Shadow and Bone Season 2 Review | Surprising in both good and bad ways

Overall season rating: 7/10

This review contains SPOILERS!

    Shadow and Bone season 2 dropped earlier this month, and I finally got around to finishing it this week. And to summarize my experience in one word: it was...surprising.

    The thing about being a book fan (granted, I haven't read the books in years and don't remember much) is that you have expectations for a certain plot. And when those expectations aren't fulfilled, you're automatically disappointed. Does that mean it's necessarily a bad show? No, I guess not, but it kind of means that it's a bad adaptation. 

    Let's start with the positives. I really enjoyed the first half of the season. I loved the introduction of new characters and the transitions between them. The settings were also fantastic, showing us different cultures within the diverse world. A huge highlight for sure was the Kaz vs Pekka showdown, which captured the atmosphere of the books so much.This season needed more Zoya; I'm excited to see more of her in the future. 

    Going into this season, after hearing about the show wanting to adapt both Seige and Storm and Ruin and Rising, I was expecting them to completely wrap up the Mal and Alina plotline and give me a Malina happily ever after in a pretty little bow. In fact, I thought that was the only given thing that I could rely on this season. So for me, watching that last episode was very shocking, and overall, I see this season as a turning point. In a few years from now, we'll look at future Shadow and Bone seasons and see season 2 as the point where a risky creative decision to deviate from the books paid off, or where everything went wrong. For me, it all depends on what they do with Mal and Alina's plotlines from now on since they are the characters that didn't exist after Ruin and Rising. Are they going to give us convincing plotlines for them? We'll see. 

    The season started off with a bang and with a lot of new characters which made it both exciting and overwhelming. I loved everything until episodes 5 and 6. The whole Shu saint sequence from the overdramatic fight scenes, the hallucinations, to the cheesy romantic speech had me cringing the whole time. The decision to group so many character backstories into one episode felt forced and just ineffective. 

    Kaz's backstory in particular was severely disappointing. It felt like we got the PG-13 version of his backstory and it seemed like little material had been filmed for the flashbacks so they had to keep going back to the same shots over and over. In the book, the horror and imagery of Kaz's experience was described which helps to understand and emphasize with the character. For a show that's advertized as adult, I was confused about why they understated Kaz's trauma. 

Inej Ghafa is an underutilized character this season, but maybe that's a good thing.

    In contrast to Kaz, Inej's character this season was underdeveloped. However, I choose to see this as a good thing because hopefully, it means we will get time for her and her backstory in a future Crows spin-off. After seeing what they did with Kaz's backstory and the brief glimpses of Jesper and Wylan's stories, I hope they do much, much better for Inej. Apart from her religious devotion, her character this season was limited to Kaz's love interest.

    Another weakness of the show was the lack of emotional pay-off for any of the huge events. The scenes with Baghra and Aleksander particularly were so short and brief. I really wanted to feel the emotions of the characters in those moments but instead felt detached from it all. I understand the show is crowded, but if they had let Ben Barnes emote for 20 more seconds it would've made the scenes more powerful and added more complexity to his character. The same goes for the scene where Alina kills the Darkling, everything was so rushed it was hard to feel anything in those key moments. The only scenes that had emotional pay-off for me were Genya and David's scenes. Even though they had little screentime, the acting and directing in those scenes really did the events justice. In particular, the scene where Genya discovers David's plans for a ring was so poignant. Other than that, I just felt so detached and unconnected to the characters.

Genya and David were the ones to make me tear up this season.

    Finally, the last episode was kind of a mess to me. It felt too long and the last scene at the church was straight out of a soap opera and felt downright comedic. Also, the introduction of the Six of Crows plot with the Jurda parem drug was a terrible creative decision since it literally sounded like the amplifiers that we've been on and on about the entire season. They will seriously have to differentiate between this drug and the amplifiers so it doesn't sound repetitive.  

    Overall, I'm not too mad about this season. It seems ambitious to me that it will be approved for a double renewal with the Crows spin-off, but if it happens, I will most certainly be tuning in. As I said, I think how I view this season will change a lot in hindsight depending on what happens in future seasons/spin-offs. 

I will be tuned in until the show delivers on my Malina endgame as promised.

What were your thoughts about this season? Are you excited for what comes next?

Thanks,

Yomna