clara. He explains that the trainees are part of a government experiment to build a type of super soldier capable of becoming an unsuspecting human weapon. According to John the children were enhanced with wolf DNA at the early stages of their embryonic development. This genetic witches’ brew resulted in denser bones, stronger muscles and a reduced susceptibility to disease. They are superhuman and more dangerous than any weapon we’ve seen before. He goes on to explain that after Erik blew the lid off of their experiment Utrax was shut down long enough to come up with a synthetic DNA alternative. Within a year the embryo trials were up and running again. These super assassins are also genetically unable to disobey Utrax’s orders. They are ticking time bombs that John hopes can one day acclimate to normal society until the day the government needs them to kill. “Who’s gonna suspect an 18-year old freshman in pigtails of state-sponsored murder,’ he asks, and it speaks to the scope of this project. Create killers but keep the government’s hands clean when they go on their state-sponsored rampages. Now he needs Marissa and new CIA recruit Terri (Cherrelle Skeete) to help him figure out what went wrong with Clara and how she was able to ignore her training and take off with Hanna. She’s a glitch in what Utrax thought was a perfect system and if word gets out about their rogue assassins it could mean funding problems for the entire program. Since Marissa knows Hanna best, John thinks she can help lead him to the girls. This is something Marissa thinks will not be easy unless Hanna makes a mistake and it’s unlikely she will make the same one twice. They last caught up with her when the boredom of life sparked her interest in what existed beyond the forest. Now their only hope is that Clara will offer them up a clue when her life in the run becomes equally unsatisfying.

Family Ties That Bind

What led Hanna out of the woods with her father is the exact thing that 249 Clara is dealing with now. The need to find a connection with her mother. When Hanna broke Clara out of Utrax she gained her trust by revealing the truth about her mother stored in the facility’s computer files. None of the trainees were aware of where they came from and were fed lies alongside their daily meds and brainwashing. Once Clara saw that there was someone out in the real world called “Mother” it was enough to leave the facility, the home she’s only known, for a life in the woods with Hanna. Secretly, her main goal is to find that mother-daughter connection she’s been missing and that’s cemented in her mind when she and Hanna go foraging for supplies. The two girls break into a cabin on the edge of the forest and when Clara spots a family photo of a two strangers who appear to be mother and daughter she steals it as a reminder of what awaits her out in the world. Hanna becomes her keeper in the way her father protected her all those years. Now, there is just one problem (like Hanna from Season One) – Clara isn’t afraid of the risks, not if they mean staying hidden away from the woman who gave birth to her.

Clara isn’t the only one with knowledge of their birth parents existence. Trainee Sandi (Áine Rose Daly) saw Hanna show Clara the files and now is aware of the fact Utrax lied about their pasts. The fact they all had mothers sticks with the blonde teen and somehow that truth manifests into a desire to make her time at The Meadows fill emotional and familial holes. Now, Sandi and the other trainees at The Meadows are handed a new life chocked full of manufactured family members and fake social media friends, all created by new agent Terri. Around the clock and strictly through messages and texts Terri interacts with each trainee, building their new identities and dragging them deeper into their fake world. Sandi desperately wants to feel that familial love, but other recruits like her new friend Jules (Gianna Keihl) aren’t buying into the fantasy life.

Later, when John and Marissa question Sandi about Clara, she spills the “mother” beans and promises this huge reveal hasn’t changed her loyalty to the mission. The clue about Clara’s mother is enough for John to set a trap to catch the rogue forest assassins, but Marissa (who seems to be the subject of this season’s redemption arc) demands Hanna be left out of his plans. In fact, John knows that she shot herself and let Erik, Hanna and Clara get away. And if she agrees to come back to work for Utrax, then he promises to leave Hanna alone and just drag 249 back to the facility. For now, the missing key is Clara and with Terri’s help he builds a social media presence for Samira Mahan, Clara’s dead mother.

Captured

After apologizing to Hanna for acting less than grateful for saving her life, Clara takes off towards the supply cabin they ransacked earlier. Immediately, the mother and daughter duo from the photo offers her their help, but Clara seems like a lost soul with very little information to work with. All she says is that she was with her mother, Samira, and they somehow got separated. When the young daughter opens her social media and searches this woman’s name she immediately finds Samira’s profile (courtesy of John and Terri) and Clara is stunned into silence. Slowly, she scrolls through the photos on Samira’s account landing on the last post that stating she’s vacationing in a hotel in Bucharest. The helpful woman and her daughter offer to drive Clara there having no idea the girl is walking into a trap. Meanwhile, Hanna realizes her friend is gone and knows exactly where she’s headed. When she arrives at the cabin Hanna finds it empty, but shortly after a group of armed soldiers pull up and search the entire area for both girls.

In Bucharest a grubby and dirty Clara finds her way to the 5-star hotel where her mother claims to be waiting for her. It’s another text message trap that young Clara walks right into it. When she cautiously opens the hotel room door and calls out for her mother, it’s not her Samira she finds but Marissa with some devastating news. Clara’s mother is dead, but Utrax can offer her something that can ease her pain. Instead of a life of solitude, Marissa offers her a new beginning at The Meadows. Along with the boarding school life, Utrax will assign her a new identity as well as a big happy family. It seems like the perfect answer to her problems, but as she starts to panic and head for the door we see how invested Marissa is in playing John for a fool. She knows Carmichael is watching Clara on a security camera, but she is strategically sitting out of focus. She tries to motion to Clara not to run that someone is watching, but it’s too late. Utrax operatives break down the door and taser Clara. As she screams and cries for help, Marissa hangs her head unable to watch the girl’s pain. For Marissa, this is practically a one-eighty degree turn from the heartless Season One Marissa we came to hate. This new woman seems to care and that puts her in a compromising position and at odds with her employer who on a good day is a lethal monster. Her life is in as much danger as Clara and Hanna’s unless she can stay off John’s radar while secretly advocating for the safety of these girls. When John walks in to see Marissa emotional he laughs it off and offers her old job back. Before she can accept she needs to know what happened to Hanna. She as worked for Utrax long enough to know John isn’t a man of his word. This is when we head back to the cabin where Hanna does her best to take down a few of the soldiers before they blast through a propane tank and the entire area goes up in flames. John tells Marissa that Hanna did not survive, and she nods her head while trying to swallow her rage. She is tough as nails and will not let him see how much she cares for this child, something that probably even surprises her but definitely is not something he would understand. As John leaves her to sit with her anger, we head back to the cabin that is now a smoldering pile of beams and charred remains. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Hanna bursts from underneath as if she didn’t just survive an explosion and heads out of the woods. When we next see her, she is covered in filth and walking into a hotel to meet Marissa. With a child like wave and a smirk, Hanna motions to Marissa who releases a deep breath of relief. Hanna is alive and these two unlikely partners are working together! The woman that sent Erik and Hanna into the woods is now the woman that’s going to give her back her life!