The first season of BritBox‘s After The Flood was all over the place, trying to cram a climate-change disaster story into a murder mystery that included corrupt cops. It was a lot and not all of it worked. The second season takes place a year after the events of the first.

AFTER THE FLOOD SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: At a factory, we see people running around, and they go through a door marked “AEXOUS LABRATORY SERVICES.”

The Gist: It’s been a year since the devastating flood in the Yokshire town where Joanna Marshall (Sophie Rundle) is a cop. She’s been recently promoted to Detective Constable after her work on the murder case that was discovered after the flood, and her daughter is about to turn one. But not all is well: She divorced her husband, Pat Holman (Matt Stokoe), after finding out that he’s a corrupt cop. And both Joanna and Pat are angry that Sergeant Phil Mackie (Nicholas Gleaves), another “bent” copper that they think had a lot to do with the previous murder, has been untouchable.

As she drives back from the beach, where her mother Molly (Lorraine Ashbourne) does a weekly polar plunge with her friends in tribute to her late husband, they come across an abandoned van with a shattered windshield with blood on it. She calls it in, and returns to it right before her daughter’s party, checking in with her former patrol partner, Deepa Das (Tripti Tripuraneni).

At the party, both Joanna and Pat are angry when Mackie shows up. One of the reasons why Mackie is untouchable is because he can threaten both Joanna and Pat’s careers with what he knows about their various ethical breaches.

Also, a controlled fire erupts on the moorland owned by the Benson family, angering Pat’s teenage niece Sophie Kamali (Maui Connock), who is sure that those fires have contributed to the flooding that the town has suffered through, and that more floods are in the town’s future.

The next morning, a body is found in the moors. Joanna and her boss, DCI Ravi Balsara (Anil Desai), arrive at the scene, which is where Joanna meets DS Sam Bradley (Jill Halfpenny), who is starting her first day of work after transferring from Newcastle. Joanna spots a Medical Alert bracelet on the victim, and also manages to figure out that the keys the victim was holding were from a nearby farm.

But the vexing part of the mystery is that it seems that the victim was shot hours after he died. It also turns out that the farm where the victim worked has become a dumping ground for construction debris. That debris injured a man named Xav Palmer (Matthew McNulty), whom the owner of the farm was chasing when Joanna arrived. But Palmer escapes custody a couple of times before she has a chance to question him.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Written by Mick Ford, After The Flood continues to marry a standard British murder procedural to a climate-change-disaster miniseries like Five Days At Memorial.

Our Take: The second season of After The Flood suffers from the same problem the first season had: Two many story threads going in all sorts of directions. The idea is that this Yorkshire town is not only beset by natural disasters due to climate change, but there seem to be a lot of murders going on there, too. Those murders may or may not be connected to the climate problems and their causes. It may not matter, because the town seems to be full of more corrupt cops per capita than any big city you can think of.

Oh, and Joanna’s personal life is a mess. That is certainly always going to be a feature of any British cop series, but her messiness, along with the personal messiness of her mother Molly, just keeps squeezing the show’s ability to really dig in and explore either the climate change issue, the murder story at hand, or both.

It really feels like Ford is taking on even more story threads this season, given that Joanna and Pat are going to keep trying to bring down Mackie while all of this other stuff is going on. And, oh by the way, there will be more fires, which might bring on more flooding due to lack of vegetation that could hold in torrential rains. Feel overwhelmed yet?

Performance Worth Watching: We are still fans of Sophie Rundle as Jo, as she is the strongest most layered presence in a show that’s full of flat, cliched characters.

Sex And Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As another fire rages in the moors, Joanna, looking for Sophie, ends up rescuing another teen. Then she goes with the EMTs to where another person has been found. It ends up being a body, shot in the chest like the first one was.

Sleeper Star: We’re curious to see what roll Jill Halfpenny, who plays the just-arrived DS Sam Bradley, will play in this story. Is she going to be a confidant for Jo? Or is she yet another “bent” cop?

Most Pilot-y Line: Palmer, bleeding out after being impaled by debris, still takes the time to tell Jo that she looks familiar to him, and if she’s on the dating apps.

Our Call: SKIP IT. We wish After The Flood would concentrate on one story instead of the handful it has to juggle, because the talent in front and behind the camera is so good. But the show continues to be messy and muddled, and really hard to connect with.

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.