[Heavy spoilers for the Drops of God TV series… obviously]

The first season of Drops of God was a hidden gem. The streaming wars have left us awash in forgettable mid-tier television dressed in prestige clothing, but this adaptation of a Japanese manga stood out as something really special. While it probably never entered the water cooler1 conversation, there was enough buzz and admiration to snag the 2024 International Emmys award for best drama series. It centers on the French daughter (Camille) and illegitimate Japanese son (Issei) of a recently deceased French wine expert (Alexandre). Alexandre, estranged from Camille while he lived most of her life in Japan, concocts a manipulative posthumous competition between his children for control of his estate.

Creatively, the series connected on some big swings. It’s multilingual, with dialogue in English, French, and Japanese. This is not a show for two-screeners. Tonally, the music and direction built a believable heaviness not inherent to a plot where rich people figure out who gets to keep some wine. There were over-stylized CGI interludes, heavy handed flashbacks, a globetrotting intrigue filled plot, and soap-y individual character arcs. Drops of God somehow turned all of this into a cohesive and gripping drama. This was no small feat!

So I was not entirely surprised that season 2 did not recapture the magic. The big swings were still there, but this time they underwhelmed. But I find this almost as interesting as if it had all worked. What, exactly, didn’t click?

There was a lot I did like. The awe inspiring Georgian wine at the center of the drama is a great plot device. Its scarcity creates mystery and the impending destruction of its vineyard generate real stakes and believable conflicts. This reveals and pressure tests our characters’ inner lives. In addition, much like in season 1, the globetrotting was fun. And finally, the broad theme of our protagonists wrestling with their relationships to their parents and each other is solid. We leave season 1 with a measure of harmony between Camille and Issei. Season 2 seeks to answer “what happens next?”

Pacing and Structure

The answer is so many things, paced erratically. The season unfolds in roughly 4 acts:

  1. The wine quest (Episodes 1, 2, 3)
  2. The Georgian family drama (Episodes 3, 4, 5, parts of 6, 7, 8)
  3. The First Vintage Contest (Episodes 6, 7)
  4. Camille and Issei start over (Episode 8)

We can immediately spot a big issue: why does the Georgian family drama take up so much space? The wine quest flies. In episode 2 alone, we go from Chassangre to Marseille to Tokyo to Vassal to Athens and finally to Georgia. It’s thrilling. And then we just… hang out with Davit and Tamar for 3 episodes. This makes the contest, paced more like the wine quest, feel rushed. And since the first 3 acts keep adding story threads, we’re left with a lot to tie up in the finale2. Before we started the last episode, my wife asked me “How are they going to resolve all of this?”

Despite a valiant effort of running down an “open storylines” checklist from scene to scene in the finale, there wasn’t enough room left to wrap everything up. Most egregiously, the Georgian family drama does not resolve at all. Davit and Tamar leave episode 8 in the exact same state as in episode 3. They are perhaps supposed to be a mirror for Camille and Issei, but the show doesn’t pay off that idea either. The animosity between our heroes is contrived, and at no point do they change their own relationship by seeing themselves reflected in Tamar and Davit. So the entire plot line becomes dead weight.

Pacing aside, the show is ultimately about Camille and Issei, and the biggest reason season 2 doesn’t work is because their character arcs are neither believable nor coherent.

Issei’s Arc

Issei’s season is a mess, both emotionally and geographically. At the start of the season he’s driven by two things: jealousy towards Camille and a haunting fear of the dark.

His relationship to Camille proceeds to fly all over the place. At first he’s antagonistic, even attempting to ditch her in Athens. Then he (kind of) makes peace with her in Georgia, before becoming replacing jealousy with disgust for her ambition to save the wine. We find out, an episode later, via exposition to his father, that he’s decided to cut her out of this life. The show never justifies this decision. Taking some wine in order to save a vineyard is just… not a big transgression? Then in the finale he completely reverses course and drives 5 hours to give Camille a hug on his way towards Marseille. None of these beats emerge organically. They are shoehorned in because they’re convenient for Camille’s story.

His fear of the dark is handled better. It stems from a repressed memory of his mother trying to drown him when he was three years old3. This pushes him to confront the tension he’s had with her. I didn’t love suicide as the resolution (his friend Dai’s glib response of “welp, I guess she did actually regret it!” was a weird one), but the overall arc worked and made sense.

However, that arc is completely separate from Camille and the rest of the story. It would be one thing if Issei realized that his jealousy of Camille tied back as some kind of projection of his mother’s pain. And it might have worked if the rift between Issei and Camille were more believable. But the show doesn’t present a whole lot of connective tissue, leading to the Deus Ex Machina Hug From Nowhere. The geographic separation underscores this. While in season 1 it made sense for Camille to be in France and Issei to be in Japan because their lives had not yet converged, the Tokyo/Japanese forest side quest that Issei takes comes across as a jarring separation and equally jarring reunion.4

Issei’s story concludes with him closing his consulting business and moving to Marseille to be with Natasha. Neither of these decisions are really supported by what we see. All of his growth centered around his relationship with his mother, something that had absolutely nothing to do with his wine business. He decides to quit when a client asks about the Georgian wine and this makes him angry. Huh? Wasn’t the lesson we just learned to not let small things destroy our important relationships? I’d say more about Natasha if there were anything to say. Her character pulls off the incredible feat of making the love interests in Michael Mann movies appear deep and well considered. (She does at least get a sick burn on Camille)

In total, Issei swings between emotional extremes with little justification from the story. He ends up in the right place, leaning back into his relationship with his sister. But the path to get there doesn’t really work.

Camille’s Arc

Camille’s arc, on the other hand, is compelling in theory but not in practice. We’re meant to see her becoming more and more like her father, but this is not what we’re shown. You know how I know this? Because about once an episode, some character has to tell us “Camille, you’re just like your father!”. Here’s a list:

At this point we need to step back so we can recap what made Alexandre a villain. He pushed his daughter to drink wine as a child, and he never contacted her after she accidentally drank herself into a coma as a result. He cheated on Camille’s mother and had an illegitimate son whom he mentored but never claimed as his own, emotionally torturing his paramour in the process. And the big one: he put his children in direct competition to receive his inheritance just for the egomaniacal pleasure of it. No one said that Alexandre was awful because he was ambitious or adventurous or cared about wine or didn’t mind “bending the rules”. It was the cheating on his spouse, the sadistic manipulation, and the unabashed narcissism! Camille doesn’t do any of that!

Camille’s arc in Season 2 doesn’t work because the show won’t commit to having her truly cross a line. Yes, she cheats at the contest, but she does it in service of the wine and not herself5. Yes, she neglects Tomas and her mother, but because she cares about Issei, cares about Tamar, and cares about saving the wine. The show goes out of its way to tell us this. Tailon the lawyer and Tamar both say “her intentions were good”. And yes, she flirts with Davit, approaching the line that her father crossed, but she rejects his advances every single time he makes a move.

In the end, Camille makes mistakes, particularly in the way she neglects Tomas. But none of them are unforgivable. We can see this when Tomas and Camille each say a teary “I love you” as she’s leaving Chassangre. Ok, why exactly can’t we work this out then? The real answer is because the story needs Camille to be abandoned by everyone but Issei. I left the season thinking Tomas is both unsupportive and insecure, rather than that Camille got what she deserved. And that’s a shame, because there were so many opportunities for her to actually earn the breakup.

The Verdict

Season 1 worked so well because the threads of the lives of Camille, Issei, and Alexandre came together into a satisfying conclusion. True to his character, Alexandre manipulates his children into securing his legacy, but Camille and Issei transcend this and forge their own bond, healing some of their wounds in the process.

In contrast, season 2 does not pull things together. Camille, the dominant protagonist, never earns her fall from grace. Issei’s storyline gives us whiplash, detaching from the main storyline in order to heal a rift with Camille that didn’t make sense in the first place. Davit and Tamar suck up too much of the season’s oxygen, throwing off the pacing, and leave us without any payoff. The bones were there: Camille and Issei could have seen themselves turn into versions of their parents, coming together only after seeing a cautionary tale in Georgia. But that’s not what we got.

I wanted more out of Drops of God in season 2, but I love that it even existed. I wish there more shows like it that are easy to watch while offering something genuinely unique. But I have to imagine that it’s incredibly hard to nail eight episodes of unique television. Not every vintage we harvest will be a winner, but I hope we keep planting interesting grapes.

  1. Or whatever the equivalent of a water cooler was in 2023 ↩

  2. Including the forced share sale, a new plot line introduced in the finale. ↩

  3. I like that the show isn’t afraid to make its characters do truly awful things, offering sympathetic backstories that never excuse the behavior. ↩

  4. I have sympathy for the writers here, though. Jetsetting is part of what makes Drops of God cool, and there are still major characters in Japan in season 2. It can’t be easy to weave “Japan the location” into the story. ↩

  5. She says to Lorenzo that “my father would make a big speech and make this about himself”, and notes “not my wine, Tamar’s” will win the contest. ↩