The Netflix adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone was a viewing event. I’d read all the available books (excepting Rule of Wolves) and put the release date on my calendar, opting to travel to my friend’s house and watch the whole thing across a single weekend (four episodes per night) on his big screen television. I took this seriously!
I’d consider myself a fan of the book series (currently made up of one trilogy and two duologies, plus a smattering of short stories) for their dark fairy tale ambience and moral complexity, especially in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom. Leigh Bardugo is a writer who knows her audience, what with her mastery of witty banter, traumatic backstories and shipping tropes, and yet she avoids certain pitfalls of other popular YA writers. There is little in the way of wish fulfilment here, and it’s replaced with a genuine sense of weight when it comes to her subject matter.
The whole thing was ripe for a streaming adaptation, and I sincerely hope that we’ll get the chance to see the entire saga play out, despite the “changing of the guard” when it comes to the protagonists: from Alina to the six Crows to Zoya and Prince Nikolai (not even introduced in the series yet) across the three sets of stories.
We’re off to a good start, with a first season that’s far from perfect, but which has a decent budget, an engaging premise, and spot-on casting. Seriously, everyone looks and behaves exactly like their book counterparts – even when some creative liberties have been taken. Alina and Mal were white in the books, and are here played by bi-racial actors, yet they embody their characters so perfectly I won’t be able to picture anyone but Jessie Mei Li and Archie Renaux in the roles from now on.
This rather negative (but fair) review points out that you can tell the show is YA by the way the material focuses on relationships over world-building, with romantic complications and love triangles taking precedence over what could have potentially been a genuinely fascinating political setup. I’ll delve more into that later, but watching the show and being aware of its target audience had the unexpected side-effect of making me feel old for the first time in my life.
Which is ridiculous since I’m still younger than Ben Barnes – and yet when I last skyped my sister and mentioned watching it, she (totally unprompted) said: “it made me realize I’m not a teenager anymore.” So it obviously had the same effect on other people too!
Even the show itself seems oddly self-conscious about the fact only one significant cast member is over the age of forty-five, to the point where a joke is made in which Jesper has to impersonate someone significantly older than him, and is indignant that anyone could think he would pass for that age – only for a snide official to tell him: “I thought you were older.”
The joke falls completely flat, since... my God, they’re CLEARLY all children! And to add another layer of irony on top of that, these actors are STILL at least a DECADE older than the characters they play in the books! Matthias is meant to be the only legal adult at eighteen!
So, if you plan on recommending this to co-workers or friends, do as I did and add the disclaimer that it’s the most YA thing they’ll ever see and may induce a premature mid-life-crisis.
The most fascinating thing about the making of Shadow and Bone is the story behind how showrunner Eric Heisserer got hired: back when he was reading Six of Crows he sent an appreciative tweet to Leigh Bardugo, and on the basis of that was tapped on the shoulder by Netflix when the time came to start putting together the adaptation.
It gets crazier: he turned them down on learning that they were planning on adapting only the original Shadow and Bone trilogy (also comprised of Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising) because his interest lay solely with the Six of Crows characters. And then – holy shit – they got back to him at a later date, having acquired the rights to the duology, and once again asked him to get on board.
I don’t know if they deliberately sought out these rights in order to secure Eric Heisserer, or if they were going to get them anyway and just got back to him after doing so, but man... I was downright gobsmacked at this story, even taking into account the fact that writing Arrival (2016) considerably elevated his profile. What a world if all job opportunities came that easily!
But knowing this background does throw an interesting spanner into the experience of watching Shadow and Bone’s first season: I was fully aware that Heisserer’s interest as a writer and showrunner in adapting this pre-existing material lay almost solely with the Six of Crows characters – or more specifically Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa and Jesper Fahey, whose storyline in this season is entirely original and unique to the show itself.
(Nina and Matthias also comprise two of the six crows, but they don’t interact with the wider cast and their scenes are taken directly from the books).
That Heisserer has been so open about how little interest he had in the Shadow and Bone part of the story means that you can’t help but see this preference in the way each plot unfolds on the show. And it’s not that Alina’s story is bad persay, but aside from some slight innovations (making her half-Shu and having her deal with the racist microaggressions that comes with it, though this never impinges on the actual narrative in any significant way) it’s nowhere near as compelling as what the Crows are up to at any given moment, even though – ironically – everything they do is doomed to fail given that they can’t be allowed to impede on the events of the actual text.
As I said in my last reading log, I enjoyed reading Shadow and Bone, despite its somewhat formulaic plot. In a world loosely based on Tsarist Russia, those known as the Grisha are endowed with preternatural abilities and taken from their families as children to live at what’s known as the Little Palace, where they’re trained in their various talents and put into the service of the royal family of Ravka, under the command of the powerful General Kirigan. Basically a bunch of Jedi air/fire/water/blood benders are brought to Hogwarts School and eventually save the world by watching the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Okay, I’m being a bit glib, because there is a lot more nuance to it than that, and the secret weapon to Bardugo’s writing is the way her descriptive prose brings Ravka and the surrounding countries to such vivid life (even if she does get a hard time for some of the faux-Russian inspired elements). There is so much clarity of detail, and a distinct fairy tale atmosphere to the proceedings, from the corruptive beauty of the palace at Os Alta to the dilapidated grandeur of the orphanage at Keramzin. I could visualize it all so clearly, and though neither the show nor the books delve into the world-building too deeply – it’s still YA after all – there are still plenty of interesting implications to ponder.
The Shadow Fold for example is intriguing in and of itself: a great swathe of unnatural darkness filled with terrifying creatures called the volcra – but as its position effectively divides the country of Ravka into two halves, the whole thing has wider implications on the world around it. It has effectively crippled Ravka’s fortunes on every conceivable front: politically, technologically, economically, socially, and so naturally, getting rid of it has been everyone’s highest concern since its creation several generations ago.
To sustain Ravka’s war efforts and dwindling Eastern territory, the First Army must constantly risk their lives to make the journey straight through the Fold for supplies and new recruits (and no, they can’t go under or around it) which has a further effect on morale, resources and even religious belief.
The show choses to add an extra wrinkle to the proceedings: General Zlatan is spearheading an independence movement in West Ravka, build on the resentment of the Eastern settlements at having to conscript their young people into faraway wars that don’t feel relevant to their lives. This addition is entirely original to the show itself, and yet it’s an organic development from the situation that Bardugo laid down – because of course the Western half would want to be free of its obligations to the East.
And this has an ongoing ripple effect depicted throughout several scenes across the season, from Kaz confirming a woman’s identity because she says she comes from “West Ravka” (not a term they’d ever use west of the Fold) to Arken eventually being revealed as an agent of General Zlatan, hired to assassinate Alina because she threatens to destroy the Fold, and therefore his bid for independence.
(Which ironically, means he wants the same thing as Kirigan – to keep the Shadow Fold in place – though for profoundly different reasons).
And because Eastern Ravka is trapped behind the Fold, it has (like the Imperialist Russia it’s based on) failed to industrialize on anywhere near the same level as other countries in the world, leading to an interesting comment by Lieutenant Bohdan when he states that before the invention of the gun, a Grisha was worth fifty soldiers in battle, but are now slowly but surely becoming obsolete as tools of war.
The progress of technology is never more apparent than when Mal and his friends come up against a squad of Fjerdans and a machine gun, something that they’ve clearly never seen before, and which even the Grisha probably wouldn’t have much luck against.
That brings us to the Grisha, the trump card of the Ravkan army, but who carry their own burdens and hardships. As it happens, Shadow and Bone does a far better job of capturing the strange contradictions of being “the superpowered elite” than The Legend of Korra ever did in its clumsy exploration of the tension between benders and non-benders. Here, the Grisha are powerful and beautiful, and treated as valuable commodities by the royal family, but this only ferments no small levels of resentment among their own people, and downright fear and hatred within those countries that haven’t weaponized Grisha abilities as the Ravkans have.
This accounts for the Fjerdan raids that secretly cross the borders in order to hunt and murder Grisha, but the visual narrative the show provides in delineating Grisha from their fellow citizens is elegantly conveyed: the First Army (made up of normal men and women) have standard uniforms and basic supplies, while the Second Army (the Grisha) are clad in beautifully embroidered keftas and camp out in luxurious tents stocked with much fancier food.
Later we find out that the keftas have been specially tailored to be bullet-proof, a consideration that’s clearly not extended to the soldiers of the First Army. Likewise, it’s obvious that Mal doesn’t get the benefit of a Grisha Healer in the aftermath of the skiff battle like Alina (suddenly revealed to have powers) does. It’s beautifully done, all the more so because the show doesn’t feel the need to draw overt attention to it – they just lay out the differences and let the audience notice for themselves.
Is it any wonder there’s antipathy and suspicion held towards the Grisha? Especially since most of them are appallingly arrogant, and with General Kirigan as their leader, there’s a discernible pall of intimidation and fear that surrounds them. They might be the elite, but life in the gilded cage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
So it’s not obvious on the first watch, but there is a genuinely rich tapestry of political, social and geographical ramifications at work within the various storylines, with practically every character being motivated in some way by the world in which they live: from the mother who flees to Western Ravka because she doesn’t want her daughter to be turned into a Grisha weapon of war (which gives Kaz the means to cross the Fold), to General Zlatan turning a blind eye to the Fjerdan raids on Ravkan Grisha because it furthers his cause (which kickstarts the entirety of Nina’s storyline).
All the show’s subplots seem separate – almost disconnected – at first glance, but they are connected by the tissue of the world these characters inhabit, specifically the existence of the Fold and the Grisha. In Ravka especially, the Shadow Fold exists at the forefront of every Ravkan’s mind, to the point where its destruction has taken on religious connotations. The Shadow Fold is aptly named, as it casts its shadow all over the country.
Among the various sub-categories of Grisha there are two profoundly rare power-sets: the ability to form and control shadows, and its counterpart: the gift of summoning and maintaining light. There is at least one Shadow Summoner known to all: General Kirigan, also known as the Darkling, whose power inspires no small amount of fear, respect, and/or loathing, and whose ancestor is responsible for the creation of the Fold in the first place.
So it tracks that to get rid of the Fold, the world needs a legendary Sun Summoner – and of course, it’s our protagonist who ends up revealing these latent abilities during a journey through the Fold, on board a skiff that is attacked by the volcra, her powers activated for the first time when her childhood friend and fellow orphan Mal is nearly killed.
In the first book at least, Alina is a quintessential YA heroine: a Beautiful All Along ugly duckling who eventually gets a makeover, the centre of a Love Triangle between two extremely hot guys, and The Chosen One imbued with a special superpower that holds the key to saving the world.
She’s promptly whisked away to the Little Palace, introduced to the King and Queen, integrated amongst the court and other Grisha, and rigorously trained towards the mastery of her power, monitored all the while by the dark and brooding General Kirigan, who likes to remind her that she’s a target now: for enemies of Ravka who don’t want the Fold destroyed, for those seeking to control her abilities, for those who hate any kind of Grisha – and yet also a source of spiritual hope for the common folk.
It’s a lot to get one’s head around, and a great premise for her characterization, as from any angle you look at it, Alina is under an intense amount of pressure to step into a preordained role that means a lot of different things to literally millions of different people. She’s simultaneously a threat, a saint, a political pawn, a legend, a saviour and a teenage girl (to quote the show: “no pressure then”).
She almost sinks under the weight of all this in the book, where Alina is – to be frank – a deeply uninteresting protagonist. Aside from some snark and awkwardness, she doesn’t have much in the way of a personality, to the point where you feel Bardugo has gone so overboard with the whole idea that “YA protagonists are audience surrogates to be projected upon” that the story sometimes reads like a second-person pick-a-path book: “You walk into the Little Palace. You think General Kirigan is hot. You decide to get a drink.”
Alina also has an astonishing lack of agency throughout the course of Shadow and Bone, seemingly content to be carried along with whatever the plot requires of her. To be fair, this is mitigated by two factors: the first is that it’s the opening book of a trilogy, leaving plenty of room for her to come to grips with her power and start making her own moves later on, and secondly, the whole thing is told in first-person narrative, which provides insight into the fact that she’s well aware of her own shortcomings and indecisions.
Between the character’s oft-criticized passivity and general blandness, you can understand why Heisserer would be at pains to endow the adapted Alina with a tad more agency – though a lot of the time, the confines of the story mean the changes can’t be properly followed through on. I’m reminded of that George R.R. Martin quote in which he points out that if you change something small in an adaptation early on, it’ll have an ongoing ripple effect that requires much larger omissions or alterations later.
In this case, it’s not a bad idea that Alina burns several maps to get herself onto the skiff that’s about to traverse the Shadow Fold, so desperate is she to not be separated from Mal, whose unit is set to make the trip the following morning (in the book, she’s simply assigned to the vessel, along with the rest of the cartographers) ... but having done that, and therefore having been made directly responsible for her fellow map-makers when they’re duly killed by the volcra, she’s given less than a second of screen-time to feel bad about what she’s done.
Later they make her, rather than Kirigan, the instigator of their physical relationship, ostensibly to remove some of the dodgy implications of their interactions in the book (which is odd, since they were a. clearly meant to be of rather dubious consent in the book, designed by the Darkling to mess with Alina’s head, and b. the show doesn’t give Nina any similar courtesy in her power struggle with Matthias) even though this change to the dynamic messes with what happens when Baghra tells Alina she has to flee the Little Palace.
As this post points out, why on earth would Alina take Baghra’s word on the matter of whether or not Kirigan can be trusted when the show has already built up a solid rapport between them and given Alina a more equal share in the power imbalance? Any teenage girl in these circumstances would rush to defend her hot new boyfriend, or at least go straight to him to get an explanation – especially since this version of Baghra has her whacking Alina with a stick during their training sessions and secretly slipping her hallucinogenic drugs. Which of the two would you trust in this scenario? The attentive love interest or the dodgy old lady?
What makes it even stranger is that there was such an easy fix! Alina is already in Kirigan’s office, so why not give her a few seconds after he leaves and before Baghra arrives to find the letters from Mal that have been kept from her? This would have changed her state of mind and made her much more susceptible to Baghra’s truth.
Heck, I’m surprised she wasn’t shown being a little surprised that Kirigan knew what her favourite flower was, which could have easily tied into a realization that Mal had been at the palace.
But the somewhat underwritten character is carried by actress Jessie Mei Li: in her hands Alina is charming and cautious, straightforward and self-deprecating, open-hearted and surprisingly optimistic, with an interesting level of self-awareness about how she’s perceived by others and the multitude of roles that are being projected upon her.
Due to her casting, the show adds another wrinkle: she’s half-Shu, meaning that at least one of her parents came from Shu Han, the Fantasy Counterpart to China in this particular setting, and one that’s in constant conflict with Ravka. This makes Alina the target of explicit racial prejudice: someone suggests to a Tailor that they change her eyes, people assume she can’t speak “English”, a cook refuses to serve her food, the other orphans at Keramzin (and Zoya) call her a half-breed, she finds it difficult to blend into the crowd while on the run...
These little moments are strewn throughout the season, and it does add another layer of complexity to the difficulties Alina faces, as well as initiating a semi-interesting conversation about what it means for The Chosen One to have the face of the perceived enemy. Yet as pleased as I am that the show decided to forego featuring yet another white teenage girl as a YA protagonist, this addition to her character isn’t made an integral part of the story: more a garnish to her characterization than anything really meaty.
Its main narrative function seems to be in deepening her bond with Mal, who I think is also meant to be half-Shu (the actor identifies as bi-racial, though there are no on-screen depictions of discrimination directed at his character) and there are a lovely couple of scenes in which the two of them react to a piece of anti-Shu propaganda hanging on the wall of the army barracks. It says so much about their self-perception and their place in the world, and I like that it connects them despite each moment taking place at entirely separate times.
Speaking of whom, if Alina’s characterization gets a few new touches here and there, Mal has been reconceived from the ground up. In the books he’s practically a Jerk Jock: oblivious to Alina’s unrequited love, the best at everything he does, adored by all who meet him, and something of a womanizer. His reunion with Alina at the palace takes place just after the demonstration of her powers at the Winter Fete, and he responds with Anger Born of Worry on believing that she’s been having a ball of a time while he’s been out hunting for the stag, terrified for her safety – a scene that’s been completely omitted from the show.
His book behaviour isn’t pleasant, but it’s also the starting point of his character development... though admittedly a lot of his best moments happen completely off-page. The show wisely depicts the suffering he endured in his hunt for the stag (which is done for love of Alina), as well as reconfiguring the relationship in general: in the book he has no idea that Alina is secretly in love with him; here it’s obvious that both are crushing on each other but have yet to make the first move.
He steals grapes for her when a racist cook refuses to serve her, he gives her advice that she follows (don’t cry in public, always have a weapon at hand), we get extended scenes of their childhood together at the orphanage, and flashbacks that show him teaching her how to punch or deliberately getting himself thrown in jail so he can keep her company. Plus he turns down Zoya’s offer for a roll in the hay – in the book he goes for it.
When Alina reveals the intimacy of knowing General Kirigan’s first name, Mal takes it like a pro, telling her that she doesn’t have to justify anything she’s done, and they get several recurring motifs, like their matching scars, the touching of hands, or the repeat of “I’ll meet you in the meadow.” (Though interestingly enough, they don’t kiss this season).
Again, it’s all very nicely done, though I remain a little conflicted about how they felt the need to sand down some of Mal’s rough edges. Was the idea of a more unsympathetic “good” love interest too scary? I’ve little doubt it’s because the writers foresaw the inevitable shipping wars that were already well underway during the release of the books and decided to nip it in the bud by giving one corner of the love triangle a personality overhaul.
On the one hand, I’m glad for Archie Renaux’s sake that he’s been spared what would have been some horrific bad faith attacks from shippers had Mal’s original characterization remained intact (though I’m sure he’ll get some eventually, especially as the seasons progress) on the other, there was really nothing wrong with Mal to begin with: the crux of his character is that when the most important relationship of his life is permanently and irrevocably changed, he doesn’t handle it very well at first.
That’s a perfectly good arc for a character (and actor) to undergo, but here it’s been obliterated. And strangely enough, they keep one of Mal’s most famous lines from the book: “I’m sorry that it took this long to see you, Alina. But I see you now.” It was a touching revelation in the context of the book, but in the show it’s obvious he’s already been in love with Alina for some time, seeing her all the while, so the line is rendered completely senseless.
As for General Kirigan, he’s a better villain (or indeed, character) than the likes of Loki or Guy of Gisborne or Kylo Ren because (and I cannot stress this enough) I KNOW WHAT HIS MOTIVATION IS. There are no amorphous daddy issues or inconsistent sense of greed/ambition or any dead cloned zombie emperors who are brainwashing him, maybe?
Instead, there’s actual clarity in what Kirigan WANTS, WHY he wants it, and HOW he’s going to get it. Basically it’s a. to control the Shadow Fold, b. use Alina’s powers to master the volcra therein, and c. weaponize it to defend himself and the other Grisha – a goal that has both noble and profoundly selfish components to it, and which is bad largely due to the lengths he’s prepared to go to in order to make it happen, and the terrible cost of human life should he be successful.
It’s not a perfect portrait of a villain – the short flashback to his creation of the Fold utilizes the exhausted trope of the Fridged Women (every time I think we’re past this as a species, it happens half-a-dozen more times), and his decision to make the Fold in the first place feels like less of a deliberate choice, and more like an uncontrollable happenstance that occurs largely in self-defense. (Leigh Bardugo has written a short story about the Darkling’s past, but I haven’t read it, so I don’t know how much it matches up to what we saw here – I do know Luda was created for the show, however).
And bless him, Ben Barnes isn’t the greatest actor in the world, but he knows what the assignment is, which is for him to be the sexy dangerous broody second option in a YA love triangle. Why a man over a hundred years old wants to get entangled in one of those is a mystery for the ages, but it’s a great role for him, not least because he was the favourite fan-cast for the character many years before the series was ever greenlit for production.
I loved some of the rather poncy affectations that he put on, and they inevitably added some more ambiguity in his interactions with Alina – in the book, it’s pretty clear that he’s just manipulating her from start to finish; here it’s just as obvious that he grows genuinely fond of her despite his machinations. His reaction to Alina making the first move is actually kind of adorable, even if in the long run, it’s only going to rile up the fanbase further.
Which brings us to... (brace yourself) the love triangle. *deep sigh*
Look guys, I’ve learnt my lesson from Star Wars, so I’m not going to dive too deeply into this. And honestly, fandom doesn’t seem to be too bad about the shipping this time around, which is almost certainly because the books have already been written and much of the pre-existing fandom have had years to come to terms with how everything pans out.
I don’t doubt there’s some unpleasantness going on in darker corners, but I was dreading a full-blown repeat of what we all suffered in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, especially since the triad of Mal, Alina and Kirigan match up almost too perfectly with Finn, Rey and Kylo Ren, right down to a scene in which the heroine is whisked away by the (white male) villain while the would-be boyfriend (played by a non-white actor) desperately runs after them, screaming her name.
But so far, everyone seems to be maintaining chill.
To summarize, the differences between these three characters and their book counterparts are interesting to note, though occasionally rather bewildering. Here’s another example: the show establishes that Alina’s parents are killed by the Shadow Fold, as opposed to a border skirmish, but fails to follow up on the implications of this: that Kirigan is therefore responsible for their deaths.
I think Alina mentions this briefly, but it doesn’t impinge on any of her choices or behaviour concerning him in any way. So why bother making that change? The altercations only end up creating brand new problems, which could have been ironed out reasonably easily if Heisserer had... well, been as engaged with their characters and storylines as he apparently was with the Crows.
***
The better something is, the less you have to say about it, and it’s obvious that the Crows (still only three, though they’ll soon be joined by Nina, Matthias and an as-yet unintroduced character) are the strongest part of this story: more engaging, more motivated, more interesting – all of which is deeply ironic since they don’t figure into the books AT ALL at this point.
But Heisserer comes up with some great material for them, which is smooth and elegant enough to fit into the original Shadow and Bone story without feeling either intrusive or irrelevant – and in the latter case that’s pretty impressive, since ultimately the Crows can have absolutely no impact whatsoever on Alina’s story! They essentially fail at everything they set out to do, but it’s done with so much panache and flair that you don’t mind – or even notice really.
I foresee a lot of new readers opening the book and feeling baffled that they’re not actually there.
Heisserer (and the other writers, obviously) have a strong fix on their characters, and much of their behaviour and dialogue feels like it could have been written by Bardugo herself: whether it’s Jesper’s devil-may-care flirting, the conflict that arises from Inej’s spiritual faith, or Kaz straight up leaving the room when Inej asks him a difficult question. Classic.
I’ve already spoken about Inej in my last Woman of the Month entry, but it bears repeating that she’s – so far – the only one of the three to be given an actual character arc and clear motivation (Kaz’s remain veiled, and Jesper is largely just along for the ride).
The show, like the book, has a very light touch when it comes to the details of her sexual enslavement at the Menagerie, to the point where I had to spell things out to the friend I was watching with, but thanks to Amina Suman, the desperation that drives her is clear. She wants her freedom more than anything, but this is pitted against her religious faith – the only remnant of her lost family – which demands of her a “no killing” policy.
It’s a deeply cruel conflict, but at several points she’s asked to choose between these opposing desires, from the madame of her brothel (and the woman in charge of her indentured service) asking her to kill a man in exchange for her freedom, to Inej choosing to withdraw her dagger from a woman’s chest and letting her bleed out. The pivotal moment happens in-between, when Inej choses to make a defensive kill in order to save Kaz’s life, and what it costs her is not lost on him.
Each potential kill ups the stakes: Kaz prevents her from murdering the Conductor (though she was clearly ready to go through with it after failing to rope Jesper into doing it in her stead) because he realizes that it’s all part of a larger con, while her decision to give the vengeful Grisha woman the Coup de Grâce after she utters a racial epithet is... well, pretty cold-blooded when you take into consideration the fact the woman was trying to avenge her twin brother, who in turn was only trying to defend his home from actual kidnappers.
(I can’t help but feel that the woman’s “Suli trash” comment was a lazy way of taking audience sympathy away from her, but it is Inej’s story after all).
The choices Inej is given and the decisions she makes are surprisingly complex, and Amina Suman performs it all beautifully – easily putting on the best performance of the show. Her arc is the attempt to find the balance between the moral code she believes in and the drastic steps she must take to escape a terrible situation, and though she’s clearly not the same person she was at the end of this particular chapter, she emerges with her integrity and compassion still intact (a bit battered, but intact).
Meanwhile, Freddy Carter as Kaz Brekker has got to be the most magnificent bit of casting in the whole show. You can’t look at him and not think: “that’s Kaz Brekker.” I actually saw him a couple of years ago in the first season of Pennyworth as a psychotic gang-leader and I distinctly remember thinking: “damn, this guy has a terrifying game face.” He’s twenty-eight and already has the expression and bearing of an embittered fifty-year old man who lost his leg in Vietnam and watched his beloved dog get shot in front of him.
Unlike Inej, who gets that forementioned arc, Heisserer wisely choses to keep the Kaz cards close to his chest. For book readers, there are plenty of little Easter eggs strewn throughout, particularly his one and only interaction with Pekka Rollins. Between Kaz’s seething rage and Rollins’s complete obliviousness, it does a lot in setting up later events – I’ll admit, I was legit flapping my hands and going: “ooh, ooh, ooh!” to my clueless friend.
It has been pointed out that much of Kaz’s machinations in this season are either pulled off through sheer dumb luck, or aren’t successful at all, but this made sense to me. This is a prequel version of Kaz, someone who is still learning through trial and error, and we’ve got at least two more seasons (or so we can assume) before he masterminds the Ice Court heist.
Till then, the focus is more on his relationships with Jesper and Inej, particularly the latter, which seems to be the undisputed fan-favourite ship of the entire canon. I can see why, the moment you add trauma with touch aversion you’ve got fandom catnip, and Carter does some great work in expressing desire for Inej that is carefully reined in behind his absolute horror of touching anyone. The scene in which she’s injured and stitching herself up is especially good: Jesper is grossed out by the whole thing and has to look away, but Kaz watches intently. Without words, we understand that he wants to help her, but can’t.
And as for Kit Young as Jesper... well, for now he’s the comic relief, which is necessary when you’re paired up with the utter lack of humour to be found in Kaz and Inej. I liked that they established his bisexuality early on, and that he’s a bit of a peacock – but for now, he’s in support.
Don’t worry Jesper, your time will come... and it’s shaped like a tank.
***
And now we come to Nina and Matthias.
First of all, if you came into this show completely cold, you would be excused for wondering what the hell this subplot had to do with anything else that was going on.
There are some tenuous links to the rest of the story – we’ve seen in Alina’s narrative that Fjerdans conduct raids into Ravkan territory to kidnap the Grisha, and Nina is given a direct link to the Darkling that wasn’t in the books (she works as his spy and apparently answers directly to him) but for the most part this story-arc will feel completely irrelevant to anyone but book readers who already know what roles these two will play in future Crow-related shenanigans.
We first meet Nina and Matthias in Six of Crows, and though it’s obvious that they have a history together, it’s only gradually revealed to the reader in a series of flashbacks strewn across the course of the story. At the beginning of the book Matthias has already been in prison for at least a year and Nina is roped into Kaz’s machinations when he promises her an opportunity to free him.
The reader is tricked into believing it’s going to be an emotional reunion, only for Matthias’s first reaction on seeing her again to be... an attempted strangulation.
What Heisserer has done is take the backstory that was related throughout Six of Crows and dramatize it in “real time”. Matthias, a Fjerdan Drüskelle (or witch hunter) takes Nina (a Heartrender) captive with the intention of returning to his homeland and forcing her to stand trial for the crime of being Grisha (which his people think of as an affront to their god). On their way back, the ship hits a storm and the two are washed ashore, forced to work together to survive a trek across the permafrost.
Okay, so – not bad material for a story, though Bardugo knew she had to tread carefully when it came to giving it a romantic bent. Maybe it’s because the show takes it out of the flashback format (where you always have the sense that things are being seen through a person’s subjective memories) or maybe because there were several crucial missteps in how it adapts the material, but I’m not entirely sure I bought what they were selling with this. Which is a shame, as Nina and Matthias are undoubtedly my favourite characters from the books, and the actors brought their A-games when it came to delivering on what was asked of them.
Let’s break it down, because as soon as you take it out of the YA context, you’re looking at something straight from a Stephen King horror/thriller...
You’ve been kidnapped by people who believe that you're pure evil. They assault you, dehumanize you (“you are no woman”) and have every intention of executing you. Your powers are nullified so there’s no chance of defending yourself; you’re completely helpless and vulnerable, shackled in the hold of a freezing cold ship.
But then... one of your captors is clearly taking an interest in you. Now you’re forced to walk a careful tightrope in trying to take advantage of this development without putting yourself in any further danger. You have to push back against his misconceptions about who you are without angering him into any violence. You’re still physically incapacitated throughout all of your conversations with him.
Ironically, the only thing saving you from him taking sexual advantage of you is that he’s the type of true believer that would find this idea completely abhorrent, as he’s been raised to believe that Grisha women are dangerous succubi – which also rules out the opportunity to take the charm offensive and seduce your way out of this mess. At your insinuation that he “wants” something, he actually gets insulted.
The scenario is horrifying, and I’m not even going into the nitty-gritty of it, like – are you being fed? Where do you go to the toilet? How long does this journey even take? (The show also avoids mentioning the fact that Grisha are burnt alive at the stake after being inevitably found guilty of their “crimes”).
It just strikes me as completely bizarre that they could tweak Alina’s dynamic with General Kirigan in order to give her more agency and consent, and at the same time adapt this material without retaining some of the mitigating factors of the book, or try and create some of their own. I’m not saying they should have sanitized the entire thing, but again – there were some easy fixes here.
Watching this the first time around I ended up assuming that this was Matthias’s first time “in the field”, and that he was having to deal with so-called “witches” face-to-face for the first time. After all, he’s significantly younger than all the other Drüskelle and we first see him in the hold of the ship, as though he was left behind to oversee the other captives.
As such, he was not only not directly involved in Nina’s kidnapping, but it was easily to read his probing questions to her as an experiment of sorts; an attempt to get Nina to validate his opinions so he could continue believing his worldview without harbouring any further doubts. (Which is a pretty great example of how quickly we reach for excuses and justifications for fictional white guys, but it would have made him significantly less culpable in what happened to her).
But on my second watch of the show, I realized that the bola thrown through the window at the inn (which incapacitates Nina and makes her easy prey for the other Drüskelle) was actually thrown by Matthias – she recognizes it tied to his waist when he’s in the middle of shackling her in the brig, something that I completely missed the first time around. Furthermore, Fedyor mentions Matthias by name when he’s reporting to Kirigan, establishing he’s actually one of the best and most renowned Drüskelle agents.
So no, we can’t pretend that Matthias is only a semi-involved participant in all this. It’s safe to assume that plenty of Grisha have died at his hands.
Other attempts to humanize him don’t really work – Nina points out that no Grisha has ever been found innocent at trial, thus proving that they’re all a sham, and he has a bit of a shocked reaction to this (dude, this has only JUST occurred to you?) and although it’s a nice touch that he keeps glancing behind him when he brings her food (suggesting that he’s doing it without the knowledge of his compatriots) he spoils the moment by getting all huffy at her “bad manners” when she assumes it’s been poisoned. As she incredulously points out, he’s complaining about her bad manners after he’s kidnapped, shackled and starved her. I mean, honestly.
It also fails to take into account that there are at least two other Grisha chained in the hold, who doubtlessly went down with the ship when it sank. Matthias doesn’t bother trying to give them any food, presumably because he wasn’t as attracted to them, but more bafflingly, Nina never tries to talk to them or bring them up after they’ve been sent to their watery deaths. Didn’t they deserve to be more than background details to Nina and Matthias’s love story?
The story is on firmer ground once the two of them are washed ashore, as we know that Nina has the upper hand from this point on. She could kill Matthias effortlessly at any time, and refrains only because they need each other (his physical strength and her Heartrender abilities) to survive the cold.
Divorced from context, their interactions from this point on are genuinely charming: the way she gets under his skin, the massive sulk he pulls, the reluctant/awkward sharing of body heat, the hilarious “oh no, he’s/she’s hot!” moments, the gradual letting down of defenses, their obvious attraction to each other... though it beats me why they decided that the real breaking of the figurative ice would be when Matthias laughs at the idea he could be beaten by a girl. When did sexism become endearing?
But then they reach civilization again, and things go pear-shaped. Look, I can buy that they’ve bonded enough in their time together that they’re a little reluctant to part ways... but to openly discuss running away together? Buh? Why would either of them be receptive to that? Wouldn’t it have been far more poignant to see them simply casting each other some longing looks and trying to stretch out their time together for as long as possible before the inevitable happens?
Neither does the show ever acknowledge the fact Nina has just gone through a traumatic experience: kidnapped, dehumanized, nearly drowned, forced to rely on her kidnapper to survive... you really expect me to believe that she’s making the moves in this scene? And Matthias himself is never required to repent of his illustrious career as a Drüskelle. At no point does he verbalize the fact that capturing innocent people and executing them on the basis of the innate abilities they have no control over was, in fact, a very bad thing.
And as with the two Grisha girls in the hold, Nina doesn’t seem to care that up until very recently, he was killing her people.
And finally, they make the grave mistake of letting Nina explain herself to Matthias in the hold of the ship after she’s falsely accused him of being a slave-trader in order to save his life from her fellow Grisha. It was a split-second decision that she had to make, and she judged it the lesser of two evils: at least in the custody of bounty hunters, he wouldn’t be summarily executed.
He responds with the book-accurate strangling attempt and a point-blank refusal to believe what she’s telling him. Gah! This one drives me nuts, because the whole set up of their rapport in Six of Crows is that Matthias has no idea what happened. He wakes up and has no other recourse but to believe that Nina has deliberately taken her revenge and had him arrested for slave-trading. Then he has to stew on that for at least a year while doing hard time in the world’s worst prison, knowing deep down that he probably deserves it for what he did to her people.
But now? She openly tells him what she was trying to do in order to save his life, and he still lashes out at her. And after what he did to her, after what she’s just given up for him, it just makes him look like a dickhead. All they needed was a scene in which Nina tries and fails to get the chance to speak to him face-to-face, and we would have been rosy. This subplot closing on Matthias’s stunned and heartbroken face while Nina desperately tries to reach him would have worked much better.
To summarize, I’m all for Nina and Matthias. It’s messy and complicated and heartfelt and lovely. It’s also hilarious, that an uptight fundamentalist and a hedonistic free spirit could end up trapped in a small whaler’s hut in the middle of nowhere and furiously realize they’re attracted to each other. I truly laughed out loud at Mattias’s mortified reaction to waking up and realizing he had slung his arm over Nina in the night.
The actors nailed the “opposites attract” dynamic, and I think they had the best chemistry of the four pairings on the show (I know Kaz/Inej and Alina/Kirigan are the fandom favourites, but I’m definitely more of a Helnik shipper).
But the more complex the obstacles and problems you add to a relationship (and these two had some pretty massive obstacles and problems) the more thoughtfully you have to write it, and the more space it needs to develop organically. This... didn’t happen. What success there was is carried entirely on the backs of the actors, who had the added difficulty of being completely disconnected from the rest of the cast and their storylines. Heck, Matthias doesn’t interact with anyone of importance besides Nina for the duration of the season.
And yet, I’m probably more excited for the continuation of their story than any other next season, so go figure.
Miscellaneous Observations:
At the beginning of this review I mentioned there was only one character over the age of forty-five and it’s Zoe Wanamaker, who is great by the way. Better than great! She knows she’s the requisite British thespian that adds gravitas to these types of fantasy shows and she does what she has to.
But what do we think of the scene in which she tells Alina to escape by taking the right-hand passage? Alina reaches the fork, hesitates, and then takes the left passage. Since this gets her safely out of the palace, what are we meant to assume was waiting for her at the end of the right fork? Since Baghra tried to have Mal killed in order to prevent her son from obtaining the stag, is there a chance she prepared a similar fate for Alina to nullify the power Kirigan was trying to assert over her abilities?
An unexpected delight were Mal’s army friends Mikhael and Dubrov, whose deaths genuinely hurt thanks to the amicability of the characters and their obvious bond with Mal. It’s not often that true narrative weight is given to obvious Red Shirts.
I always feel bad for actors who are cast as book characters described as ethereally, stunningly, heart-stoppingly beautiful: in this case Mal, Genya and Zoya are all played by deeply attractive people, but you can’t help but wish for their sakes that Bardugo had lightened up a bit when it came to describing them in the text, in which people practically faint with awe when they see them coming.
The effects of Alina’s powers were terrible! They looked like blobs of watery light when they should have been bright and clear shafts of white light, cutting through the darkness like swords. Major disappointment there and probably my biggest complaint.
Perhaps to make up for this creative decision, I loved the fact that the antler amplifier taken from the stag isn’t a necklace (as in the books) but something that actually sinks into Alina’s skin and sticks out from her collarbone. It’s creepy and eldritch and a perfect visual choice.
I wish there could have been more courtly intrigue, since Alina’s time at the Little Palace is the most interesting part of her story – in the show and the book. Heisserer has discussed opting for a limited number of episodes in order to stretch the budget, but Alina’s lack of initiative when it comes to negotiating court politics is disappointing. There was a lot of potential here for more original material – with the Grisha, with the royal family, with Baghra and Genya, and with Alina coming to terms with her own abilities.
Most galling is that despite Alina’s Race Lift, she gets no significant interaction with Botkin, the Grisha trainer, who was Shu in the books just as he is in the show. Surely that deserved a little extra attention?
I honestly didn’t recognize Howard Charles, who is probably best known for playing Porthos in the BBC’s The Musketeers, and here played Arken Visser, the Conductor who gets the Crows across the Fold on his secret railway. At one point I leaned in and peered closer, finding him familiar and wondering if it was him, only to dismiss it.
I mean, it’s a testament to his acting that he can go from the brave and boisterous Porthos to the more effeminate and cowardly Arken (even his voice was drastically different!) and it’s almost a shame that he turned out to be a wrong ‘un. Initially introduced as someone who smuggles Grisha across the Fold so that they aren’t forcibly conscripted into the Second Army – which seems a noble purpose – he ends up being a lackey of General Zlatan, hired to assassinate the Sun Summoner.
The Crows leave him to his fate after using him as a helpful distraction, which is a bit rich since they plan to kidnap Alina and deliver her into the hands of a crime lord who wants her for God only knows what reason. I mean, between that and the death of Marie, can you really blame the Grisha for attacking the remaining Crows with such aggression? They’re technically the good guys in this scenario, defending their people from a home invasion.
On that note, what was Nina really up to? She’s introduced as Arken’s contact in Ravka, as a “radical” who doesn’t believe Grisha should serve the crown against their will, helping them to escape via the secret railroad into West Ravka. But then we learn that she’s instead (or also?) a spy for General Kirigan, who might well have led the Crows to their deaths had things gone as planned and she learnt of their plans for Alina.
The Nina of the book aligns more with the former description than the latter, and not helping is that we never actually see her interact with Kirigan, leaving her true loyalties up in the air. Whatever the truth, I wonder if it’s a coincidence that Heisserer has now formed a direct link between Kirigan and the Crows... that’s a thread that could potentially be picked up later.
Can I complain a bit more about Kirigan’s dead wife? I actually feel a bit guilty about this, as over on Tumblr I think I got my mutuals excited about the fact Lucy Griffiths was going to feature in this show... only for her to die in the exact same way she did as Maid Marian back in 2007 – stabbed to death in the side to facilitate the man-pain of a man dressed in black leather. As Marge said:
Urgh. Every time I think we’ve moved past this tedious cliché it turns up again, and Luda’s character could have just as easily been a brother or protégé figure.
I would have liked to see more of the dynamic between Kirigan and the other Grisha. Ivan was certainly very loyal to him and he seemed to be on a first-name basis with everyone (his weary interactions with David were very cute), but how deep did this really go? Do the Grisha see Kirigan as a father-figure? A leader? A protector? Genya remains on his side even after Alina points out that he used her as a spy to keep tabs on the king (with all that entails) whereas Zoya turns on him pretty quickly after she realizes the full extent of his plans for the Fold (though I’m not sure how I feel about the show introducing an overt sexual element between them).
This is more untapped potential, especially since so much of what Kirigan does is to protect and preserve them – heck, the Fold itself largely exists for their sakes.
Amidst all the YA clichés, it is at least a nice subversion of the usual Chosen One narrative not that Alina is an orphan (she is) but that her parents aren’t secretly of royal blood, and have no further bearing on the story. That she’s the Sun Summoner has nothing to do with her bloodline *side-eyes Disney’s Star Wars*
I don’t know what’s funnier, Jesper’s reaction when he sees Alina cross the courtyard and hide in the carriage that the Crows have prepared for her abduction (essentially kidnapping herself) or Matthias’s double-take when he looks up from the fire he’s trying to light to see Nina taking her clothes off.
As it happens, I wrote most of this review before the second season was confirmed, which came as a massive relief to me. Heisserer has already stated that all the scripts have been written, so let the speculation begin! Obviously Siege and Storm will be the basis for the main storyline, but how will the Crows be integrated?
This season ends with Nina overhearing their need for a Heartrender, so perhaps there’ll be an extended rescue of Matthias from Hellgate Prison (the first sequence of what is widely known as the Ice Court heist) in order to secure her services? I’m not sure about that since it’s a fairly integral part of Kaz’s plan that Matthias have inside knowledge of how the prison operates, and to get that he needs to spend some time behind bars.
Or perhaps they’ll team up with a certain privateer who makes his big entrance in the next book (my heart is set on Wade Briggs who played Benvolio in Still Star Crossed – he would be PERFECT) though apparently we’re getting Wylan as well, which could constitute a brand new subplot in Ketterdam.
However it pans out, I’m so glad it’s actually happening. Shadow and Bone is by far the weakest novel Bardugo has written, and I was terrified that it would prevent a season two from happening. Rest assured, things get awesome from here on out.
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