Shadow and Bone’s Overstuffed Second Season Does a Disservice to Its Great Characters
Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
The first season of Netflix’s Shadow and Bone was a shining example of how to do a YA fantasy adaptation right. Though the show wasn’t necessarily the most technically faithful translation of the first book in author Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse series of novels, it was remarkably true to its spirit, embracing both the high fantasy elements and the complex emotional and relationship stakes of young adulthood. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the series’ second outing, which is not only poorly paced but narratively overstuffed, crammed with new characters, superfluous side quests, and rapid-fire plot revelations that are rarely given enough time to breathe, let alone develop fully. This ultimately means that the end result is something that, while not technically bad, is certainly disappointing.
It’s not that Shadow and Bone Season 2 isn’t fun to watch. It is—there’s plenty of action, big emotional set pieces, and the introduction of several fan-favorite new characters from Bardguo’s larger fictional world. The series’ scope is larger than ever, encompassing multiple kingdoms and at least a half dozen major plotlines. But its increasingly expansive narrative—and the fact that it adapts events from two books (Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising) from Bardugo’s first Grishaverse trilogy—means that the narrative steamrolls ahead relentlessly throughout Season 2’s eight episodes, spending little time on exploring the emotional fallout from the events its characters experience.
Season 1 of Shadow and Bone was largely focused on Sun Summoner Alina Starkov’s (Jessie Mei Li) journey to claim her own power—both literally and figuratively speaking—as a Grisha. Season 2 begins in the aftermath of her battle with the power-hungry General Kirigan (Ben Barnes), a centuries-old Shadow Summoner known as the Darkling who seeks to use the monstrous Shadow Fold (a literal giant wall of darkness full of monsters) to take over the kingdom of Ravka. With the Darkling now presumed dead, Alina and her best friend/love interest Maleyn Oretsev (Archie Renaux) are searching for Morozova’s two remaining mystical creatures, the sea whip and the firebird, which will hopefully enhance her light magic abilities enough to destroy the Fold for good. Unbeknownst to either of them, the Darkling has returned and is building an army of deadly shadow monsters and dangerous new Grisha recruits—with his sights set on killing the Ravkan king.
Elsewhere, Kaz Brekker (Freddy Carter), Inej Ghafa (Amita Suman), and Jesper Fahey (Kit Young) return to Ketterdam, where they discover the Crow Club has been taken over by a local gangster and hire Heartrender Nina Zenik (Danielle Galligan) to help pull off an elaborate plot to take back what’s theirs. Nina, for her part, is desperate to get her lover Matthias (Calahan Skogman) out of the famous Fjerdan prison known as Hellgate and willing to work with Kaz to do so. Unfortunately, the stories of these characters—who all hail from Bardugo’s Six of Crows novels—often feel as though they’re happening on a different show entirely. The deft balance that Shadow and Bone managed to strike in Season 1, in which the Crows characters were woven into the larger story of Alina’s embrace of her powers and role in Ravka’s future thanks to the invention of a new prequel-esque plot for them, is largely missing here, as the group has little direct connection to the larger story the show is telling until at least two-thirds of the way through the season.
What makes all this especially unfortunate is that the best part of the Netflix series thus far has been its deft and thoughtful character work, which is often the first thing that seems to have been jettisoned in a Season 2 that is so frequently hamstrung by its need to cram what is essentially two novels’ worth of plot into eight episodes of television even as it serves a half dozen characters from another set of books entirely. Season 1 was so thoughtful and deliberate in the way it crafted a variety of rich, fully realized relationships, from love stories to friendships, across the series’ canvas, and the show spent a prodigious amount of screentime showing us both the depth of those bonds and the ways those connections changed the people involved in them, for both good and ill. Mal is perhaps the best example of the ways the series expanded and improved upon the foundation in Bardugo’s novels, and the newfound onscreen depth and complexity of his character is also reflected in his romantic relationship with Alina, which is, in turn, reimagined as the emotional crux around which the series turns.