College Drama
7 Burning Questions We Need Answered in ‘Cruel Intentions’ Season 2
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Cruel Intentions Season 1.]
Cruelty is a family affair in Prime Video’s Cruel Intentions adaptation.
Prior to the Season 1 finale, power-hungry step-siblings Lucien (Zac Burgess) and Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) only inflicted deliciously evil harm on their classmates at Manchester University. But in the season finale, the gruesome twosome turned their talons on each other when Lucien had a change of heart about their arrangement.
For those who need a refresher, just like in the 1999 movie starring Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar, that arrangement involved Lucien and Caroline betting that if he can sleep with Annie Grover (Savannah Lee Smith), the virginal daughter of the Vice President of the United States, he can have what he’s always wanted — carnal knowledge of his stepsister.
But after he seemingly sleeps with Annie, Lucien decides to come clean about the bet and trades vicious insults with Caroline by poking at each other’s insecurities. In retaliation, she uploads his curated collection of sex tapes for the entire university to see, even though she’s been streaming them in, ahem, private for some time. But her attempt at destroying him through revenge porn backfires because Lucien is too shallow to be truly shamed. Plus, he has one last move up his sleeve: He sleeps with Claudia (Claire Forlani), Caroline’s horribly critical mother and his stepmother.
It is the biggest betrayal Lucien could have committed against his stepsister, and Caroline is bound to unleash hell on campus if Prime Video renews the seductive series for a second season. Until then, here are a few burning questions we need answered now!
What did you think of the first season? What do you want to see in a Season 2? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Cruel Intentions, Season 1, Streaming Now, Prime Video
1. What will Caroline do now?
We aren’t all that shocked that Lucien is callous and cruel enough to hurt his stepsister this deeply. But Caroline is just as ruthless, and if we were Lucien, we would at least be watching our backs for the foreseeable future because she is not one to forgive and forget. We know she is already pacing her Delta Phi Pi president’s bedroom cooking up a plan, and she has a few options at her disposal. His precious vintage car’s days are probably numbered, if we had to guess. But more immediately, we think that after he rejects her call in the final scene, it’s possible she dials up her stepfather to share the news of his wife and son’s extracurricular activities. Speaking of…
2. How will Lucien’s father react?
This is a tricky one because we don’t know much about Lucien’s dad except that he’s pretty absent from his son’s life. But if Lucien is any reflection of his upbringing, we have to imagine that anger is too simple an emotion for the elder Belmont. In these elite circles, where the emotions of others are carelessly disregarded, it is more likely that Lucien’s father’s response will be self-serving at best, utterly destructive at worst. If anything, Claudia has more to lose here than Lucien here.
3. Why was Annie calling Lucien at the end?
By the time Annie caught onto Caroline’s duplicitous streak in the finale, she was already in the viper’s pit. There’s no turning back now for the newest Delta Phi sister, even though she suspects that her president is behind the sexual misconduct complaint filed against Professor Chadwick (Sean Patrick Thomas) that has greatly jeopardized his budding relationship with his teacher’s assistant, Cece (Sara Silva). Could that be why Annie is calling Lucien in the final scene? Despite him calling her boring and only interesting because of her powerful daddy, she seems to recognize that Lucien may be more ally than enemy in the coming war against Queen Caroline.
4. Can Cece unseat Caroline?
The best character (in our humble opinion) in the series is Cece, whose loyalty to Caroline all season was admirable but underserving. It was also shaken in the finale when she learned that her blonde overlord stole her very personal story about an intimate relationship with her tennis instructor in order to convince Annie that she is just a wounded person that can be trusted. Cece has excused Caroline’s vicious tactics in the past because it was in service of the sorority, but watching her best friend co-opt her own trauma seems to be the final straw. And, yes, Cece, we saw you take a long look at Caroline’s presidential jacket in her closet. Is someone interested in usurping the throne and seizing the crown for themselves?
5. How much damage can a scorned Blaise do?
Blaise’s (John Harlan Kim) attempt to blackmail Scott (Khobe Clarke) and his congressman father (Jon Tenney) could not have gone more terribly, and that’s what he gets for doing that to poor Scott! But Blaise, like Caroline and Lucien, isn’t one to simply lick his wounds and move on. He’s ejected from Alpha Gamma for embezzling money, but on his way out, he takes the fraternity’s record book, which seems to document the the brothers’ history of misdeeds. Have these boys never heard of the dangers of a paper trail? While he smuggles the book out of the house, something tells us the ramifications of the secrets from its pages will come bursting back through the door in due time.
6. Can Scott get an actual boyfriend who isn’t gaslighting him?
Sweet, simple Scott. He may not be the sharpest tool in the shed — or the entire Home Depot — but he is an authentically nice boy, and those are in short supply in this world of elite pricks. When he revealed that he told his conservative dad that he was “gay for Blaise,” as he put it, and wanted to pay off Blaise’s embezzling debts, we just wanted to give him a big hug. But now that he’s seen Blaise’s affection for the opportunistic ploy that it was, we think it’s time that Scott found himself a man that will treat him well and give him the confidence to continue embracing who he is. If anyone deserves a happy ending in this story, it is Scott.
7. Will Lucien’s sex tapes finally be what brings down Greek life?
If it wasn’t Scott’s nearly fatal hazing, or Lucien’s blow-out birthday party, or the genuinely creepy singing from the Delta Phi sisters, then maybe it will be Lucien’s library of sex tapes that starts to tear down Greek life at Manchester one brick at a time. As Blaise leaves the frat house, he sees the police ransacking Lucien’s bedroom, seemingly looking for evidence of how his collection was released. But the scandal that will inevitably erupt from this seems like it could have implications for the future, and maybe even finally give anti-Greek crusader Beatrice (Brooke Lena Johnson) the ammunition she needs to knock Caroline and those like her down a peg or two. We love an underdog story.
