Netflix’s Tomb Raider Gets Bigger — And So Much Better — In Season 2
Lara Croft steps out of her comfort zone.
The Tomb Raider franchise has a new lease on life. With a new live-action series officially in the works and two brand-new games on the way, Lara Croft will rise again. It’s an exciting time to be a fan of the treasure-hunting girlboss, even if it may take some time for these new adventures to arrive. Fortunately, for the less patient among us, Netflix has spent the last two years continuing the Lara Croft saga in animation.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft was a much-needed breath of fresh air when it debuted in 2024, the first product to truly “get” its heroine in a long while. Less a straightforward reboot than a sequel to the Survivor trilogy (comprised of the Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider games), the series found a middle ground between Lara’s gritty origin story and the campier games that came elsewhere in her tenure. The Legend of Lara Croft felt like part of two worlds, straddling mysticism and grounded adventuring in one fell swoop. That largely worked to its advantage in Season 1, and its new second season delivered a worthwhile follow-up by diving headfirst into the supernatural.
When we last saw Lara Croft, the inimitable tomb raider learned a valuable lesson about the merits of teamwork. No longer a traumatized lone wolf, Lara renewed her commitment to her teammates, vowing to prioritize her relationships over the treasures she dedicates her life to hunting. That new responsibility sends Lara on a mission to rescue Sam Nishimura (Karen Fukuhara), her childhood best friend, from the crosshairs of a faceless syndicate.
Saving Sam is a surprisingly simple feat, if only because Lara gains an unexpected ally in Fig (Marisha Ray). She’s the hired muscle for Mila (Tricia Helfer), the altruistic leader of a slightly shady research facility called Pithos. Their name, derived from the ancient Greek word for box — “As in Pandora’s,” Lara remarks — is the first of many red flags. It’s fairly obvious that Mila’s intentions aren’t entirely pure, whatever she might say about her efforts to heal the world, rescue artifacts from museums, and return them to their indigenous lands. Unfortunately, our heroes don’t get the memo until it’s much too late, and Lara donates an ancient Yoruba mask from her family’s personal collection to Pithos.
Said mask is a conduit to the powers of an Orisha, one of many divine spirits native to West Africa. The Orisha are akin to demigods, a parallel that Tomb Raider wields as a clever shorthand: the immortal figures have lived among humans for millennia, concealing their powers to heal, control disease, or manifest monstrous vegetation. Mila is on a mission to recover as many of these powers as she can in an attempt to literally restart the planet, and she has no qualms with murdering Orisha or kickstarting a few extinction-level events to do it. So begins yet another adventure to save the world, but Tomb Raider Season 2 breaks the mold by teaming Lara up with the surviving Orisha, serving up a deep dive into Yoruba culture in the process.
Yoruba mythology takes center stage in Tomb Raider Season 2.
Tomb Raider Season 2 reintroduces Lara as a well-rounded team player. Rather than pushing her allies away and traipsing into danger alone, she’s more willing to lean on Sam and fan favorites like Jonah (Earl Baylon) and Zip (Allen Maldonado). And, crucially, she’s much better equipped to help her new allies in the fractured Orisha. Not unlike the Greek pantheon, the Orisha are a majorly dysfunctional family, driven apart by centuries of betrayal and hurt. None is more broken than Eshu (a fantastic O-T Fagbenle), a trickster god who’s essentially the Yoruba answer to Loki or Hermes. How he lost the mask that granted him the power to shapeshift and traverse through space is a tragic secret that Tomb Raider spends most of the season unspooling; it’s also one of several brilliant and tactful takedowns of colonialism.
It’s not every day that a major franchise delivers such a competent crash course on African history and folklore, which makes this new season of Tomb Raider so refreshing. Lara Croft has long reckoned with the damage that treasure hunting can cause, but focusing on the toll of the Transatlantic Slave Trade makes that hit closer to home. This globe-trotting quest explores the African diaspora in Brazil, New Orleans, and the Caribbean, tackling all the insidious ways that West African culture has been subdued across centuries. The Orisha embody multiple angles of that wound, from the psychological to the physical, with Eshu’s own identity crisis — and eventual redemption — serving as the lynchpin of a supremely satisfying adventure.
Tomb Raider goes bigger and more mystical in its second season, setting the tone for Lara Croft’s next phase.
While its first season played things a little safe with a familiar world-ending threat, Season 2 offers a new and truly exciting path for the Tomb Raider franchise. Sure, Mila isn’t all that different from the megalomaniacal billionaires that Lara’s fought in the past, but Tomb Raider offsets that sameness by delivering a unique ensemble adventure, and by leaning into a mystical world that remains largely untapped elsewhere. Season 2 is even more watchable than its predecessor, and increasingly eager to expand its small-screen world. Sadly, the series won’t continue (Netflix pulled the plug this past September), but The Legend of Lara Croft set a high bar that future Tomb Raider stories will have to work overtime to clear.
