Shadow and Bone is inspired by the works of Leigh Bardugo, and Season 2 adapts a number of her books.
Bardugo’s novels are collectively titled the Grishaverse, named after the characters who wielded a variety of powers known as Grisha.
So far, the Grishaverse consists of the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, and the King of Scars duology. It also includes short story collections such as The Language of Thorns, The Lives of Saints and the graphic novel The Demon in the Wood.
Here is everything you need to know about the new season of Shadow and Bone.
Season 2 of the Netflix hit finds Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li) still on the run with Mal Oretsev (Archie Renaux) after the events of Season 1, but the pair are quickly drawn back into the fight to save their home country of Ravka.
Alina makes it her mission to find the last of Illya Morozova’s amplifiers to increase her powers and take down General Kirigan, aka The Darkling (Ben Barnes), and tear down the Shadow Fold he unleashed on Ravka centuries earlier.
The only way to do so is to join forces with new allies, such as Ravkan prince Nikolai Lantsov (Patrick Gibson).
Meanwhile, the Crows—Kaz Brekker (Freddy Carter), Inej Ghafa (Amita Suman), and Jesper Fahey (Kit Young)—are plotting revenge against Pekka Rollins (Dean Lennox Kelly) for framing them for murder. They try and bring this about with the help of Nina Zenik (Danielle Galligan) and Wylan Hendricks (Jack Wolfe).
The fantasy series adapts the final two books in Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone trilogy, titled Siege and Storm other ruin and rising, respectively. It also takes elements from Six of Crows other CrookedKingdom.
Kaz’s plot for revenge against Pekka Rollins is a storyline featured in CrookedKingdom, for example, while details of Kaz’s backstory and Wylan’s introduction into the Crows crew is a part of Six of Crows.
There are even elements of the King of Scars duology included in the show, such as Nikolai’s friend Dominik, who died in battle years before Bardugo’s books are set but is still alive during the events of the TV show.
Showrunner Eric Heisserer told Newsweek that streamlining Shadow and Bone Season 2’s story to include plotlines from multiple books “came down to necessity” because of the show’s large cast.
He explained: “The discoveries we made in the first five weeks of the writers room, when we were looking at Season 2, were major tectonic shifts for us, in that we realized so much of Siege and Storm—because it’s solely through Alina’s point of view—didn’t give us much interaction […] with other major characters.
“And when you have a cast list as big and exciting as ours, we knew right away that we needed to find as aerodynamic as possible a story that allowed us to hit on the moments with Alina’s development and her arc […] but then allowed us to shift over to any of Nikolai’s team, or the Crows, or any number of other new characters that we had introduced here. So, it was about having a lot of mouths to feed really.”
Shadow and Bone Season 2 is out on Netflix now.
Shadow and Bone is inspired by the works of Leigh Bardugo, and Season 2 adapts a number of her books.
