Back in spring of 2021 I watched the first season of "The Vow" as it aired on Sky Documentary channel. Though I felt it was interesting, I thought that it stretched it's points a little thin with 9 episodes and I couldn't believe that a second season was planned. Having watched that second season now I can see why the court case inspired them to run again, but I do still feel that the whole story, told in six hours would have been enough.
Keith Raniere is arrested in Mexico and charged with various racketeering offenses. As the charges come, and the evidence is prepared, various members of NXIVM are shocked by elements of the situation that they didn't know. Realising the seriousness of allegations, Nancy Salzman, pleads guilty and provides more evidence to the prosecution. There are some diehards though that believe Keith is innocent.
Much of this season is focused on the trial. Ironically, that seems to be the only bits of the show that aren't diligently videoed and recorded. Instead animation, in the style of court drawings along with reconstructed audio is used for those scenes. Unfortunately, it's the mechanisms of the trial that I perhaps struggled with the most. I feel that the show falls into the trap that the defence accuse the government of and focusing on the more salacious acts, so I understand some of the sex crimes he's guilty of, but almost nothing of the rest of the charges.
A focus of this series is Nancy Salzman, who we've seen in the first season as Keith's right hand woman and pretty much the face of NXIVM, but once she starts participating in the documentary we're presented with the idea of a very different woman, essentially one of Keith's earliest victims who turned into, at best, an enabler. I'm never totally sure how much I believe her here, but I do think that Raniere's strength, perhaps even his only ability, given how singularly unimpressive both the man and the message actually are, is his skill of identifying vulnerable people he can exploit.
Ultimately, though it's a worthwhile story, and with that extraordinary amount of footage to go through, I still feel like this documentary series is solid, but far longer than it needed to be.