Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft Season 2 Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Despite being largely unfamiliar with the source material, I quite enjoyed Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft‘s first season upon its initial release last year. The action was great, the characters were compelling, and it packed in plenty of love for the original games while still being accessible to newcomers like myself. Given all that and the cliffhanger ending, I was naturally excited to see where the story would go in the second season.
Now, with said second and sadly final season having arrived on Netflix, I feel like the series ends largely on a high note. While the vibe is definitely different, the strong character work and thrilling action that made the first season work very much carry over here. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, and we’ll get into why, but it feels mostly on par with the first season at least.
After reuniting with her longtime best friend Sam, Lara Croft, voiced by Hayley Atwell, is pursued by a seemingly benevolent billionaire who wants to provide Lara with whatever resources she needs as part of an ongoing effort to make the world a better place. However, things quickly turn awry when said billionaire’s true intentions reveal themselves to be a sinister conspiracy to use the power of the mythical Orisha to quite literally play God.
With Sam by her side, Lara must travel across the globe to find the Orisha’s ancient masks before her enemies can. Will the power of literal gods and goddesses prove too much for our beloved heroine to handle? Or will her skills, determination, and maybe a little help from her friends save the day again?
While Season 1 was about Lara getting back in the game and coming to terms with her trauma, Season 2 is very much Lara in her element. She knows what she’s doing, she’s got her team by her side, and she frequently makes the impossible seem effortless. And that last factor helps contribute to the action being just as strong if not better than before. It’s just so much fun to watch Lara parkour on top of and between buildings, save innocent bystanders just in time, and even do underwater hand-to-hand combat. I don’t know if anything tops the T-Rex fight from the end of the last season, but some of it definitely comes close.
What was slightly less delivered on is that aforementioned team aspect. Her supporting cast is present but mostly in the background. After being a main character in the first season, Earl Baylon’s Jonah is given almost nothing to do, and Roxana Ortega as Abby has it even worse. Allen Maldonado as Zip, one of my personal favorites from Season 1, does get some nice character moments, but it still feels like they could have done more.
However, much of this is largely understandable when you consider how well the creative team handled the relationship between Lara and Sam. Their dynamic ends up becoming the centerpiece of Season 2 if only because giving Lara a more bubbly but otherwise equal peer to bounce off of is such a joy to see play out. Karen Fukuhara is immensely charming as Sam, and she has clear and compelling chemistry with Hayley Atwell’s Lara, even if they never go so far as to turn the clear sapphic subtext into text.
Moreover, the new supporting cast is great too. Without going too deep into spoilers, the Orisha characters that Lara and Sam meet along the way all bring a lot to the table in terms of both action and emotional depth, and the new main villain is pretty fun if a little basic for this kind of story. Admittedly, the Orisha do start to overshadow Lara towards the end. It’s still her story and it’s not like the action scenes with the Orisha aren’t fun to watch, quite the opposite, but when the stakes of your story involve all-powerful ancient deities, someone who is ultimately still a regular human like Lara gets a bit lost in the shuffle.
One odd thing though is that, for how frequently the show rightfully calls out the evils of colonialism, particularly in regard to grave robbing; it also goes out of its way to absolve Lara of any association with that, explicitly labeling her as an “ethical archaeologist.” To be clear, I agree with the intent and the central message at play here. And while I can’t fully speak for the games, Lara in Season 1 definitely did more genuine archaeology than people like Indiana Jones or Nathan Drake, who at a certain point were essentially just grave robbers, ever did.
But at the same time, the series is still called Tomb Raider. It is literally named after someone who robs graves. While it’s true that she spends most of this season solely returning stolen artifacts back to their indigenous owners, she still did a fair amount of the “Let’s just take something that doesn’t belong to us from an ancient civilization” thing in Season 1 and in the games and the show never questions it. I don’t necessarily need a full-blown dissertation on archaeological ethics from what is ultimately an action show, but if you’re going to bring it up in a franchise like this, you should be better prepared to address the elephant in the room.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft Season 2 is not without its faults. Certain concepts could’ve been further developed, certain characters could have used more screen time, and it doesn’t feel quite as strong as the first season if only by a small margin. But when it works, it works incredibly well. The action is fun, the chemistry between the two leads is phenomenal, and if this is truly the end for the animated adventures of Lara Croft, it feels like a largely worthy conclusion.
