While I thought that the first season had its flaws, I overall still found them negligible and they did not impact my viewing experience to the point where I could not appreciate the concept and ideas presented in the show. This season, however, did not improve upon the problems from season one at all but instead amplified them by a hundred.

Now, I had already had my doubts about this season from the very first episode. I had expected season two to continue where season one had left off but instead, I was faced with an unexpected two-year time skip and a new set of main characters. Still, I really wanted to give this a fair chance, so I kept on watching, which was really my own fault since I could already tell that this was not for me from the very beginning.

Firstly, the new characters range from absolutely unbearable to utterly forgettable. The season starts off with our new protagonist, Time, wanting to reinstate the Gifted Program as he believes it will somehow benefit him in the future despite people repeatedly telling him that it's not a good idea and that the program was abolished for a reason. Despite already having received his potential prior to taking the placement exam and having interacted with Gifted Class XV, he doesn't even try to understand their reasoning at all and just stubbornly sticks with his idea. Without any care or regard for the words of others, this supposedly smart character just keeps on pushing forward with his agenda and excuses his own actions by saying that it will not only benefit him but also every other kid in school. Yet, he is also somehow not confident enough that people will actually want to join his cause, so he decides to fake the results of his petition with the help of Grace, who sides with him because she wants to... keep her perm? Needless to say, their motivations are shallow and I could not understand them whatsoever.

Third's character, while not nearly as atrocious as Time or Grace's, still suffers from being incredibly underdeveloped. He starts out as someone who seeks out validation from the adults by acting as a student inspector and who is tempted by the idea of gaining further recognition through getting accepted into the Gifted Program, while outwardly being against its reinstation. He was by far my favorite out of the three new characters because I thought if developed correctly, he could make for an interesting character and maybe even tread the line between good and evil to become an even more compelling sub-villain than Wave was in season one. But what they really ended up doing with him was... nothing. They simply used him to incite some small conflict by temporarily siding with Miss Darin for maybe 5 minutes in total for an honestly pretty understandable reason and in the end, his "evil actions" didn't even have any ill effect on anyone really since the reason Time collapsed after Third used his potential on him was not because of him but because of the NYX-88 virus. If you cut Third out of the story completely, it would literally make no difference at all to the plot of the show, which just goes to show how little effort was put into him from the start.

Furthermore, instead of at least further developing the pre-existing characters from season one, they somehow managed to make them progress backward. Sure, it was shown that some of them had improved their potentials but that was about it. The characters did not grow at all and while they acted like they had become such good friends who had united to fight for the same cause and had set aside their individual problems for the greater good in the first few episodes, that illusion was shattered so quick, which was really disappointing because the reason for their failure in season one had been that their opinions had been too divided to agree upon one definitive way to defeat the director and now they basically started their next fight in an even worse state of division than before while expecting a different outcome.

The entire group solely places their trust in Pang for some reason, which to me makes no sense because he is not only the least academically gifted, he is also the one who uses his potential the least and is, therefore, the only one who has barely progressed with it at all. Instead of making decisions together, they just all look at Pang for the answers, who is understandably overwhelmed by it. When Korn betrays the group and spreads the NYX-88 virus, he tells Pang it's his fault for not looking out for him and asking him if he was contend with the solution they had collectively come up with. However, this makes no sense as they had, well, supposedly collectively decided that this was the best option and he had the chance to oppose it but just chose not to. Pang even asks in the drama why Korn didn't step forward at the end of season one to agree with him that the erasure of all potentials was the only true way to equality if he thought that the Gifted Program was the root of all evil, to which Korn simply responds with some nonsensical argument that "Well, erasing the potentials wouldn't actually change anything," which doesn't even make sense because he literally said he thought it was the only way out a second prior. His character is supposed to be motivated by the fact that his potential brings him more harm than good and that he feels unseen and unheard but really, none of his actions would even solve his issues. What good would it do him to only try to kill Gifted Class XVI while Gifted Class XV stays healthy? One group of students dying wouldn't really change a thing if the ministry or the director was really hell-bent on continuing the Gifted Program as we have already seen that they don't shy away from covering up any deaths or even killing people themselves if needed.

Chanon's storyline also has much of the same problem wherein he is supposed to be tormented by the years he lost to his memory wipeout but instead of blaming the person who is actually responsible for it, which is Director Supot, he lets out his frustrations on his former best friend Pom, who was a literal child when all of this happened, actively helps the director, and then just stays as miserable as he started. I think the writers also noticed that neither Korn's nor Chanon's motivations and actions were really consistent with their characters, so they just casually threw in the fact that they were secretly manipulated by the director all along and are actually still nice people to make everything make sense and redeem their characters. But at least to me, their redemption arc did not work at all because they were still saying and doing horrible things outside of what the director had initially ordered them to do and I also don't believe that some of the characters like Pom, who had been injected with a possibly life-long, incurable illness by Chanon, or Punn, who had been slashed in the gut by Korn and almost driven to insanity, would really forgive them that easily.

I also did not enjoy what they did to Punn and Claire, who had been my favorite characters in season one. Punn just randomly starts developing severe trust issues in Claire just because he is no longer her number one priority and she now sometimes focuses more on other things and people as well like her childhood friend Korn, who is going through a tough time and whom she had basically neglected for Punn until now. Her setting some boundaries should not be enough to send Punn off into insanity as it did this season because it is such a vital part of their relationship in season one that they both care and love each other to the point where one of the main reasons why Punn doesn't go completely insane in season one is exactly because of Claire. After his whole character arc in season one, I cannot believe that his trust would be so easily broken by a one-time instance like Claire not telling him that Korn is the culprit right away but instead choosing to try to peacefully resolve the conflict on her own first. Not to mention that Punn's evil arc doesn't even add anything significant to the plot besides causing a rift between the gifted students for two episodes or so because he never actually ends up using the powers he copied for anything really bad.

As for Claire, she pretty much faces the same fate as Mon this season. They say that they want to take matters into their own hands and try to help Korn before he ends up in jail for the rest of his life or something even worse happens to him since he is still their friend after all. This whole thing is framed as some girl power move in the show, which is ironic because they just vanish for the rest of this story arc after outsourcing their plan to Pang and Time, making them rely on men once again to solve their problems. It also heavily plays into the stereotype of "girls are emotional and boys are logical," while simultaneously praising itself as some feminist plot point.

But Pang is by far the character that was hit the worst this season. Instead of showing how he grows into some charismatic leader that guides his friends into a bright and hopeful future, he just gets treated badly by them all the time. Everything he does gets framed as something terrible and he is held responsible for every single little thing, even things he doesn't have anything to do with. He does what they want but it ends badly? That's his fault. He ends up going with his own idea and resolves the problem? The other students feel betrayed by him for not listening to them. He is nice to his friends? Probably just because he wants something from them, that sly manipulator.

No matter what happens, he cannot win. His friends believe he doesn't truly care for them the moment he even makes a small slip-up and all his hard work trying to accommodate for them and their needs gets unrecognized. He could easily use his potential to simply make them do whatever he wants instead of playing friends with them but the other characters don't even stop for a second to consider that he is sacrificing his own mental health by refusing to use his potential on them just so that they can have their freedom.

He gets blamed for not saving Korn and for not realizing that he had this whole evil scheme planned from the beginning when really, there was no way for him to know because it was shown that despite his inner dissatisfaction with his own life, Korn was actually still planning to warn his friends of the virus instead of spreading it before the director interfered. But instead of putting the blame on Korn, or later on the director after they find out about the manipulation, they just put it on Pang, who at best only indirectly influenced the whole thing. After Pang witnesses Korn's suicide attempt, not knowing if he survived it, and he is led to believe that Time has died under his watch, too, none of his friends offer their condolences or mental support to him. We only see a half-hearted scene of Ohm knocking on his door once to check up on him but that really doesn't change anything because right after, Ohm suddenly decides to also blame Pang for everything and says he's ruining his nice and carefree life, which really doesn't suit his character at all because he is supposed to be one of Pang's best friends. Even Wave, who suddenly becomes uncharacteristically sweet this season, just lashes out at Pang as he seems fit, and then when the writers need him to, he goes back to loving Pang unconditionally. Really, almost all members of the original cast turned into detestable characters in the second season because all of them were willing to let their juniors die from the virus to keep their own comfort and literally didn't bat an eye while blaming Pang for their own mistakes and driving him into such a deep depression that he even says in one episode that he'd rather die than continue on just to push forward his ideals, which ended up just bringing him more pain than good.

In the end, Pang isn't even the one who really affects any change. For the last two or three seasons, it suddenly becomes "The Gifted: Grace is the Best" and the writers conveniently give her some clairvoyant ability to fix all of their problems, not even addressing the whole can of time paradox they have opened by doing so. Yes, Pang makes the final decision in spreading the soundwave and making everyone in the whole country gifted but before that, he just passively stands around while Grace cleans up the whole mess.

But really, the biggest problem this season has is that it just feels like the writers thought they needed to change things up a bit so it's not entirely the same plot as in the first season, so they simply resolved what should have been the main conflict— getting rid of the Gifted Program and creating equality amongst the students of Ritdha Wittayakom High School— in the first few episodes and forcibly introduced some new, even bigger problem with NYX-88. The characters already struggled to solve the much easier to solve problem and now this? A basic "a deadly virus has spread" storyline like in every other dystopian piece of media? Really?

The writing just felt so uninspired and it really just infuriated me at some point. Characters changed their personalities at the whim of the writers instead of actually developing or developed new abilities as needed. The story jumped from Director Supot being the villain to Miss Darin being the villain to the ministry being the villain to Korn being the villain back to Miss Darin being the villain again but this time with Punn's help to Director Supot being the villain again but this time with Pom's help to Chanon being the villain to Director Supot being the villain once again to even future Grace being the villain for a brief second at the end. I saw people praise the writing of the show in the comments under the episodes but really, nothing made sense. The writers just hoped you wouldn't notice that there were so many plot holes as long as they made the story convoluted enough.

Just to address some of the things that really made no sense: Why did the ministry suddenly change their opinion on the Gifted Program? Because someone else took charge of it? Am I really supposed to believe that the Ministry of Education is the highest-ranking entity in the entirety of Thailand and one man has the capability to shut down a whole project that was framed as crucial to the development of the country until now just because he wants to? And there's also really nobody in the entire government who questioned whether it was ethically and morally correct to let a batch of kids die because of some useless power play?

Also, if Director Supot has the ability to make a person believe they are a whole other person, why not just use his potential on the minister from the start, before he could notify anyone else of his potential and take security measures, if the minister is the only member of the ministry standing in his way? Why not make him believe they are best friends or even make the minister make him a part of the ministry so he can closely monitor their actions? And if you can actually use your potential on someone else with the same potential as long as they are mentally weak enough, why didn't Supot at least try to use it on Pang while he was clearly depressed and mentally unwell?

It also makes no sense to me why the director would send Namtaan overseas because her ability could be a danger to him since she can see the past but not use his ability on Namtaan herself by telling her to stay away but on her mother instead. If Namtaan was never under the influence of his potential and knew that the real reason she was sent away was that she was a danger to the director all along, why did she not try to get back by herself? Why did she not tell her friends about it and encourage them to steal some of the director's belongings, ship them to her before he found out, and she would then proceed to uncover all his secrets far away, securely tucked away in her overseas home? And if anything, wouldn't it be more secure for the director to not tell Namtaan she's a danger to him and then quickly infect her with NYX-88 to make her compliant as soon as he got his hands on it? I get that Namtaan's actress probably really didn't appear in the series because of some scheduling conflict but then why even say that that was a possibility?

I just really feel like it was such a shame that they decided to waste the perfectly fine story from season one by continuing it like this and I honestly would not recommend this season to anyone, even if they were fans of the first season. I felt like I was wasting my time watching it and it just make my blood boil with how bad it was. The more time I spend writing this, the more things I find that either don't add up and I could keep going if I wanted to but I think this much is enough.