Grisha Trilogy Archives - Page 2 Of 2

April 29, 2021

“Shadow And Bone” Episode 7 Review!

**SPOILERS FOR SHADOW AND BONE AHEAD!**

In yesterday’s review of Shadow And Bone episode six, I probably angered a whole bunch of Malina shippers by suggesting that the couple should be platonic soulmates, so today…I’m about to do it again. I’m sorry! But the ship wars surrounding Shadow And Bone are almost as epic and brutally violent as any of the in-universe conflicts, and none more so than the fight over The Darkling (Ben Barnes), and the nature of his relationship with Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li), dubbed “Darklina” by fans: something that episode seven dives into while exploring The Darkling’s origins and agendas in a way that some viewers have criticized for humanizing the villain.

Now, how you feel about this varies from person to person, and I can’t and won’t tell anyone how they should feel about the ship, or make broad assumptions about their character if they do ship it. I can only give you my own reading of Darklina, which, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, is not something I personally ship. And that’s not an attack specifically on Darklina – I also don’t ship Malina, or Helnik (we covered that one yesterday too), or even one of the Grishaverse’s most popular pairings, “Wesper” – the coupling of Jesper Fahey (Kit Young) and Six Of Crows‘ Wylan Van Eck, who hasn’t even appeared in Shadow And Bone yet.

But purely from a story-telling perspective, it usually makes sense to humanize villains in one way or another: for one thing, it just helps keep the story interesting and engaging. The notable exception to the rule (and even this is not consistent, as I’ll explain) is when a villain is specifically intended to represent some indefensible evil, such as systemic racism, environmental destruction, or capitalism. But while you could make a convincing argument for why The Darkling represents the indefensible evil of abuse, that ironically means humanizing him is more necessary, if anything.

Abusers are often only able to do evil things because of their ability to pass as decent people or even as victims. The Darkling (in my opinion, doesn’t have to be shared by anyone else) is a predator, who subtly nurtures Alina’s insecurities to make her more dependent on him for security and comfort – this is demonstrated when Alina discovers that it was him, working through the Tailor Genya Safin (Daisy Head), who was preventing her letters from reaching Mal Oretsev (Archie Renaux) and vice versa, leading Alina to believe she had been abandoned by her best friend. To me, humanizing The Darkling is essential to understanding not only how he operates, but the full extent of his evil.

Shadow And Bone doesn’t even do a great job of humanizing him for the audience: the episode is frontloaded with flashbacks to The Darkling’s origin story, but these sequences run a bit too long, and could have been streamlined to better explain several major plot-points – including The Darkling’s relationship with the Grisha Healer Luda (Lucy Griffiths), who appears to have been a critical part of his early successes. She is killed off in her first scene, and we never learn more about her, so the emotional impact of her death isn’t felt: even during her short onscreen lifespan, I think most of us were still distracted by Ben Barnes having his Prince Caspian hair back (the wigs in these flashbacks for Barnes and Zoë Wanamaker are…not it).

This same problem comes up again when we watch The Darkling create the Shadow-Fold, something that should have cleared up the entire mystery about why he did so, but doesn’t fully. The explanation, such as it is, is that The Darkling – who was being pursued by agents of the Ravkan king for unspecified reasons – only consciously intended to bend the king’s army to his will: but by using forbidden merzost magic to do so, he unconsciously inflicted upon the world a seething flesh wound of darkness, mutilating Ravka and transforming everyone caught in his hellish outpouring of power into terrible demons.

That’s a decent enough explanation (though different from the books), but in the limited time Shadow And Bone has to explain what merzost even is, the entire concept feels rushed. And given that, in creating the Fold, The Darkling ends up accidentally following his mother Baghra (Zoë Wanamaker)’s advice to create “a problem only Grisha can solve” to win back his prestige, I would have either made that his intention from the start or at least more obviously in the back of his mind while he was using merzost. It’s a pretty brilliant idea because of how it plays into a key theme in Shadow And Bone, which is that victors write the history books, and the Darkling’s had time to craft an elaborate falsified version of events.

The Darkling, after all, is immortal – and “patient”, something he explains to Mal later in the episode. He’s faked his own death and changed his name and persona countless times without mortals ever being able to catch on: but in every life he’s lived in Ravka, he’s also been able to subtly alter and revise the story of the Shadow-Fold’s creation over time, until the “Black Heretic” was an entirely separate person whose real name – Aleksander, the name he still carries in secret – was lost and long-forgotten, and he was merely one of the Heretic’s descendants working to undo his forefather’s crimes.

Ironically, the anti-Grisha bigotry that sparked the creation of the Fold is also erased from history by Ravka itself, as the Fold’s very existence forces the entire country to rely on Grisha for survival and defense (therefore making the rise of modern technology even more threatening to the Grisha). And while most of that is left in subtext for the viewer to conclude on their own (not that it takes a great deal of guesswork), it still helps to inject some conflict into The Darkling’s character arc, giving him a sort of tragic nobility.

But the flashbacks ultimately don’t help flesh out his character as much as his interactions with Alina later, after following her and Mal to the location of Morozova’s Stag – one of three magical beasts whose bones and life-forces act as Amplifiers to a Grisha’s natural power, supposedly only for the Grisha who strikes the killing blow. Alina can’t bring herself to shoot or stab the Stag as it lays dying in the snow, but The Darkling has no such reservations: using The Cut, he brutally decapitates the Stag, slicing its crown of antlers straight off. Alina, now his prisoner, can only watch in horror.

The Darkling doesn’t give Alina any choice when it comes to using the Amplifier – in an intense ritual presided over by Grisha Fabrikator David Kostyk (Luke Pasqualino), he has the Stag’s antlers melded into a small medallion embedded into his own hand, and a multi-pronged collar that becomes rooted in Alina’s spine and shoulders like body-horror jewelry, allowing him to access and harness Alina’s Summoning abilities without her consent. But once that’s done and she’s under his control whether or not she wants to be, then he offers her a chance to rule alongside him – a chance she rejects utterly. Shadow And Bone book fans all got a squeal of excitement out of hearing Ben Barnes say the iconic line: “Fine. Make me your villain”.

The beauty of this line in the show is the added context that The Darkling knows that, whether or not this generation remembers him as a villain, it’ll only take him a few more to change the historical record again. But as book readers know, Darklina doesn’t simply go away now – the romantic connection that Alina and Aleksander shared is something intrinsic to all their interactions going forward, even though Alina is well aware of his strengths as a manipulator and liar. And as Alina herself levels up to challenge his power (something happening much faster in the show than the books), becoming his equal in raw power, the ship only becomes more…shippable.

I know Malinas are extremely overprotective of their ship because they feel they have to be (which is fitting, considering that’s Mal’s defining character trait in the books); and I know Darklinas are defensive of their ship because they get made out to be the villains of the Grishaverse fandom (again, weirdly fitting); so where does that leave us angsty Kanej shippers who are just here for Kaz Brekker (Freddy Carter) doing everything in his power to keep Inej Ghafa (Amita Suman) from quitting the mission without telling her it’s because he depends on her? Somewhere between happy and heartbroken, that’s where.

(And if you ship Jesper with his emotional support goat, Milo (goat), you’re in luck; because Milo returns in this episode and saves the day again, playing an instrumental role in freeing Mal from The Darkling’s prison and setting the entire finale into motion. In return he gets a nice little bit of, like, I don’t know, is that cheese or something that Mal feeds him? “Good with goats” is officially the only thing I look for in a partner, and Mal has passed the test with flying colors).

One thing Shadow And Bone doesn’t have much time to explore in season one is the wealth of material in all three of the Crows’ individual backstories – except for Inej, about whom we’ve already learned a great deal in a very organic manner. In this episode, a single glance from her speaks volumes about the things she suffered while indentured to the brothel owner Tante Heleen, that required her to learn how to patch up wounds while she was still a child. And that’s as much as you need to know. I think there are cases where “tell, don’t show” is acceptable, and, while I’m excited for Shadow And Bone‘s second season to explore Kaz and Jesper’s backstories through flashbacks, it would be difficult to do much more than what’s already been done with Inej.

The Crows already have history together, though, as a team unit – and you can feel it in their iconic motto: “No mourners, no funerals”, which Kaz uses in Shadow And Bone as the Crows board a skiff bound across the Shadow-Fold disguised as foreign ambassadors (and can we just talk about Inej wearing a bowler-hat and suit? Because I feel like we haven’t talked about that enough), having given up on their mission to kidnap Alina – or at least, so Kaz claims. It’s a remarkable coincidence then that they end up sharing the skiff with Alina and The Darkling, not to mention the stowaway Mal, and the Grisha Squaller Zoya Nazyalensky (Sujaya Dasgupta).

As the skiff slips into the haunted darkness of the Fold and everyone’s storylines promise to converge in the season finale, you can’t help but wonder why everyone in the Grishaverse doesn’t have an emotional support goat for times like these (I mean, Alina technically has an emotional support stag, but it’s not very huggable anymore as a result of being dead and headless).

Episode Rating: 9/10

March 30, 2021

“Shadow And Bone” 2nd Trailer!

**SPOILERS FOR SHADOW AND BONE AND SIX OF CROWS AHEAD!**

In all my coverage of Netflix’s upcoming Shadow And Bone adaptation, my one consistent concern has been how the series is going to juggle the various components of its sprawling story. While its title is borrowed from the fairly straightforward first book in the Grisha trilogy, Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling YA fantasy series, the Netflix adaptation is also drawing on material from Bardugo’s later (and, in my opinion, superior) Six Of Crows duology, set in the same fantasy world but in a different region, at a different time. To better link the two, Netflix is compressing the timeline and creating original storylines for the Six Of Crows characters that will bring them into contact with Grisha trilogy characters they never met in the books.

The task seems daunting. The Grisha trilogy takes place in the Russian-inspired country of Ravka, where an orphaned girl named Alina Starkov discovers that she’s the Sun-Summoner, a magical being capable of creating light – and thus powerful enough to save Ravka from the terrible Shadow Fold, an ocean of pure shadow that cuts an ugly rift through the country. The Six Of Crows duology, set years later in the Amsterdam-inspired city of Ketterdam, follows a ragtag band of criminals, nicknamed the Crows, who unite to kidnap a mage and score a hefty reward. Tonally, the two stories share little in common…and while a handful of characters overlap, they are both very much their own thing.

But the second full trailer for Netflix’s Shadow And Bone reveals the series’ solution to that problem…which, as far as solutions go, seems to me like one that comes with massive risks and the potential to completely derail the storyline of the books as time goes on. The Crows will simply unite to kidnap Alina Starkov herself.

We’ve known for a while now that we weren’t gonna get a literal adaptation of Six Of Crows in this first season of Shadow And Bone. The series is still focused on Alina and the events of her books. The Crows were always going to be playing secondary roles in this season, with the promise that their roles would be upgraded in season two, when their story could actually take off. But with this new development, I don’t understand the point in doing the actual Six Of Crows storyline anymore, even in season two…because they’re already basically using it as a season one subplot, heightening the stakes dramatically while recentering it around Alina.

I’d actually be very surprised if the story from Six Of Crows were to be adapted at this point, because I think I can begin to guess what Shadow And Bone is doing…and why, while I think it’s a gamble even Jesper Fahey would shy away from, it might just pay off.

Just as it feels like the Crows’ individual arcs are being reworked to fit into Alina’s story in season one, I believe the opposite might be true of season two…which, rather than following the events of Six Of Crows, may actually lift more heavily from the book’s sequel (and my favorite of Bardugo’s Grishaverse stories), Crooked Kingdom. In that book, the Crows return to Ketterdam with their kidnapped prize, only to be betrayed by their client and embroiled in a war of subterfuge and deceit in the city’s criminal underworld. If that’s the case, it’s unfair we wouldn’t see a more accurate adaptation of these stories – but it’s already unfair that Shadow And Bone still includes Mal, one of the worst love interests in literary history.

There’s evidence for this theory in the trailer. The Crows still receive their offer from a mustachioed older gentleman who appears to be Jan Van Eck, their backstabbing client from the books. Mal tells Alina at one point that he’ll find his way back to her if they’re ever separated, implying strongly that they will be (I see no issue with that, gotta be honest). And while the Crows don’t have much screentime in the trailer, it looks like they make it to Ravka: we see Inej Ghafa evading a jet of fire that could only have been cast by a Grisha magician, and moments later she appears to be in the Shadow-Fold itself, looking dashing while throwing knives at an unseen enemy – perhaps a Volcra demon?

We also know that Alina’s backstory in the series has been changed to make her biracial and half Shu Han (an East Asian-inspired region bordering Ravka), a change reflected in the decision to cast an actress of Chinese descent in the role. The showrunners have cited multiple reasons for this change, one of which being that it lends depth to her arc. But it could also make her taking over the role of Kuwei Yul-Bo – the Crows’ kidnapping victim, and the only prominent Shu Han character in the books – more plausible.

Obviously, the Crows kidnapping Alina and bringing her back to Ketterdam would have massive consequences…but if I’m being honest, I think Alina’s character would benefit a lot from the change. The Grisha trilogy gets kind of boring when it devolves into love-triangulations in book two, so it would be refreshing to see Alina separated from both her love interests for a minute and placed in a completely new scenario, before possibly returning to Ravka by way of the seafaring Prince Nikolai, who appears in the second books of both series’. And I won’t deny that the thought of her interacting with the Crows excites me greatly.

The only question is how the Crows would benefit from this change, from having Alina and the Darkling (and Mal, I guess) constantly barging in on their storylines – and, as someone with a Crows bias, that’s the question that gives me pause and makes me wonder if it’s actually worth it. I also would like to know why the Crows still only have three members, and why Nina Zenik and Matthias Helvar don’t even seem to have real storylines in this season (Nina does at least have a cut hat).

Shadow And Bone still looks very promising and well-produced, however, and I’m excited to see if anything can make me interested in the events of the Grisha trilogy. I’m not totally sold on Six Of Crows being used as a subplot in Alina Starkov’s story, but if it means Crooked Kingdom (or some version of that story) might be the focus of season two, you better believe I’m gonna grin and bear it.

Trailer Rating: 8/10

February 26, 2021

“Shadow And Bone” 1st Trailer Needs More Crows

**SPOILERS FOR SHADOW AND BONE AHEAD!**

I like the Six Of Crows duology more than the original Grisha trilogy. I know, I know, real original, right? But as someone who infinitely prefers reading an action-packed heist adventure with a diverse crew of antiheroes to wading through endless chapters of Alina and Mal bickering over literally everything, I’m going to stick with my boring Grishaverse opinion. And thus, it’s no surprise that the first trailer for Netflix’s adaptation of Shadow And Bone didn’t really pique my interest fully, because…there’s a lot of Alina, and a lot of Mal, and while I believe actors Jessie Mei Li and Archie Renaux are probably going to put in the work to try and make their characters engaging and relatable…I’m still not convinced that’s possible yet.

To give credit where credit is due, the Grisha trilogy (the first of multiple series’ by Leigh Bardugo set in the Grishaverse, where magic runs rampant in a gritty late 19th-Century-inspired fantasy world) does incorporate one of my all-time favorite tropes: palace intrigue and political scheming. And the first season of Shadow And Bone, which will adapt the first book in the bestselling trilogy alongside some wholly original stories featuring the Six Of Crows cast, seems to feature just as much palace intrigue as the books – if not more. For those unfamiliar with the premise of the book, Alina Starkov (played by Jessie Mei Li in the Netflix adaptation) starts out a humble orphaned mapmaker before discovering her magical ability to conjure sunlight: a gift that comes in handy when your kingdom is split in half by a demon-infested ocean of inky, uncharted darkness, hindering trade and leaving those trapped behind “The Shadow Fold” struggling. Alina gets recruited into the Grisha, a small army of sorcerers who operate at the upper echelons of high society, all while maneuvering political and religious crises, and a love-triangle involving her best friend Mal and her Grisha partner: the infamous Darkling.

The love-triangle is fairly unpopular in the fandom, with both of Alina’s potential love-interests being widely hated-on for various reasons (the Darkling is a backstabbing tyrant, Mal is…Mal), and it doesn’t feature too heavily in the first trailer for Shadow And Bone, which wisely focuses attention on the series’ spectacular CGI budget and action sequences, some of which seem to be infused with a dose of horror. The catalyst for Shadow And Bone‘s events, Alina’s attempted crossing of the Shadow Fold and the reveal of her powers, is getting a perfect page-to-screen adaptation, by the looks of it – the dreadful silence inside the Fold, the rush of wings as volcra demons amass in the darkness, the suspense, and then the reveal of one monster about to bite a man’s head off from behind: good stuff. Don’t be fooled by the books’ YA rating: the Grisha trilogy and particularly the Six Of Crows duology get really dark (and not just because the Darkling can literally conjure up shadows).

Unfortunately, the trailer just barely squeezes in individual shots of the three main Six Of Crows characters who will be introduced in season one, implying that they and their subplots will not be a primary focus until season two at least. That saddens me greatly, because I already think I’m going to love them: Freddy Carter has won me over with his portrayal of crime lord Kaz Brekker, just from the intensity of his glare and the confidence with which he swings his cane; Kit Young looks radiant and fun as chaotic bisexual sharpshooter Jesper Fahey; and Amita Suman as assassin Inej Ghafa appears to be taking the lethal energy she displayed in her first-look image, and applying it brilliantly to her physical acting. Of the three Crows, she stands out the most – ironically, since her whole storyline revolves around being undetectable. I want her to have epic fight sequences, Netflix! Don’t force me to sit through hours of “Malina” content when I could be watching Inej brutally knife people!

With the series’ in-universe timeline still a confusing mystery and plot details for the Crows’ subplot a secret, I still don’t understand how the two vastly different storylines will intertwine organically – though the showrunners insist there’s a connection. But with the characters of Nina and Mathias still completely absent from the conversation (except for an embarrassingly bad first-look image that conveyed nothing whatsoever of their characters’ rich and unique backstories or personalities), and Wylan Van Eck not appearing in season one, don’t expect any tease of the actual Six Of Crows plot until the season finale, at least.

I feel like Shadow And Bone fans will collectively raise their eyebrows at me if I don’t talk about the Darkling at all, especially given that he’s the series’ main selling-point, but honestly – what is there to say? He’s got fantastic hair, the kind of luscious mane that practically requires a soft breeze to be rippling through it at all times. But Ben Barnes, despite looking and sounding the part, isn’t really radiating the kind of palpable seductive charisma I had anticipated from arguably the only truly iconic character in the Grisha trilogy. I’m willing to believe this is the fault of Netflix’s marketing, though, as it seems reluctant to reveal the Darkling as the series’ main villain.

So while the rest of you are busy digging your trenches in the endless Darklina vs Malina shipping war, I’ll be over here minding my own business (I always preferred Alina’s dynamic with Nikolai anyway, and he won’t be in season one), and happily stanning my Six (well, three, for right now) of Crows.

Trailer Rating: 6.5/10

December 17, 2020

“Shadow And Bone” 1st Trailer Hypes Up The Epic Dark Fantasy!

It’s been a long time since we got any news from the set of Shadow And Bone, one of the myriad of upcoming fantasy series’ in Netflix’s seemingly endless catalogue. The cast looked pretty good when they were revealed last year, and filming wrapped just prior to the start of the coronavirus pandemic, luckily, but in the months since then all we’ve really seen (or rather heard) was a snippet of the series’ melancholy, ominous score – which was admittedly quite beautiful. But now, to accompany the news that Shadow And Bone has been set for a fast-approaching April 2021 release date, Netflix has generously dropped a new teaser trailer.

A mere forty seconds long, the teaser doesn’t provide any actual footage (and only a single line of dialogue), but instead sets up the series’ general atmosphere: dark, wintry, and mystical. Shadow And Bone will combine storylines from Leigh Bardugo’s two separate book series’ set in the Grishaverse world: the Grisha trilogy, which follows Alina Starkov as she becomes the prophesized Sun-Summoner and battles The Darkling for control of her homeland; and its more popular successor, the Six Of Crows duology, which takes place many years after the original trilogy and explores life in the criminal underworld of the city of Ketterdam, where a thief named Kaz Brekker and his gang of social outcasts stage a daring heist to win a fortune. The books are very good, and I highly recommend reading them, but suffice it to say that the Grishaverse is kind of like a gritty Narnia with overtones of The Witcher. It stands out from the crowd of young adult fantasy stories thanks to its mature themes and elegant writing style. I’m pretty typical/boring in that I prefer Six Of Crows to the Grisha trilogy, but I have a feeling Netflix might finally make me care about the characters of Alina Starkov and The Darkling (nothing they can do will ever get me to spare an ounce of interest in Alina’s love interest, Mal, one of the most detestable and annoying characters I’ve ever read).

The first season of the Netflix adaptation will tackle the events of the first Grisha trilogy book – itself titled Shadow And Bone – and, it seems, the backstories of most of the main characters in Six Of Crows. Whether or not these two story threads will interweave organically or not is still a mystery: in the books, there isn’t much crossover between the two until Six Of Crows‘ sequel, but that may change for the series. It’s possible we’ll follow two storylines unfolding in a non-linear fashion – but The Witcher just did that, and got criticized for confusing viewers. I suspect there’s a chance, then, that the events of the two series’ will occur simultaneously for the Netflix show’s purposes…despite the plot-holes that could case, if done sloppily. The clearest link between the two, which I hope Shadow And Bone will exploit, is the character of Nina, who (in the books) is a crucial member of Kaz Brekker’s gang, but hails from Alina Starkov’s home country of Ravka, where she was a young but powerful Grisha mage before being abducted.

Anyway. Elements from both series’ are incorporated into the imagery used in the teaser – from a crow (the emblem of Brekker’s gang) soaring past, to the white Morozova’s Stag whose intricate, frosted, antlers command attention before being transformed (via CGI wizardry) into a ball of radiant, fluid, sunlight clasped between two silhouetted hands. In the books, the mythical Stag’s antlers are similarly used to amplify Alina’s magic powers, which manifest as the ability to conjure and control light. I especially love how Alina’s hands fold against her chest, snuffing out the light as darkness encroaches around her. Before the title card is illuminated by one of her outbursts of magic, we hear from Alina’s nemesis and love interest, The Darkling himself, whose power to manipulate shadows pits the two against each other throughout the book series: in his gentle yet firm voice, he tells her that “You and I are going to change the world”. Fans have long been hyped to see Ben Barnes as The Darkling – it would have been nice to get a first look at his costume.

And of course, the whole visual masterpiece is complimented by the aforementioned theme, composed by Joseph Trapanese and well-suited to a dark fantasy epic like this. Although there’s not much to go on yet, the vibe I’m getting from the show is really good so far. And Netflix’s track-record when it comes to creating addictive content is pretty spotless: I unironically loved The Witcher, and I believe Shadow And Bone will probably be another bingeworthy hit for the streaming service.

Trailer Rating: 8/10