Discussion about the show ended up being in the Netflix thread, but now that it’s gotten a second-season pickup I figure we might as well have a stand-alone thread.
I can’t say I have read the books, but I would expect the 2nd season to follow the Inferni and her kidnapper, and split some time onto our “main characters” a bit. They certainly seemed to hint that the first two will be a major plot element, though they might just unite them all.
I still need to watch this past the first ep. I really enjoyed Bardugo’s Six of Crows, which follows the street rats on a fairly ridiculous over-the-top heist thing.
Jesper is roughly as fabulous in the books as he is in the show. <3
So you made a thread for it, but what is Shadow and Bone, and why should someone watch it?
Because my wifes couch potato binge tendencies, I haven’t heard of this one.
Jesper is basically Cat from Red Dwarf, but with guns.
LMAO - that’s a fabulous description
I’ve read the first two of the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the kidnapper / his Grisha captive, and the Crows are not in it. I’ve been told they show up in another series by the same author in the same world, so I guess the show runners are pulling elements in from everywhere.
Books are ok, but to be honest, I think the series is better. Those young actors are very personable. And Jigsaw is great as the villain. No, not that Jigsaw. The one from The Punisher.
I watched the first season. It was ok.
- I really liked the faux 19th century Russia aesthetic, and the way it’s set into the transition period of magic starting to become obsolete by technology. And some really neat bits of worldbuilding around the magic.
- The one thing the description of the series says is that it’s about a cartographer. Which sounded intriguing, but it matters for like one bit of plot setup 15 minutes into the first episode, and might as well be forgotten after that. It was particularly galling given how bad the series is at creating a sense of geography. There’s a lot of place names, but I have no idea of where any of those places is in relation to the others or to the fold. Even who is on the east and west side of the fold didn’t seem to be making sense early on.
- I really wasn’t signing up for a teenager who has been born with special powers to save the world. Sorry, I’ve seen that story quite often enough.
- I did not understand the Nina / Matthias storyline. The only intersections with the two main plots were too small to matter. I assume that they’ll play a bigger part in the next season, and had to be introduced earlier. But I think to make the character arcs and the relationship development at all believable they would have needed way more time than this. I think I’d rather have seen these characters come in from nowhere, but with an implied rich backstory, rather than what we got here.
- A ton of people complained about the sound mix earlier when this was being discussed in the big Netflix thread half a year ago, specifically the dialogue being mixed too low. I didn’t notice that, so I wonder if they went back and fixed it.
Discovered this while poking around the Netflix recommendations, and I thought it was pretty well done. The world-building and storyline reminds me a lot of Wheel of Time. There’s very little new and innovative here, but the tired old tropes are well executed and I’m not completely burned out on the genre yet. I’ll probably watch season 2 whenever I cycle around to Netflix again.
Honestly I liked this a lot better than WoT.
I liked parts of this but the main protagonist just didn’t capture my interest. I found her storyline uninteresting. I enjoyed some of the other storylines more but hers was the focus of the show so overall I felt fairly tepid about the show, despite the good world building and generally good performances.
Not a bad show, IMO, but one that didn’t really “click” for me.
Oh see General Sexy is the actual main character. Get with him instead of whatsername, that’s my advice.
I actually like that actor (he was in both Westworld and Punisher IIRC) but since a big part of his story is interacting with the main character, that just didn’t grab me.
I feel I’m probably an outlier on this show - don’t let me discourage anyone. It’s got some interesting variations on fantasy tropes and very solid world building. YMMV.
Season 2 just sorta popped up this week. It’s only 8 eps and the recap of S1 isn’t very detailed so you might want to rewatch at least part of S1. Cuz if you’re like me and my wife you’ll be going “who? What?” quite a bit during the first new ep.
Still really enjoying this despite it being YA based. It has an interesting world with lots of Eurasian influence that I’ve not often seen in fantasy. Worth a look for sure.
This was going along fine, then started looking badly like their budget got slashed, so the final “army” scenes had about 20 people. The CG went downhill badly. It became clear the magic system has no limits or power requirements. And the final episode sucked donkey balls. 10 minutes of actual story, then at least EIGHT different ending scenes plus a cliffhanger ending that isn’t, teasing a 3rd season plotline absolutely nobody will give a damn about.
A damned shame, the show was quite fun and just ended horribly.
Lol. The great “army” was hilarious. I’m not familiar with the books but it felt like they crammed at least two if not three books into a single short season. But that army, lol. I guess they did the best with the funds they had but maybe a bit more on extras could have helped. Not to mention their strategy of flying a small but super obvious sky ship with no defenses towards the enemy, an enemy with fire/ice/wind shooting wizards, seemed very very poorly thought out.
Just finished Season Two last night. I liked this show a lot more than I liked Wheel of Time, and I thought it was also better than The Witcher : Blood Origin prequel thing.
The series’ YA novel roots are very obvious in both the plot lines and the scripting, but the characters, even those new to Season Two or with much enhanced roles from Season One, are interesting enough and well acted enough that it overcomes any limitation the source material brings with it. As others mentioned above, I too liked the unique Eurasian look and feel of the various kingdoms and city states, and this played perfectly into providing for a diverse cast. I thought the lead actress started out kind of meh in Season One which did not help her character to click with the audience at all, and for a while the Crows were by far the most interesting characters in the story, but eventually in the second half of Season One and throughout Season Two both the lead actress got more comfortable in the role and brought far more life to her character. Still, the supporting cast in this truly shines the brightest (no pun intended) and without their side stories it would not have been nearly as interesting or entertaining.
All that said, Season Two ended on a very confusing and jarring note.
With Kirigan dead and The Fold gone, multiple major plot points are suddenly wrapped up, and it would seem the only real threat to a now united Ravka would be geopolitical rather than magical, and that is a threat that newly crowned King Nikolai is well suited to handle. Instead though we’re plunged immediately into a new threat seemingly out of nowhere that involves an addictive drug and it’s effects on the magic users of the world. This is literally days after the final battle, so like where the hell was this threat when everything else was going down? It’s jarring that something so impactful just sprouts up out of nowhere at the coronation of all places. It felt clumsy and seems like a stupid thing to use to replace a literal evil demonic mist that had engulfed a large portion of the country as a threat to Ravka. Plus now it appears both Nikolai and Alina are tainted by the shadow power?
And let’s talk about Alina and Mal for a minute. In love for so long in the way only YA novel protagonists can be, suddenly Mal’s just like “yeah babe, you’re like the Sun Summoner and stuff, but like, I need to find myself, so it’s been real but kthanxbye”. Oof. Then there is Nina who takes the King’s Pardon for her man and…waves it around fruitlessly at the prison arena. Like, wouldn’t you take that directly to the city leaders of Ketterdam and the prison commandant? What the hell does Rollins care about a pardon, he’s just the head gang leader of the inmates? None of the little ending scenarios made much sense at all, and they certainly don’t set up any sort of agency for Season Three.
The show has been fun, but I also agree with a lot of the critiques. The Crows were absolutely perfectly cast and definitely the best part of the series, but it almost felt like the show-runners were afraid to linger too long with them because they wanted to focus more on the much weaker YA romance plotline.
If they’re doing a season 3 (it’s Netflix, so good luck with that), I’d suggest they abandon the books and stick with world events and more grounded adventures from The Crows’ perspective with cameos from the other major characters.