Review: Shadow and Bone: Season 2

Remember that episode of Friends when Rachel and Chandler were fighting over the cheesecake and it ended up all over the hall, but tasted so good that they just ate it off the floor? That’s the best analogy I have for season two of Shadow and Bone. It’s delicious, but it has, in fact, exploded all over the floor. Or, if you like, it has exploded all over the floor, but it still tastes delicious.

Perhaps this was inevitable. On the one hand, there’s the looming spectre of cancellation-happy Netflix hanging over the show, which no doubt made everyone want to squeeze in as much material as they could just in case the axe falls. Then there’s showrunner Eric Heisserer’s open preference for the Six of Crows characters, inserting them into the narrative at every available opportunity and expediting Alina’s story to get to theirs.

Even the structure of the Grisha-verse book series itself poses a problem, starting with the Shadow and Bone trilogy* which was a standard YA trope-ridden fantasy of “plucky girl plucked from obscurity negotiates love triangle while saving world from sexy dark lord who has the hots for her.”

* Simultaneously kickstarting the current surge of Slavic fantasy novels and the YA trend of [noun] and [noun] titles, including A Court of Frost and Starlight, The Girl of Fire and Storm, A Curse So Dark and Lonely, A Book of Spirits and Thieves, A Sorrow Fierce and Falling, and Girls of Storm and Shadow, which is part of the Girls of Paper and Fire trilogy – yes, those are all for real.

The trilogy was followed by the Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom duology, which deliberately set out to buck those clichés, a gas-lamp fantasy centred around a heist and the complex dynamics and backstories of its six core characters. Lastly, there’s the King of Scars/Rule of Wolves duology, which wrapped up plot-points, character arcs and political situations from the previous two sets of books. There’s also a couple of short story collections, such as The Language of Thorns and Lives of the Saints, which provide more details on the world’s invented mythology.

The second season of the Netflix show builds its story from nearly all these books: Siege and Storm, Ruin and Rising, Crooked Kingdom, King of Scars and Lives of the Saints, which is how we get to the exploded cheesecake.

Xena Warrior Princess: Key to the Kingdom, Daughter of Pomira, If The Shoe Fits...

The next three episodes are comprised of two very light comedy episodes, and one very serious one that is let down by trite writing, bad acting, and an attempt to resolve a profoundly complex scenario involving a kidnapped child, a grieving family, and multi-generational hostilities between two cultures within forty-five minutes. Xena may have many skills, but even she can’t pull that one off.

All three episodes are filler, though you have to recall that this was the norm rather than the exception back in the early noughties. In these days of heavily serialized storytelling, it’s actually something of a treat to watch three standalone stories (regardless of quality) that are entirely self-contained. Bkac when most shows had twenty-two episodes per season, there was time for characters to breath, to bounce off each other, and to just plain have fun. Imagine that!

Woman of the Month: General Nanisca

General Nanisca from The Woman King

Nanisca is to The Woman King what Maximus was to Gladiator: not just the protagonist of an historical epic, but the entry point through which an audience can be introduced to a very different time and place; a character who is not only of the world they inhabit, but also someone that embodies the recognizably human traits of honour, bravery and familial ties. Both have endured a horrific tragedy, both are formidable fighters, and both are driven by a deep loyalty to those around them.

Of course, if you want someone who can pull all that off, you cast Viola Davis. She’s a force of nature in this movie, which is no mean feat when you’re in your mid-fifties – something I’m only mentioning because she herself brought it up in various interviews. Her age is woven into the basis of her characterization, and there are several times in which we see her tend to long-standing injuries or physically struggle to keep up with the younger warriors.

There’s also an inner conflict between her sense of duty and her moral compass – every time she disciplines new recruit Nawi, the audience is very aware that she herself is a rule-breaker.

In short, Nanisca is the quintessential protagonist of an historical epic. Everything about her – her background, her personality, her status, her trauma – is larger than life. I was genuinely moved by some of her scenes with Nawi, and her emotional arc is the main thoroughfare of the film. Towards the end of the film she tells another character: “you are not the thing that hurt me” and I bawled my eyes out.

More than anything, this is a story of healing, which isn’t something that was apparent in any of the reviews or promotional material surrounding the film’s release. Nanisca is a striking example of a woman who suffered a terrible ordeal, and yet has the strength to find her way back out of the darkness. Everything else in the film is secondary (or supplementary) to this inner journey.

For this reason, I’m aware but not hugely worked up about the liberties taken with the portrayal of Dahomey, which is the advantage of being an adult who can grasp that history and entertainment seldom go hand-in-hand. Because The Woman King isn’t just a depiction of this specific time and place, it’s a story about women and their connections to each other – largely for good, sometimes for bad, but as part of a much more complex and nuanced portrayal of womanhood than anyone seemed to give the film credit for.

Reading/Watching Log #89

Over the Easter break, I made it my goal to watch one eighties fantasy film per night, partly because why not, and partly because I’m so exhausted with the churn of today’s media. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, nothing excites me anymore – all the biggest franchises are just remakes and reboots and sequels and prequels and I am SO BORED with all of it. So I deemed it was time to revisit my childhood and watch some cult-classics.

They ended up being The NeverEnding Story, Ladyhawke, Legend, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride and Willow. Good times.

This post also kicks off SLAVIC FANTASY MONTH, which may well last until the end of the year given all the books I have to read in this niche subgenre. It’s something I’ve been organizing for a while now, with at least twenty-five books based on Slavic folklore and legend stacked in a neat pile next to my bookcase:

It’s going to take me a while to get through all of these, so buckle up.

And as it happens, I’m about to start a new job. I’ll still be a librarian, but at a different – much bigger – library. I have mixed feelings. The position I was in was full-time, but its permanency depended on whether the colleague I had taken over for would be able to secure a promotion in another library.

And... she wasn’t. Which means that when I was offered a full-time, permanent position elsewhere, I didn’t have much choice but to accept. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to a change of scenery and the chance to meet more people; on the other, I’m going to be well outside my comfort zone and forced into a half-hour commute in rush hour traffic each morning. That I’m not looking forward to, especially not in the dark winter months.

But it would seem the universe wants me to try something new, and who am I to argue with that? My mortgage won’t let me.

Legend of the Seeker: Dark

I’m back! No, I hadn’t forgotten about this show, I’ve just been swamped with other stuff – but in saying that, these reviews will probably go on hiatus for a while, as I really want to get to the third and final season of His Dark Materials.

But let’s have a quick catch-up first. When we last saw our heroes, they’d been forced to part ways, with Richard accompanying several Sisters of the Light (essentially kung fu nuns with magical powers and ninja-stars) to the Palace of the Prophets in the Old World (no context is given for either of these things, save that they’re shot through a gold filter to differentiate them from the New World) while Zed, Kahlan and Cara go in search of a replacement Seeker.

The head sister is called Verna, who has apparently been searching for Richard for the last twenty-four years (so if nothing else, we know they’re really bad at finding things) and has the solution to his debilitating headaches: to get the proper training that will allow him to balance out the potent magic of both his bloodlines. Richard wants to get there, learn what he has to, and leave again ASAP, though it’s obvious that Verna has other plans...

Woman of the Month: Evelyn Quan Wang

Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Some of these entries chose themselves, and this month was always going to be Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang. What a character, what a performance!

She’s a middle-aged Chinese-American immigrant and laundromat owner who is clearly enduring rather than enjoying her life. With a stressful tax audit, a judgmental visiting father, a husband vying for a divorce, and a gay daughter whose orientation she still wants to keep under-wraps, Evelyn is not the most auspicious heroine of any type of movie. But as Yeoh said in her Oscar acceptance speech: “ladies, don't let anybody tell you you're ever past your prime.”

While at the IRD office, an alternative-world version of her husband Waylan pulls her into a janitor’s closet and gives her some mindboggling news: the multiverse is real, and in his reality, Evelyn is a genius scientist who discovered a way of sending her consciousness into every version of herself across the aforementioned multiverse. But in doing so, Evelyn destroyed the mind of her own daughter, who is now a nihilistic supervillain intent on destroying all existence, in every version of reality.

Evelyn has to – you know, stop her. With a quick primer on how mental world-hopping works, Evelyn is soon tapping into the knowledge and skills of her alt-world doppelgangers, learning more about herself and her family in the process – from the life she would have led had she never married Wayland (which looks like her life as Michelle Yeoh) to what history would have been like if humankind evolved hotdog fingers.

The most important thing about Evelyn as a character is that the film doesn’t shy away from her very-real faults. She does treat her husband and daughter badly. She does have a grim and unappealing outlook on life. She is a real struggle to be around. The disappointment on her daughter’s face when Evelyn describes her girlfriend as a “good friend” to her grandfather hits like a freight train. She hurts the people she’s supposed to care about, and it’s from the bottom of this pit that Evelyn must climb.

Or as this review points out: It's a story about an anonymous loser who discovers that they are actually incredibly special, but whereas most stories like this focus on young people, here the heroine is middle aged and trying to come to terms with the fact that she's probably made all the big choices in her life already—and what makes her special, it turns out, is that all those choices were the wrong ones. (Also, let's not ignore how unusual it is for a woman to be the protagonist of this sort of story, much less a woman of colour.)

The levels of characterization that the screenplay gives his woman is extraordinary, and Yeoh is more than capable of parsing through them all. This movie – as its title indicates – is about so many things, and Evelyn is at the axis of all that, juggling the multitude of storylines and characters that ripple out from our first glimpse of her sitting at a cluttered desk, grumpily rifling through tax-related forms. I hope I get the chance to watch it again soon, as I guarantee you’ll spot something new and ingenious each time.

Reading/Watching Log #88

This was a month of FINALLY finishing shows that I started ages ago and then neglected to finish in a timely manner, as well as a slew of children’s books, a trip to the Court Theatre, a couple of graphic novels, and two fantastic, absolutely-recommend movies.

Naturally I’ve seen the second season of Shadow and Bone, but I’ll hold off talking about it until I can write up a proper post in its honour, but believe me when I say I live in fear of it being cancelled. I’ve no idea how confident Eric Heisserer is about his proposed Six of Crows spin-off, but he clearly set up for it in this season (somewhat to its detriment) and adapting the Ice Court heist is blatantly the reason he came on board in the first place. If Netflix doesn’t come through, then I think it’ll be the end of streaming services for me. I’ve been burnt too many times by cancelled and unfinished stories that I just don’t have the energy to care anymore.

Easter is also on the horizon, and I’ve decided to make it Eighties Fantasy month: that means I’ll devote the long weekend to Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, Ladyhawke, Legend, The Princess Bride, and maybe The Dark Crystal – though I’ve been planning to watch that one in the context of all the most recent books, graphic novels, and (cancelled) Netflix show, so we’ll see.