While these loose ends somewhat unravel the satisfaction of such a purposeful second season, I’ll argue that the writers know what they’re doing. Nick’s pubescent fate still remains unclear, and the Shame Wizard returns in the final episode after his “defeat” as a humanized character with personal issues of his own. Depression, of course, affects more than just middle schoolers with raging hormones, and Big Mouth once again grounds its characters in typical scenarios like puberty, drama at school, and divorce, while reminding its viewers that other people out there understand those intangible but widely felt experiences (as Andrew says in episode 10 when he and Nick hunt for Jessi in the Depression Ward inside the Department of Puberty, “Oh my god, there are a billion rooms in here!”).Įven with its piercing wit, Big Mouth still has moments in which it struggles to find solid ground in season 2. Even episode 5, the well-intentioned yet stagnant pro-Planned Parenthood variety show, which reveals how Nick, Andrew, and Jessi’s respective parents coupled up, moves Jessi’s storyline along: she sinks deeper into her belief that she’s to blame for her parents’ split, and soon enough, she trades in her loyal Hormone Monstress for the manipulative Depression Kitty. Nearly all of Big Mouth’s main characters are multi-dimensional in all ways except their animation, but season 2 reveals Jessi to be possibly the most substantive. In episode 3, when the Shame Wizard plays judge and jury and tries Andrew after he is caught masturbating in front of Nick’s sister’s swimsuit, every Shame Wizard in the room morphs into Andrew himself, chanting “Guilty!” at him as he sends himself into an internal tailspin. The Shame Wizard is a more insidious figure than the Hormone Monsters, slipping between real life and the inside of the kids’ heads. And Big Mouth season 2 (now streaming) delivers on exactly that: Enter the Shame Wizard, an emaciated, floating, Voldemort-adjacent creature voiced by Harry Potter’s own David Thewlis. It’s clear Kroll and his team know that when hurricanes of puberty ravage impressionable children, serious self-loathing usually comes next. Animated characters often have moments when they seem too mature for the reality of the situation, usually for the sake of a joke, but the Big Mouth world clearly has consequences that shows like Family Guy and South Park ignore (like in season 1 when Jessi’s mom’s casual dig at her husband, “You’re a lemon, Greg,” turns into a long-term divorce storyline a few episodes later). But because the Hormone Monsters are separate from the kids, rather than, say, an Inside Out sort of deal, the main cast-Nick (Kroll), Andrew (John Mulaney), Jessi (Jessi Klein), Missy (Jenny Slate), and Jay (Jason Mantzoukas)-gets off too easy in season 1.