Streaming series review - Petra: Season 2

Petra: Season 2 *** (out of 5) It’s been three years since I reviewed the earlier episodes of this entertaining Italian procedural. This round not only provides a pleasant return to its picturesque Genoa setting, but gives us an engaging evolution of the eponymous star. Here’s the usual refresher link:

https://patch.com/missouri/clayton-richmondheights/streaming-minseries-petra

We rejoin Petra and Antonio after they’ve been on a long (by US standards) vacation. She stayed home alone with her pet tarantula – as would, of course, be her wont. He indulged in the uncharacteristic luxury of a long cruise, meeting a woman he adored (Beatrice, played by Manuela Mandracchia). But middle-aged shlub that he is, Antonio felt underqualified to keep it going on land, since she was one of the VERY wealthy elite of the community. The class gap seemed to bother him, far more than her.

A more significant change manifests in Petra. She’s actually unpacked all those cartons and filled that drab apartment with nice furnishings, though there’s still no artwork adorning the institutional gray walls. She’s opened up her personality noticeably, smiling and joking more than before. She’s still relationship-averse, assuming anything serious would end badly… again. This second season has more heart, with greater emphasis on character development and personal story arcs, romantic and otherwise. Besides the spider, Petra continues another idiosyncrasy that fans of our Quincy series will recognize – keeping a memento from among the clues at the end of each solved case.

But now to address the main course – the murders to be solved. As before, each 90-minute episode addresses new crimes, so bingeing isn’t as important for following the proceedings. In the first, a guy she meets from the web for a “zipless… shall we say, boink” turns up the next day as the season’s first murder victim. She keeps that one-nighter a secret for a while, so she’ll be allowed to stay on the case. It turns out that he was married with two kids and a complex set of personal and business activities, leaving a whole lotta motives and murderers to sort through. The second begins with a homeless guy in an alley being killed by a bullet, then brutally kicked by skinheads. Are those loathsome louts the culprits? Or was there more in the man’s pre-destitution life that caused his demise, and others that followed?

The third begins with the murder of a dude in a jester costume during the colorful festivities of Carnival. Since everyone frolicking in the crowded street was in costume, ID’ing the killer wasn’t helped much by footage from surrounding street cams. The solution had to be extracted from old business with old friends/frenemies as well as recent events. The last revolved around sex trafficking and prostitution – mainly affecting the lives of minors. Though there are moments of levity along the way, these are all handled as dramas, without the comedy side of other Italian favorites like Detective Montalbano, Makari or Monterossi. Three of the four cases were harder to figure out than one. It would be interesting to know which episode any of you find to be the weakest mystery link. Perhaps your mileage will vary.

What I’d previously described as a miniseries turned out to be two four-episode seasons that end in a satisfactory place for most of the principals (i.e. – no cliffhangers), but leaves the door open for a third season. Since this quartet aired abroad in 2023, which was three years after the first foursome, it’s quite possible that more will follow. Fine with me if that’s the way the renewal winds blow.

(Petra: Season 2, mostly in Italian with subtitles, streams on MHz Choice as of 10/21/25)