All five episodes of Tiger King Season 2 are available now on Netflix.
Watching the five new episodes that comprise Tiger King 2, one is reminded that, sometimes, you can never go back. In March 2020, when humanity was freshly stuck inside due to the global pandemic lockdowns, the arrival of Netflix’s Tiger King docuseries was the trashy distraction we all needed. But now in November 2021, with the pandemic still killing way too many people and humanity beyond weary of being caged inside our homes, Tiger King 2, as they say, hits different.
As a refresher, Tiger King was the sordid, tabloidy expose of Joe Exotic, the owner of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma. With his bleached mullet, terrible self-produced music videos, and rickety zoo housing a variety of abandoned animals, including big cats, Exotic came across like a modern day, white trash P.T. Barnum. But in the course of the doc narrative, the carnival sideshow aspect got dark with his bizarre obsession and hate for rival conservationist Carole Baskin.
Tiger King 2 picks up where the insanity left off, with Exotic in prison for a 22-year sentence for hiring a hitman to kill Baskin and violations of the Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act. Exotic signed his animals and zoo over to another frenemy in private zookeeping, Jeff Lowe, and so he’s a bigger player now too. This docuseries also tracks where the other major players from the original series are, using a mix of brand-new footage and a lot of news clips, since various participants, including Carole and Howard Baskin, didn’t come back for new interviews.
The new episodes hit specific themes, like the opener focusing mostly on Exotic and his quest for a pardon from Donald Trump before he left office. “The Carole Diaries” and “Bounty Hunting” function as a two-part quasi-Dateline episode trying to get to the bottom of Carole’s missing ex husband, Don Lewis. And the last two episodes, “The Lyin’ King” and “Stark Raving Mad,” are about the miscreants and shady thugs who are still operating private zoos for profit in Exotic’s circle, including Lowe and Tim Stark.
Directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin are clearly picking at the bones of their footage for this follow-up. There’s plenty of re-treading of the more salacious stories, including the bounty on Carole’s head and Don’s disappearance, with many rumors that Carole killed him. The doc doesn’t confirm anything, it just sniffs a little deeper in some areas, making the already sordid tales more complicated or just gross. The fact that Don Lewis spent a lot of time in Costa Rica with underaged women was not something I wanted or needed to know, but this series gave me that and now it’s there forever in my brain. In fact, the sheer volume of distasteful stories unearthed about the gaggle of awful people in this niche world of exotic animals should earn us all a big bottle of eye bleach. The only mammals that come out of this series with any impunity are the animals stuck inside the misery wrought on them by these bottom-feeder humans.
And that’s a big problem with Tiger King 2; the animals stuck in deplorable living conditions are the true victims, yet they are barely focused on until the final episode. Carole and a PETA lawyer are the only talking heads who genuinely lament what is happening to them in the abysmal baton passing of animals from one bad actor to the next, and it makes this a distasteful watch overall. In the fourth episode, from one of Joe’s many inside-prison phone interviews, he even admits that the financial machinations going on between Lowe and Stark and their cronies are “not about the tigers,” which might as well be the subtitle for this season. It’s galling that it took a few years in prison for Exotic to get the irony of how his own callous and thoughtless treatment of his animals is the karma bestowed upon him as he now sits in a small cage.
If there’s anything of interest to be gleaned from the five new hours of material, it’s the revelations surrounding Allen Glover, who was supposedly the hired hitman paid by Joe to kill Carole Baskin. His on-camera confessions implicating other players in the plot might feel worthy enough to tread through this series as the last two episodes lay out the lurid and interwoven destinies of these rich, narcissistic men who are more interested in ego than ecology. They scream and threaten police as warrants are served, and knife one another in the back as easily as breathing in order to cover their own asses as the Federal and local authorities dig deeper into their crimes and cover-ups. So, even if Glover ends up revealing evidence here that could get Exotic a new trial and out of jail, there’s still a host of crimes he did commit against his animals and others. The moral of this new story is that maybe every single one of them all need to be in jail, and then maybe nature can finally heal.
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