Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Time’ Season 2 on BritBox, Examining Three Women Locked Up For Very Different Reasons

In 2021, Jimmy McGovern’s series Time gave us the story of an inmate who was a fish out of water, but knows the crimes he committed to send him to the prison where the show takes place. It also gave us the story of a corrections officer who had to compromise his ethics to help his recently-incarcerated son. In the new season of the prison anthology series, we are now in a women’s prison, examining the inner and outer lives of three inmates who have gotten to the prison for a range of offenses.

TIME SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman frantically butters some toast in her cramped kitchen, her three kids sitting at the table.

The Gist: Orla O’Riordan (Jodie Whittaker) is dressed like she’s going to work as she shoves toast in her kids’ hands and follows them out the door of their flat so they can go to school. Suddenly, we see her in the back of a police paddy wagon, being hauled to Carlingford prison. She has no idea how to get in touch with someone who can pick her kids up from school. She’s in the wagon with Kelsey Morgan (Bella Ramsey), an addict up on drug charges, and Abi Cochrane (Tamara Lawrance), a lifer who’s being transferred from another prison.

During their “induction” period at Carlingford, Orla gets her own cell, and Kelsey and Abi are in one together. Orla, who has gotten six months for stealing electrical service to keep her flat warm, is frantic that her kids are going to wind up in the hands of child services; she begs her PO, Ms. Martin (Lisa Millett) to call her mom, who knows the number of the person she wants to take care of the kids. She gets that with the help of a nun, Mary-Louise O’Dell (Siobhan Finneran), who works in the prison chapel. This is when she finds out to her horror that her alcoholic mother, Elizabeth (Karen Henthorn) has decided to take the kids in.

At the same time, Kelsey, who has snuck some smack in her, um, private cavity, sleeps well her first night, which leads the doctors at the prison to not give her any methadone. In addition, she finds out that she’s pregnant; she wants to abort but Abi tells her that a judge will give a pregnant woman a much more lenient sentence. However, her desire to help Kelsey dissipates when her cellmate trades her hair and skin products to a rough and violent inmate for some more smack.

When someone in a cell asks the three new women what they did to find themselves there, Abi says she killed her sister-in-law, but another inmate, who recognizes Abi from a different prison, knows better. Abi threatens the inmate to shut her up. But a few weeks later, as the three women are settled into their cell in the barracks-like general population, the inmate who was trying to blackmail Abi tells a visitor, and the truth comes out: Abi is serving life for killing her own baby.

As the weeks go by, Abi has to deal with being ostracized yet again, while continuing to suffer flashbacks from the horrible event; Kelsey decides to stay sober while pregnant, even getting off methadone, and tells her boyfriend about the baby; Orla’s kids end up in foster care when her mother is drunk when CPS comes calling.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like the first season of Time, this new season is written by creator Jimmy McGovern; this season he is joined by Helen Black (Grantchester). As we mentioned during the show’s first season in 2021, the show is on the prison drama spectrum between Oz and Orange Is The New Black, tilting more towards the Oz side.

Our Take: Just like in its first season, Time is examining the prisoners at its center as the human beings they are instead of symbols of the crimes they committed. But, unlike the first season, which had one prisoner who isn’t a career criminal but wants to atone for what brought him to prison, this season examines 3 people whose crimes range from minor to horrific.

In Whittaker’s character Orla we have the person who doesn’t belong but has to pay the price for what they’ve done. She fully admits that she nicked electricity from the power company, but it’s because she’s broke and needed to keep a warm flat for her kids. In her frantic performance, Whittaker shows how being in the prison system can tear a person’s life apart: In turn, she loses her freedom, her job and her kids, and she knows when she gets out it’s going to be difficult to rebuild back to even the tenuous circumstance she was in before she was sent to prison.

Abi isn’t an evil murderer; she was likely suffering extreme postpartum depression when she murdered her baby. We see that as she talks to her husband at visiting time, begging him to hold onto some semblance of their previous life. So when she’s ostracized after the truth comes out, the anger she feels over the fact that no one gives her any kind of grace or wants to know how it happened is palpable, and that comes through in Lawrance’s performance.

Kelsey is probably the least defined of the three main inmates, which is not the fault of Ramsey. She’s a young woman who is an addict; as she gets an ultrasound, she realizes that the baby growing inside of her isn’t just there as her ticket to a lighter sentence. That reality is likely what’s going to define her character over the next two episodes, but in the first episode, her character doesn’t distinguish herself from other young junkies we’ve seen in shows like these.

Sex and Skin: When her towel is stolen, Abi walks through the common room naked and dripping wet.

Parting Shot: Kelsey comes into the cell after Abi is slashed in the face by another inmate; Kelsey screams and Abi tells her to get help.

Sleeper Star: Siobhan Finneran’s Mary-Louise O’Dell is the only carryover character from Season 1; when she talks to Abi, she says she used to work in a men’s prison, where almost no one wanted to unburden themselves to her. However, “nine out of ten women won’t shut up, so I thought I’d have a bit of that.”

Most Pilot-y Line: It took us a few tries to figure out what Orla actually did. She kept saying, “fiddled the leccy” or something like that. We had to get what she did from context. From what we understand, it’s a pay-as-you-go electricity service for lower-income families.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Once again, Time does a good job of showing inmates as humans, and how their lives suffer on the inside as they deal with real-life problems happening on the outside.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.