When you’re binge-watching a television show, nothing leaves you quite so desperate to smash that “next episode” button as a cliffhanger ending. In the case of Ratched, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix prequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest about the iconic Nurse Ratched, the show left viewers hanging in delicious limbo, with Mildred Ratched speeding down the highway after confessing to mass murder. But will Ratched get another season, or will we be left wondering forever? It’s enough to drive a person downright crazy. If you, like the residents of the Lucia State Hospital, are stark raving mad to find out what happens next, read on for the full scoop on Ratched Season Two.
Will There Be a Ratched Season Two?
Good news: Season Two of Ratched is a definite. When Netflix greenlit the project, it ordered two seasons up front, with nine episodes apiece.
When Will Ratched Season Two Stream on Netflix?
Here’s the rub: Ratched Season Two is a definite, but with the coronavirus pandemic continuing to throw roadblocks into life on film and television sets, it could be a while before the cast and crew can get back to work. The jury is still out on when Ratched can resume production, according to the leading lady herself.
"Nobody knows anything about season two because Ryan [Murphy], with the number of things he has going on, who’s to know when that’s all going to begin, and you throw in the pandemic and then we think, ‘Well who knows,’" said Sarah Paulson, who stars as Mildred Ratched.
Paulson went on to say, "I like to think about it like The Crown, because I’m a desperate fan of The Crown and the amount of time I have to wait for another season always makes me so fucking crazy. But then when it comes, I’m just like a raved nut just sitting there, and I devour it. I like to put us into that timeframe in my mind that if people consume it the way I hope they do, they will anxiously be waiting for the next instalment when it does come. And it’ll make it that much sweeter.”
What Will Ratched Season Two Be About?
According to Paulson, Murphy’s ultimate goal is to bring Nurse Ratched full circle to the setting of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: the Salem State Hospital, circa the Seventies. However, Paulson isn’t confident that Season Two will bring Nurse Ratched up to the events of the book. If it does, she cautions, it won’t retread familiar ground.
“But I don’t know that we would ever go into the hospital, simply because – and this is me saying this, I don’t know what Ryan’s plan would be – I certainly don’t want to see me acting opposite a computer-generated Jack Nicholson,” Paulson said. “I don’t think that sounds like a good idea. So I think if we end up in that era, it would be more about what Nurse Ratched’s life was when she turned the key in her white uniform, coming back into her house from those days at the hospital with all those events that happened there.”
At the conclusion of season one, the final episode wrapped with a two-year time jump. Mildred’s brother, Edmund Tolleson, rang up Mildred and her lover Gwendolyn in Mexico. Believing that she once planned to kill him, Edmund tells Mildred that he’s found her hideout in Mexico, and that he’ll be traveling there to kill her and Gwendolyn. Mildred, who killed seven innocent nurses instead of Edmund, responds that she’ll kill him first. With the chess board set, Season Two promises a delicious game of cat and mouse—with psychological consequences for Mildred.
“I think what you do see at the end of this season is that, once Mildred realises that the very thing she has spent her entire life governed by has betrayed and forsaken her – which is her brother – and has now brought harm and more mayhem by taking the lives of seven innocent women, who are also nurses, she says, ‘I’m coming for you,'” Paulson said. “What you’re probably going to see is a Mildred who has now become even harder, because the thing that kept her soft was the part of her that was engaged in the love and the protection and the desire for absolution, as it pertained to her brother. Now that that’s gone, I don’t know who she’ll become. But further and further away from her heart and her humanity, I can be pretty sure about that.”
There you have it: expect Mildred and Edmund to face off, with serious consequences for the fate of Mildred’s soul. Watch this space for updates as we continue to learn more.
Adrienne Westenfeld is the Books and Fiction Editor at Esquire, where she oversees books coverage, edits fiction, and curates the Esquire Book Club.
