It's time to admit: this is Elisabeth Moss' world and we're just living in it. After smashing through the glass ceiling of Mad Men, staring down the face of dystopian nightmare Handmaid's Tale and nailing the perfect New Zealand accent in Top of the Lake, Moss is back as stony-faced Detective Robin Griffin in the second season of Jane Campion's crime drama masterpiece.
Seriously, how many other actors on TV are we going to see fronting two of the most exciting "peak TV" shows that 2017 can muster?
Set five years after the first grim chapter, one that followed the disappearance of a pregnant 12-year-old, Detective Senior Constable Robin Griffin finds herself on the sun-soaked shores of Bondi beach.
After the traumatic events in Godzone and a relationship lost to adultery, she's throwing herself into her work elsewhere. Soon enough, the work washes up right at her feet in the form of a battered suitcase on the beach, seams spilling with black hair belonging to an anonymous victim known as "China Girl". With no leads or identification, the body in the suitcase opens up a can of worms into the world of human trafficking, sex work and exploitation.
Nicole Kidman stars in season two of Top of the Lake.
Despite all this, Top of the Lake: China Girl could equally be considered a messy family drama - just one that happens to have caught a seaside homicide in its web along the way.
As Griffin investigates the case, she's also piecing together her own puzzle, reaching out to her daughter who was put up for adoption after Griffin fell pregnant following a brutal sexual assault as a teen. As we get to know the stroppy long-lost daughter Mary (Alice Englert), and her fractured parents Julia (Nicole Kidman) and Pyke (Ewen Leslie), their family on the edge of explosion becomes equally as intriguing as the dead girl on the beach.
For a series concerned with the lives of women and the intricacies of motherhood, it's worth noting Griffin's long-lost daughter Mary is played by Jane Campion's own daughter. Englert is fantastically frustrating in her precocious rebellion - all Dostoyevsky and cigarettes.
As her adoptive academic mother, Kidman is transformative well beyond the bad teeth and the grey wig. Game of Thrones fans rejoice, for Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) is a shining beacon of Labradorian joy as Griffin's hapless sidekick Miranda. I have big hopes for this unlikely duo to strengthen in the coming storm.
Concerns of gender politics and violence have long been in Campion's wheelhouse, and China Girl works to highlight violence against women that is far more insidious than just the instances that end with a corpse in a suitcase.
From the gross coffee group of nerds who ogle the waitress and rate sex workers online, to Griffin's male trainee cadets who undermine her every move, to her colleagues who won't stop asking her out on a date, China Girl takes great pains to wring out and condense the horror of being a woman into a universe that would border on parody if it all wasn't so real.
Nicole Kidman with Kiwi director Jane Campion. Photo / Getty Images
Perhaps the biggest departure from the deft gloom of season one is this: China Girl is funny. Like, really funny.
There are masterful moments of dry dinner table dialogue, physical slapstick comedy and even subtle visual gags - any shot with Miranda and Griffin in the same shot looks like the VHS cover of Twins.
The darkest joke of all comes in the opening scene of the season, when a mystery sullen pair attempt to roll the corpse-yielding wheelie suitcase off a cliff, only for it to get stuck in a nook on the edge. Pathetically, they have to nudge it until it tips off.
Season one, as beautiful and brutal as it was, felt at times like a death march into the depths of human despair.
China Girl takes a completely fresh approach to tackle issues that remain equally as dark. The foreboding New Zealand landscape that once heaved with dread has been swapped out for the sunny, seedy cityscape of Sydney; the rural isolation replaced with cramped brothels and sticky apartment blocks.
Judging from the premiere, it's already clear that season two of Top of the Lake is willing to plunge deeper, go wider and think bigger than the first. After all, we're dealing with a whole ocean now.
