Tomb Raider is in their renaissance period! Ever since Square Enix gave up the rights to the IP, Lara Croft has been fighting tooth and nail to reclaim her space in the public consciousness.

We had the announcement of two games with Legacy of Atlantis, yet another remake of the first chapter from 1996, and Catalyst, an entirely new adventure which I’m very curious to learn more about. Lastly, we had the announcement of a new live action TV series led by Sophie Turner, which has already shown her look in promotional material, and she looks absolutely divine in the role. I can wait to see her in action!

In the midst of all these announcements, Powerhouse Animation continued their work on the animated show Tomb Raider - Legend of Lara Croft. I’ve already spoken about the first season in my very first blog and I was very satisfied by the work done with the show!

The first season gave us a globe-trotting adventure with Lara that had the right balance of treasure hunting, lots of action, a nice tinge of fantasy and a good deal of character drama.

The ending left the door open for a new adventure with the abduction of Sam Nishimura, a close friend of Lara from the 2013 videogame reboot, by some mysterious entity. And a year later, in December 2025, the second season was released on Netflix.

Tomb Raider - Legend of Lara Croft

Season 2

About the Plot

The story opens in Russia, where Lara has been able to track down Sam. She’s been kept prisoner by what appears to be a mercenary group, which Lara takes little time to dispose of once she leaps into action. It’s during this scuffle that a mysterious woman shows up to help them, her name is Fig.

Sam was abducted because she was getting too close in figuring out the identity of a big black market ring about stolen artworks and relics from various museums. Fig, instead, works for one of the victims of these robberies, a billionaire philanthropist named Mila, who’s looking for Lara’s help in a matter of extreme importance.

Mila is looking for a particular African mask belonging to Oko, an Orisha of Harvest. According to Mila the mask got lost during the pillaging and trafficking of artworks of the 17 hundreds, but in reality the mask appears to be part of Lara’s private collection, which was sold at an auction during the first season.

Personally, I’ll be slightly suspicious about this person looking for this incredibly rare relic, that pops up right after you end up saving your friend by a mercenary group on the payroll of an artwork trafficking ring. Unfortunately Lara is very susceptible to Mila’s guilt tripping, constantly reminding of her father’s not so ethical means of gathering his riches. So in the end decides to help her get the mask.

My suspicions will be revealed to be true. Right after delivering the mask to Mila, Lara is made aware of her true intentions. The Orisha, African deities, are real, living hidden within normal human bodies. If someone gets in possession of their mask, they have the chance to trap their soul within it, and allow everyone who wears it to use their power.

So Lara has been deceived, and it’s up to her and Sam to travel around the world, find those masks and give them back to their Orisha, before they end up getting killed by Mila.

Let’s start with the positives, the premise is very good: having Lara being deceived by someone else into doing their dirty work is a nice beginning to the series, and sets up a nice excuse for the globe-trotting.

As always Powerhouse doesn’t disappoint when it comes to action, and I feel this is also a step forward from the previous season, especially in masking better the scenes where some 3D has been used. They also took full advantage of the fact that these masks have divine powers, there are some fights, especially towards the end, where they don’t hold back with the use of magic. This combined with a good dose of shootouts and brawls has left me well entertained.

The guilt of Lara, about her family’s approach to archeology, is also a nice theme to explore, and I feel is connected to an issue a lot of writers seem to have when working with a character like her, 30 years after her birth.

In the 90s watching an English person roaming the world in search of undiscovered treasures for his own collection, could’ve still been seen as something more “normal”, a matter of fact situation. Nowadays it’s harder to enjoy this kind of adventure without it looking like someone is pillaging other cultures for the sake of your wealth.

This point is brought up many times throughout the season, how there used to be a massive trafficking of artworks and relics from ancient civilizations because they were seen as “exotic” and something to brag about owning. They also expose the behaviour of some museums, who treat these objects more like a trophy to expose and make money through ticket sales, rather than actual historical preservation.

It’s important to me trying to put a point into this theme so that we can go beyond it, and re- contextualize Lara in a more modern point of view. You can’t really remove her origin as a treasure hunter but you can present it in a way where she’s not doing it for money, but rather for passion about history and preservation.

As enjoyable as the action scenes are, what had the biggest impact on my enjoyment of the show has been the writing of the characters. In particular the antagonists have been the weaker point of this season, which was a hard pill to swallow for me, considering that in the previous season they were the part which I enjoyed the most.

About the Characters

Lara in this season is a more cheerful character, she got over her trauma in the previous season, so it’s nice to see her bounce off of Sam throughout the season. The two are just adorable together and the enthusiasm brought by Sam perfectly counterbalances the more practical and serious approach of Lara, who’s seriously worried about stopping Mila.

We don’t backtrack on her character growth, instead we move forward! As much as Lara is worried about Sam, who’s not really used to these extreme situations, she rarely keeps her at a distance. The two are always together and Sam has never shown to be a deadweight to Lara.

Watching the whole group getting involved was the best part of the series for me. Episode 5 is written like a heist movie where every member of the group has a role to play, between costumes, sneaking around and gadgets worthy of a secret agent: personally my favourite episode of the season.

I also laughed like a madman in a scene where Lara ends up resolving the final enigma of an Escape room way too quickly and her friends end up lamenting the fact that she keeps ruining all the fun. All these moments make their friendship feel genuine. Which is the reason why I’m still perplexed by a line spoken by Mila at the end of the season.

“You put on a good show for you little friends, but the truth is
you think you can do it all without them.”

For the entire season we saw Lara never having any issue about asking for help. As much as she was worried about them and preferred them staying safe, she has always allowed Sam to be close to her even in her weakest moments. If this was a last minute effort to plant a seed of doubt in her, then it was shoddily written. Even now I think about this sentence and the only feeling I get from it is complete confusion.

Mila has been the character that disappointed me the most and I feel heavily contributed to not making me enjoy this season. A character with a lot of wasted potential!

We know she’s a billionaire philanthropist, who is making an effort in making the world a better place, something that by itself is already hard enough to believe. In her younger days she was in a relationship with a man who’s then revealed to be the Orisha Ogun, who’s also the one who told Mila about the mask’s secret divine powers.

Mila tried to convince Ogun in using their powers to reshape the world and society in order to create a better place, but Ogun refused the idea, getting so far as suicide in order to destroy his own mask. Since then Mila has been trying her hardest to get the remaining mask with every means necessary. It’s left intended that she’s supposed to be the one behind the artwork trafficking which Sam was investigating.

Mila has all the tools to become a very impactful antagonist, unfortunately the season doesn’t manage to take advantage of her properly, giving her way too little screentime. Her entire past with Ogun has been told to us but never shown, his manipulative side disappears the moment she manages to get the first mask, and her motivations devolve into a generic “Resetting the world”.

If she really is this famous philanthropist, with apparently unlimited means and funds, who is working so hard for bettering everyone else’s lives, why not show us her descent towards nihilism? With Charles we have witnessed his change, and it worked incredibly well.

Not to mention the biggest wasted opportunity with the biggest contradiction about Mila. At the beginning of the season she goes on a long speech about how Europeans have exploited and pillaged African civilizations for their own gain, and how this was wrong, without even realizing she’s doing the exact same thing. The best we get is her constantly apologizing every time she ends up killing an Orisha, constantly repeating how it’s something that she needs to do and how she’s the only one who could carry this weight.

The biggest mistake was to reveal her true intentions in the very first episode. In my opinion, Mila should’ve been an ally for most of the season, working with Lara in order to gather these artifacts, have Sam being the one more weary of her real intentions, and Mila intentionally trying to drive a wedge between them. It would’ve been a lot more interesting, it would’ve given a lot more space to Mila and a much more central role to Lara and Sam.

In truth for as much as Lara kickstarted these events, her and Sam’s role is more on the side. She put her trust in the wrong person, she needs to fix this mistake and make amends for her actions. They feel along for the ride in a story that the more goes on the more becomes less about them and more about an Orisha called Eshu.

Eshu is introduced to us during a visit to New Orleans. In his first appearance he looks like an eccentric man, with serious alcohol problems. A character that appears secondary until, when presented with the masks of his brothers, reveals his true nature as an Orisha and decides to follow Lara through the rest of her adventure.

Eshu and his story become the focal point of the story. During the slave trade, his village is attacked by the english army. Eshu in that situation witnesses the slaughter of his entire village, his mask gets lost in the chaos and his only choice left is to run, abandon his people in order to save himself.

This choice has left him ostracized by the other Orisha, who label him as a coward, and since then he lives as a wanderer drowning his nightmares in alcohol. The meeting with Lara and the news about Oku’s death awakened a sense of duty within him. For as much as he continues to mock Lara’s efforts, and reminding her how she’s fighting a losing battle, he doesn’t hesitate to help her when needed.

It’s nice to see how often the love he feels for his homeland emerges, he misses his roots where he feels not allowed to return to, how much he longs for his brother’s forgiveness but at the same time doesn’t feel worthy of it. A very nice scene is during a visit to an art trafficker Eshu, recognizing some findings from his village, suddenly snaps and starts destroying the exposition room, looking at the owner with anger in his eyes and screaming

“These do not belong to you!”

This entire season becomes his path to acceptance of the call of duty. Having to face his past mistakes, realizing that some people still believe in him even if the other Orisha didn’t forgive him. He cannot remain indifferent to the brutal murder of his brothers.

Eshu has done the heavy lifting in carrying this entire season, he’s been the funniest character, has shown more sides to himself and has had an actual journey that changed him. If only we had a good antagonist to bounce off of, this season would’ve been perfect!

In Conclusion

Unfortunately I couldn’t help but to be disappointed by this season and it’s all because of Mila. I didn’t like how quickly she uncovered her true intentions, I didn’t like how her past wasn’t explored and how her character has been extremely one dimensional.

Thinking back to the ending of the first season I remember how sorry I felt about Charles, while in this one I think about Mila’s fate and my thoughts are a mix of apathy and frustration that we can easily sum up with a sarcastic, “It’s been nice knowing you!”

It doesn’t really help that I’m also tired of these nihilistic bad guys who think they’re the hammer to crush every world’s problem. It also kinda sends the message that everyone who wants to enact a massive change to the world is much more interested in watching the world burn, so it’s much better instead to endure these injustices, because at the very least we aren’t on fire.

Watching a story about a person which had all the tools at her disposal for changing the world at her disposal, and in spite of all that manages to fail to the point of being completely disillusioned to their ideals, it’s a very interesting story to tell! Could’ve also been used to expose all dynamics that are used to tear down this person and force them into compliance.

In spite of everything, I can’t objectively call this a bad season. Lara and Sam are fun characters to follow, I did really enjoy Eshu’s story and if you’re just looking for a treasure hunt with a nice dose of action you certainly aren’t in the wrong place. But I cannot ignore the lack of substance in some characters and all the wasted opportunities with Mila prevent me from enjoying it to the fullest.

What do you think instead? Did you enjoy this season? Did you expect more from the characters? What aspects did you enjoy the most? What did you enjoy the least? Let me know with a comment!

Search This Blog

Markus Tavern