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!