Rivals Is About to Test Your Loyalties
Remembering who wants whom is only half the work of returning to Rivals. You also need to remember who feels humiliated, who thinks they have won and who has mistaken desire for loyalty. Those are the useful things to have in your head when season two resumes on November 11. A list of plot twists will only get you so far.
The return brings a three-episode premiere on Disney+ in the UK and internationally, and Hulu in the US. Six new episodes make up this second part. The first season and the first six episodes of season two are already available on Disney+, so returning viewers have somewhere to refresh their memories before November 11. Newcomers should begin at the beginning; this is an ongoing contest, not a fresh anthology story.
David Tennant returns as Tony Baddingham, Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara and Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black. The official preview puts the television-franchise struggle and its personal fallout back at the centre. It also promises parties, a hunt ball and a turbulent Christmas. These are useful settings for a melodrama: places where people are supposed to behave, with plenty of witnesses when they fail.
That is the pleasure worth protecting in the return. A private insult can be dismissed or denied. Deliver it across a beautifully laid table and everybody has to decide whether to pretend they did not hear. The social occasion gives a grudge an audience. It makes the effort of maintaining appearances part of the entertainment, even before anyone does something spectacularly unwise.
The challenge for a second half is to make the consequences feel like more than another round of provocations. A character can behave outrageously for only so long before outrage becomes their default setting. What holds attention is a change in the balance: someone who used to command the room suddenly needing a favour, or someone dismissed as harmless discovering that they have leverage. Those are the reversals that would make another visit worth the time.
If your memory is rusty, resist turning catch-up into a homework assignment. Revisit the last episode you watched and concentrate on the relationships that have shifted. Who owes an apology? Who would never accept one? Whose version of events depends on everyone else staying quiet? That is a more useful preparation for this sort of drama than trying to memorise every development.
There is also no obligation to swallow the three-episode return in one evening. A melodrama can be enjoyable company between episodes, while you decide whose conduct was unforgivable and whose you are prepared to excuse for entirely selfish reasons. The gap leaves room to argue with another viewer. A long viewing session can flatten those separate pleasures into a procession of incidents.
Start the November 11 Rivals return with your loyalties provisionally restored and your willingness to change them intact. The clothes and parties are the invitation. The reason to stay is the possibility that the person you have been cheering for will make it awkward to continue.
