Those who were able to branch outside of their subtitle comfort zones with streaming on Netflix were probably pleasantly surprised by How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Season 1.
The show which was loosely inspired by real-life events found an energy that most shows do not possess. And it borrowed a lot of the same ingredients that made David Fincher’s The Social Network relentlessly engaging.
But with Season 2 hitting Netflix today, did the show find lightning in a bottle twice with its second outing? Will audiences still care about Moritz and the saga of MyDrugs?
Here is our How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Season 2 review.
How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Season 2 review
In comparison to the first season, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Season 2 has vastly different stakes. Where Season 1 dealt with Moritz breaking his moral character to win back the affection of his girlfriend Lisa, Season 2 has Moritz risking his friendships for the sake of riches.
The season involves Moritz (Maximilian Mundt), Lenny, and Dan looking for a way out of their business dealings with their distributors known as The Dutch. All three teens have made close to a million dollars in Bitcoin operating MyDrugs and Lenny and Dan are ready to pull out.
When a nervous and anxious Moritz meets with his Dutch partners he asks about what would happen if they were to pull out of MyDrugs — worrying that a departure could mean death. They suggest it would not be personal — but the company would forfeit to them in full ownership.
Simply put — this does not satisfy Moritz.
And the result is Moritz lying to both Lenny and Dan — suggesting leaving MyDrugs would mean death. That is, unless they each make another $5 million each. And he does this because his pride won’t let him give up his control.
This leads to a consistent struggle for Moritz in the second season: His inability to keep his lies together or just to be honest about how he feels about anything.
It’s clear the fragility of dishonesty was an obvious theme throughout the second season. There’s even a quote from Moritz early on about how telling a lie is an investment, and investments just require “staying on top of things.”
Watching his character constantly trying to dig himself out of his own lies is still engaging as ever.
A key difference that might be frustrating for some is How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Season 2 does not spend much time on the techy side of things this time around. Much like The Social Network, the first season made for a compelling watch because it dived into online subjects about the business such as the Dark Web, coding, business building, and illegal activity on the internet.
Season 2 strays away from that somewhat and leans more heavily into the friendships and relationships struggles. There are a lot more teen comedy/drama elements rather than a focus on the ferocious lifestyle of being a famous online drug kingpin. Most of the consequences of the latter are not given a spotlight until closer to the end of the second season.
That said, just like the drugs Moritz and his pals sell on MyDrugs, the show is just as addicting as ever.
The series is edited in such a way that it feels like we as viewers are watching it from the eyes of a teenager with ADHD. The energy is always moving and images of texts, emails, emojis, and frenetic cuts give the show’s quality an addictive liveliness.
Furthermore, positioning more to the character side of the series is benefited by the solid well-crafted performances of the three leads of the show.
While Moritz becomes the unlikeable teenage version of Walter White, his friends Lenny and Dan kind of steal the show this season, much like Jesse Pinkman did in Breaking Bad.
Danilo Kamber — who plays the wheelchairbound Lenny — gets one of the more touching subplots this season when he finally meets his Discord girlfriend Kira. Without spoiling anything, it will surely put a smile on viewer’s faces.
And Damian Hardung — the actor who plays the jock Dan — gets some of the best character growth of all. It’s a common cliche to make the good-looking popular kid in high school an arrogant jerk in movies. But the writers here made Dan into a realistic teen who actually has a bigger heart than his appearance would suggest.
Overall thoughts
Fans of the first season will undoubtedly find lots to enjoy in the second season as Moritz fights his way to keep up with all the seeds of dishonesty he has planted. And by the time it wraps, the closing moments of Season 2 lead to a promise of a third season that will have higher stakes than ever before.
This makes How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Season 2 just as entertaining and binge-worthy as ever. And while it abandons some of the tech-driven aspects that made Season 1 so fascinating, the second outing maintains its addictiveness with energetic pacing and extremely loveable main characters. All in all, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) still remains the most underrated series on Netflix.
How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.