How Shadow and Bone season 2 sets up an expanded Grishaverse

Shadow and Bone season 2 has many similarities to the first season — adventure, magic, heists, humor, and just a bit of bloodshed — but while season 1 remained mostly loyal to Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels, season 2 uses the books as more of a loose roadmap, and ultimately went down a different road.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunners Eric Heisserer and Daegan Fryklind explained how the ending of Shadow and Bone season 2 sets up a potential Six of Crows spinoff whilst also preparing us for a third season of Shadow and Bone that takes inspiration from Bardugo’s King of Scars series.

Beware SPOILERS for Shadow and Bone season 2 ahead.

Why did Netflix change the ending of Shadow and Bone season 2?

The ending of season 2 left viewers stunned: the Darkling is defeated, but when the Sun Summoner Alina tries to use her Grisha abilities, she summons darkness instead of light. This is a cause for concern.

While this has roots in the books (at the end of the novel Siege and Storm, Alina gains some of the Darkling’s powers after a fight with him), the circumstances are entirely different. After defeating the Darkling for good in the novel Ruin and Rising, Alina loses her powers and goes to live a peaceful life with her true love and childhood best friend Mal (Archie Renaux). On the show, she still has her powers but is potentially corrupted. Mal is elsewhere.

“This is the difference between running a show and writing a novel,” Heisserer said by way of explanation. “You need to pay attention to who your stars are and if they’re under contract. Of course, we didn’t want to lose Jessie or Archie. I wanted to make sure that they felt like they were important characters in the stories to come.”

Six of Crows spinoff

The second season of Shadow and Bone introduces jurda parem, a drug that enhances the abilities of a Grisha. Jurda Parem is important to the Six of Crows novels. By bringing jurda into the storyline now, the show is laying the groundwork for a Six of Crows spinoff. Whether this spinoff happens depends on how well season 2 of Shadow and Bone performs.

Were the spinoff to happen, Heisserer stresses that it would line up with the ending of season 2, with “a good chunk of what you see in the Crow’s side story” occurring at the same time as Nikolai’s coronation. Despite seeing Inej (Amita Suman) sail off to hunt slavers with Mal, Tolya (Lewis Tan) and Tamar (Anna Leong Brophy), Heisserer also confirms that Inej would return for the spinoff. “Obviously, we’re not gonna keep Inej out of that. We’re gonna bring her back. So you understand then how many weeks it has been since she’s been on the high seas and then returning to Ketterdam.”

Zoya, the bee, and King of Scars

The second season ends with the fall of the Shadow Fold, a great rift of darkness that divides the country of Ravka. After the Fold comes down, there is a moment where a bee lands on the shoulder of Zoya (Sujaya Dasgupta), and she brushes it away in irritation. Book-readers probably recognized this as a hint about the King of Scars novels, which is where Heisserer and Fryklind hope to pick up with season 3. “It is, for the book fans, a very pointed Easter egg that hopefully they notice and hopefully there’s a squeal moment when they see it,” Fryklind said.

Book-readers would have also noticed the inclusion of Dominik (Louis Boyer), the childhood friend of Nikolai (Patrick Gibson). The writers changed the timeline of that relationship somewhat so Dominik’s death takes place during the events of season 2, which means we’ll see Nikolai’s reaction in season 3. Additionally, season 2 ends with part of a nichevo’ya going into Nikolai. This sets up the events of King of Scars, where Nikolai struggling to cope with this new part of himself. “We’re more interested in the psychological aspect of being infected by this rather than the physical aspect,” Frykling said. We’re looking at an exciting next phase for this character, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde aspect.”

Zoya and Nikolai’s future storyline in King of Scars is very Saints heavy, so the show bringing in the character of Sankta Neyar and the blade Neshyenyer (seen in Bardugo’s companion book, The Lives of the Saints) was both a way of bringing literal Saints into the show and setting that importance up for the future; but also ensuring that the Crows were incorporated thoroughly into the storyline too. “We got a few begs, I would say, from Netflix after seeing what worked in season 1,” Heisserer said. “That inclusion of the two groups together was a huge deal to them, it was a priority.”

Leigh Bardugo helped with some of the big book changes on Netflix’s Shadow and Bone show

The Crows featured in both seasons of Shadow and Bone, even though they weren’t part of the corresponding books. In future seasons, things will reverse: the show will adapt the Six of Crows books and make up new material for the characters from the Grisha trilogy.

“Thankfully we’re creating brand-new material for actors that we know and love and trust who will carry the water for us on this.” Heisserer said. “And it’s weaving their story in with the King of Scars duology that we’re already in love with, and what we think is going to come alive onscreen from those. So it’s a matter of stitching those in the way we’ve stitched in other characters in these first two seasons.”

With author Leigh Bardugo giving her seal of approval to these changes (Heisserer says that Bardugo herself came up with at least one of the big changes for season 2), it seems that the direction of the Grishaverse is in good hands.

Shadow and Bone seasons 1-2 are available to stream now on Netflix.

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