‘Shadow and Bone’ Soars in Season 2

Shadow and Bone magnificently expands its rich world-building and heart-capturing characters in Season 2, releasing Thursday, March 16^th on Netflix. 

If Season 1 was a strong takeoff for the show based on two of Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling YA book series — The Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology — Season 2 soars even higher.

There’s nothing quite like seeing what happens when you “bring a gun to a magic fight,” in Bardugo’s words.

For those not already in the know, Season 1 begins with Alina Starkov (“newcomer” Jessie Mei Li) transforming from a lowly orphaned cartographer on a military assignment with her childhood friend, Malyen ‘Mal’ Orestsev (Archie Renaux), into a newly discovered and developing “Sun Summoner,” believed to have the rare power to destroy a shadowy and dangerous “Fold” that has divided the country of Ravka for hundreds of years, created by an ancient, dark magician experimenting with power beyond his control. Alina aligns with General Kirigan (the inimitable Ben Barnes), attracted to his power, and hoping to learn from him to control her own power, and together destroy the Fold that killed her parents.

Their story collides with a band of thieves — the “Crows” — featuring Inej (Amita Suman), a beautiful and stealthy knife fighter, Jesper (Kit Young), a gunslinger extraordinaire, and Kaz (Freddy Carter), their surly and mysterious boss, who are hired to capture the Sun Summoner. When their plans go awry, and nothing turns out quite as expected, Alina is on the run by the end of the season.

As Season 2 opens, Alina is still on the run, now with allies and reunited with Mal, and determined to seek two mythical creatures to amplify her power so she can destroy the Fold once and for all. She’s opposed by forces who’d prefer to use the Fold to leverage it as a weapon and keep the balance of power in their favor. Alina and Mal, aided by some excellent new characters, including Sturhmond, a privateer with uncertain interests, a pair of twin sibling fighters (Tolya and Tamar, pictured above), and Wylan, a charming demolitions expert. 

With the diversity and excellence of the cast, well-drawn characters breaking tropes (sharing power instead of constantly competing), unique “tsarpunk” costuming and settings, intriguing magical abilities and methods, and beautiful world-building, Shadow and Bone is fresh, intriguing, and delightful. And it truly takes off in Season 2.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Eric Heisserer, the series creator and showrunner, and the screenwriter behind Arrival and Bird Box, about how he came to work on the show, his approach to the adaptation, and how he runs the show. 

Heisserer originally read the books for pleasure, starting with Six of Crows. He fell in love with the story with the chapter titled, “Inej,” after being introduced to the world and to Grisha abilities, with a characters who “came alive on the page,” saying, “I’m still in awe of Leigh’s writing ability to do that.” 

He so enjoyed the read, he tweeted about it to author Leigh Bardugo. He had made a resolution that year “to reach out to authors of anything I love to give them joyous praise,” in counterpoint to “the other side” (negative critiques).

A little over a year later, Netflix reached out, surprising Heisserer, who’d forgotten entirely about his tweet. He was in the middle of developing a pilot project at another network based on another story by Ted Chiang (Arrival is based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Chiang), when Netflix approached him about becoming involved in the adaptation of the Shadow and Bone trilogy. Heisserer related how he turned the project down because they didn’t also have the rights for the Crows duology, feeling confident that the pilot project was a sure thing. He laughed about it ruefully, saying, “I definitely had the Charlie Brown voice of, ‘I’m absolutely kicking the ball this time.’ And Lucy yanked it from me.”

Luckily, Netflix was interested in his take to integrate the two series and picked up the rights to both, bringing him on board as showrunner and lead writer.

[SCI-FI CIRCUIT: Insights from 'The Ark']

Because the Shadow and Bone series is a prequel to the Six of Crows duology, Heisserer had a unique challenge — essentially inventing a prequel story for the Crows to play during the Shadow and Bone timeline — and which ended up being “just as difficult as adapting something, but also just as rewarding.”

Heisserer described the work as something akin to a Back to the Future Part II effort, in that they were integrating characters into the main storyline that “could have absolutely been in the first book,” but weren’t. The writers had to do some of this in Season 2 too, particularly because they hadn’t yet reached the point where the Six of Crows duology begins (and had to navigate a hard and fast rule from author Leigh Bardugo to not have a certain something show up before that point). They compressed the remaining two books of the trilogy for Season 2, in part to get to that point in the timeline, as well as to navigate around some of the “palace intrigue” that otherwise would have kept too many of the large (and excellent) cast off-screen for too long.

Although the writers began writing the Season 2 scripts in January 2021, well before Season 1 aired and before Netflix renewed for Season 2, they haven’t followed the same approach this time around with a third season. Happily, however, they’ve written a season’s worth of scripts for certain characters that can “live alongside a Season 3, should we be so lucky as to get a Season 3,” per Heisserer, who added, “Book fans will know what I’m talking about.” (I’m hoping this means an adaptation of King of Scars, featuring Patrick Gibson (The OA), who was fantastic in Season 2 as Sturhmond, but since I haven’t read the books yet, that’s pure speculation on my part.)

Heisserer worked as the solo showrunner for Season 1, but “when [Netflix] green-lit the production of Season 2, they also green-lit the writer’s room for this side project, and I made it very clear I could not do both at the same time, and live. And we all agreed that Daegan Fryklind, who was my EP and right hand in Season 1, should absolutely ascend to be co-showrunner for Season 2. And I'm grateful that she said yes — great boots on the ground for so much of that on the production, and I joined her as soon as I could.”

[Ask the Coach: How Do I Find a Showrunner?]

Eight writers comprised the writer’s room for Season 2, including Heisserer and Fryklind, plus other “fresh voices” working on the mysterious side project (Heisserer mentioned an Inej-focused episode which immediately caught my attention). The writer’s room included two assistants who moved up in the ranks, one from show assistant to writer’s assistant, and another from writer’s assistant to staff writer. Heisserer said, “[This] is part of the process — looking to bring people up in the business and have them ascend to greater positions of writing — the way it used to work.” (We love him for this, right, writers?)

He added, “I have clung to this creative team and stuck with them as much as I could throughout. They're a good group of people and know the material so well. There's a genre fluency and a fluency to the world, and they know how to write for our actors. So we kept a lot of that same team throughout.”

On the subject of adaptation, Heisserer had this brilliant piece of wisdom to offer, “The important thing to focus on is preserving how the source material made you feel when you read it, and to hold on to that feeling and making sure it's preserved in your adaptation. There will be a lot in the aesthetic fidelity of the project that you'll try to preserve, but discover that does not translate in the adaptation.”

 As an example, he shared that “one of the most frustrating elements in Shadow and Bone was that in the books [a character] was called ‘the Darkling’ constantly and had no other name. And we struggled with that. We tried to make it work for so long and it got frustrating for two reasons. One was that we found in so many early auditions that if there's a slight enunciation problem with an actor, it sounded like ‘darling.’ It worked so well in that source material and it fell apart for us in the show. [Second], we didn't want to divulge his first name until early in Season 1, when he’s making a gesture of closeness and intimacy to Alina. When we thought about having him give a fake first name, we realized it would seem like he was lying to her about everything and wasn't being emotionally honest with her, which was a betrayal of his character at that moment. So we knew that was going to be too troublesome for people to understand. We only hope they can empathize and understand that it came out of us holding on as hard as we could to what worked in the books that didn't work in the adaptation.”

With world-building in fantasy, Heisserer fought a battle for all writers: “On adapting fantasy or creating fantasy — particularly second world fantasy where you don't have the portal of the real world that someone can ground it in — there is so much world-building that needs to happen. The fight I had — that I hope will make it easier for other fantasy writers — is in how much you have to define and explain, particularly for the executive who doesn't read and doesn't necessarily care about fantasy, and wants a text crawl or a 10-minute voiceover describing all the hierarchies, caste systems, currencies, and histories so that it turns into a BBC documentary about a show versus an actual fictional narrative.

“And the fight I had was this, ‘If this were a medical show and our character — our lead — was a neurosurgeon who threw around a ton of jargon about the brain, about surgical tools, medicines, and whatnot, that you didn't know about, you wouldn't care. You wouldn't bat an eye. You would be happy with it because you understood the stakes are life and death. If I can get you to the place where you believe the stakes are life and death, then let us have this use of foreign terms, and trust the audience, because today's audience has such a genre fluency that we wouldn't have 30 years ago. We’ve been weaned on Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings and all these other shows that have paved the way for us, and we think viewers will give us that faith and hang in there until it clicks.’”

Amen.

Season 2 of Shadow and Bone is out on Netflix on Thursday, March 16^th. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Note: Screened Seasons 1 and 2 for review. 

About the Series