Netflix’s “Shadow and Bone” is an adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling novels, with lethal flesh-eating monsters, superpowers, and childhood best friends turned lovers, and it is an admirable attempt at fantasy, but it falls short.
“Game of Thrones” – the 8-season epic that had the attention of the nation season by season – was one of TV’s major successes with fantasy, a genre that is rarely pried into. After the riveting 8-season whirlwind, the fantasy craze faded away into the background in between poorly written mystery thrillers and cheesy attempts at Gen Z-focused tv series.
However, the latest attempt at a fantasy-focused spectacle comes from an amalgamation of Leigh Bardugo’s best work – the Grisha trilogy. The series follows the main plot from the book series of the same name, “Shadow and Bone”, and adds in the characters from the “Six of Crows” duology, which is used as the second strand of the plot.
The season follows Alina Starkov (played by Jesse Mei Lee) who is of mixed race: half-Shu and half-Ravkan. The Shu are those that come from the fictional place of Shu Han, and Ravkans are people from Ravka.
She is a cartographer assistant for the First Army, where she is joined by her childhood best friend and fellow soldier Malyen (Archie Renaux).
When one of the crewmembers aboard the ship they’re on loses his nerve, he lights a lantern in the darkness, drawing the winged monsters towards them. This attack eventually leads to a rare Grisha known as a Sun Summoner being revealed.
Sun Summoners have the power to destroy the Fold, but none have been born nor found. Until — and you’ll never believe it! – it turns out to be Alina.
Mal is mauled by a Volcra, a flesh-eating winged creature, and in her grief, Alina unleashes a pool of light that repels the monsters away and allows them to reach their destination safely.
The story follows a typical Chosen One narrative that focuses on a teenage girl who has the ability to save the world.
In later episodes, Alina is taken under the wing of General Kirigan (played by Ben Barnes), a shadow summoner and leader of Ravka’s army for training.
A survivor of the attack tells a nasty man named Pekka Rollins (Dean Lennox Kelly) – part of that second strand of the plot that was mentioned – about Alina, and he believes he could make good use of a Sun Summoner. This man offers Kaz Brekker (Freddy Carter), the leader of the Dregs gang on the Island of Kerch, a million Kruger if they cross the Fold themselves and bring her to him.
The Dregs gang is a gang of thieves that operates in Ketterdam, the Capital of Kerch. The Dregs gang is made up of resident sharpshooter Jasper (Kit Young), and a spy named Inej (Amita Suman).
The series delivers a superficial fantasy daydream that audiences can get lost in. It is a fictional world that has been built to feel real, and it has a large and diverse ensemble cast that spreads out across the fictional world.
It has high-budget effects and admirable action sequences and it makes for a good adventure to get lost in while chowing down on a bucket of popcorn on a random Friday night. The acting isn’t unbearable either and the jokes are funny enough to get you to chuckle or smile.
However, there is one key issue the series struggles with and that is The Adaptation Problem. The series is again, adapted from multiple novels that many audience members have read prior to watching the TV series. The majority of audience members who enjoyed “Shadow and Bone” were those that had already read the series.
This is because they simply have more knowledge. The books go into enough detail to explain the context behind a lot of plot elements and characters that the show fails at explaining. For example, the show vaguely explains the rarity of a Sun Summoner, who are said to be people capable of destroying The Fold that divides their world and contains the Volcra, and only brings up relevant information that gets revealed much later.
This brings up another element that the show struggles with – getting to the point. The show takes its time to explain certain plot details that only leave casual audience members confused and that make for an incomprehensible plot.
This can be seen with the White Stag, an animal that appears at the beginning of the series. At first, the importance of the White Stag is vague and it is unexplained until a few episodes later when the Stag’s importance is highlighted.
The White Stag ends up being an amplifier that makes Alina stronger.
A casual audience member that is unfamiliar with the lore will be faced with confusion for the majority of the series.
Another example is the explanation and origin of the Fold, which isn’t revealed until episode 4. While the show sets up a great amount of time making audiences acknowledge the importance of the Fold in this world, its exposition isn’t mentioned at the beginning at all – you just have to accept that it’s there and that it’s important.
The series drags on in the middle, partly because of that unexplained exposition, and it forces awkward story beats and teenage melodrama. The character-building is lackluster at most, and while the characters have complex layers in the books, the show doesn’t deliver any of these character elements and they don’t feel three-dimensional.
One of these more complex characters is Kaz Brekker. He personally changed the Dregs gang from a group of pickpockets and cons to one of the most dangerous and competitive operations in the city. He is known for being a character that becomes corrupt and shows readers complex moral dilemmas.
While the show lets audience members know that the Dregs gang is dangerous and that its leader has a notorious reputation, you don’t really get to see his many layers. He’s a smart and clever thief and that’s as far as the audience gets to see of him.
Further, the childhood-friends-to-lovers story doesn’t work because of its disjointed narrative and odd story beats. The audience understands that they are close at the beginning of the series, and then the show shoves the story arc down our throats with melodramatic voiceovers and badly placed flashbacks.
For example, in the beginning of the season, the show mostly communicates Mal and Alina’s relationship through these jarring flashbacks in-between scenes.
In one scene, they are aboard the ship crossing the Fold, and in the next, we are transported into an orphanage where the two of them are running across a field as kids. The scenes also happen to be quite awkward.
Despite its talented cast, the writing torpedoes itself throughout the series. One-liner after one-liner is delivered with no substance in between and the dialogue does a poor job of communicating the feelings the audience should be seeing, primarily due to the actor’s doing nothing more than staring at each other with wide-eyes and agape mouths.
While the show creator, Eric Heisserer, went to great lengths to incorporate elements of other books (like “Six of Crows”), instead of using them to add more depth, complexity, and scope, they instead just feel logistically confusing. This is because while the “Shadow and Bone” plot focuses primarily on Alina, her abilities, and her love story with Mal, the “Six of Crows” plot emphasizes moral corruption with dashes of humor.
Whilst the audience is given a combination of scenes of Alina struggling to find her own strength, the scenes are intermingled with the “Six of Crows” ensemble who make one-liners every couple of seconds. Due to this, it gets increasingly difficult to feel anything during the emotional scenes where characters have more at stake.
Additionally, some of the rules applied to the “Shadow and Bone” plot aren’t applied to the “Six of Crows” plot. When Alina and Mal cross the Fold, the danger they face is heightened to make audiences feel scared for them. However, when the Dregs cross the Fold, the entire scene is humorous, and they do not face the same stakes as Alina or Mal did.
Casual audience members may also have a hard time following geopolitical conflicts and orienting themselves geographically due to the often vague setting explanations and poorly explained politics, specifically regarding The Shu and the people of Ravka.
It’s a shame the first season fell so flat, despite Bardugo’s sparkling sentences and elaborate plots within the books. The characters grow richer and more complex as the books go on, but Heisserer fails to showcase any of these elements.
If you’re wondering why the cast of characters seems so jarring and different, it is because the Dregs gang and the shipwrecked lovers are from completely different stories. The story, ultimately, just feels crowded and incoherent.
Despite the messy incorporation of different stories, the series does have the potential to be one of these fantasy spectacles audiences can fall in love with. The show just needs a little work.