Review: Decoding Netflix’s Blood & Water
It’s safe to say that Netflix’s second season of Blood & Water lived up to expectations when it aired this past weekend. Every member of its stellar cast held their own alongside a simple, yet strong narrative that made for an immersive experience.
Ama’s performance has grown stronger and more intuitive this second time around. In her portrayal of Puleng, Ama embodies the lead character and her family’s trauma of losing Phume (Puleng’s sister, who was abducted as part of a human trafficking network). Her performance beautifully captures both the character’s inner emotional struggle and her focused commitment to finding answers to an unresolved tragedy. The loss seems to define Puleng, but her determination to investigate the abduction and identify Fikile Bhele (Khosi Ngema) as Phume, will hopefully set her free from what can be seen as some sort of an identity crisis.
While it’s pretty admirable (and groundbreaking) to see a young black woman lead as a very determined ‘investigator’ in a crime drama, our lead forsakes her friendships, relationships, studies and career prospects in an attempt to solve the mysteries surrounding the crime. Her search for her sister nearly becomes pathological: she continues to take advantage of Wade’s (Dillon Windvogel) interest in her to get his help with the case and plans an elaborate birthday party for her boyfriend KB (Thabang Molaba) just to break into his family home and get more evidence for her investigation. Her love for writing, which is brought up once towards the end of the season is completely absent in the story. In any case, Puleng’s painful determination to find answers is precisely what drives the narrative of Blood & Water.
At the same time, there are plenty of forces preventing the progress that Puleng’s character desires and the water imagery is significant here. The series uses water as a symbol for overcoming struggle, as understood through a story of Fikile nearly drowning at the age of four (told in seasons one and two). According to the second episode of season one, Fikile’s non-biological mother sent her for swimming lessons soon after the incident which eventually leads to her becoming a swimming champion.
On the other hand, water is also a place of secrets. It’s where truths go to drown, or rather, where Phume goes to ‘die’. In episode one of season two, we further learn that the incident started with Fikile hitting her head, losing blood and then drowning. In this sense, the loss of blood represents a loss of the truth and biological family. With her champion swimmer status, Fikile thrives in water, where truth dissolves, thanks to her mother (Xolile Tshabalala) who tries to control the near-tragedy with swimming lessons.
There seems to be a lot more to this accident though. In season two, Fikile experiences vivid flashbacks of being strangled in the pool as she struggles to start swimming again.
Swimming in secrets, as we discover in the series, is not at all favourable to Puleng and all she wants to do is bring the truth and Fikile out into the open. While Fikile was the main obstacle to progress in the first season, the second season highlights a range of obstacles that try to drown out the truth about Fikile’s identity.
Matla Molapo (Sello Maake Ka-Ncube), the powerful father of Puleng’s boyfriend KB who was involved in the abduction of Phume, makes increasing efforts to remove Puleng from his son’s life and from the school. Janet Nkosana, gracefully depicted by Blood & Water newbie Zikhona Sodlaka, is pressured into becoming Fikile’s therapist to keep her from the truth. She encourages Fikile to swim and regain a sense of normalcy and tries to get Puleng kicked out of school by planting drugs in her bag. With the example of just these few obstacles, we see how the rich and powerful figures of the story try to drown out the truth, so to speak.
It seems that the overflow of secrets and lies in the series’ story resembles the misinformation surrounding human trafficking in South Africa. Last year, TV presenter Lerato Kganyago unknowingly spread fake information by tweeting that a million South African children are trafficked every year. This inflated figure and many others like it have been debunked, but plenty of other instances occur where the issue is totally undermined by authorities like police officials who make claims that the issue isn’t as serious in the country.
With the human trafficking ring being so essential to Blood & Water’s story, it would be ideal for it to delve deeper into the muddy waters of human trafficking and the dingy adoption agency responsible for the trauma in Puleng’s family. If the show does get picked up for a second season, it’s probable that the pool accident, if there’s more to it, will be uncovered with more detail. And finally, we hope Puleng gets to explore her identity and embrace her teenhood alongside the developing stories of her peers. While she’s out there catching the corrupt and powerful, no investigator is resolving the messy state of her three-way relationship with Wade and KB.