Lupita Nyong’o not only shares the screen with a feline co-star in the new film A Quiet Place: Day One, she’s also a devoted cat mom to a ginger tabby named Yoyo.
Although I haven’t seen most of Lupita Nyongo’s movies — I really liked her performance in Us and her voice work in Disney’s Jungle Book remake — I’m a big fan now that I know she’s a cat lover.
Nyong’o took to the red carpet for the premiere of her newest film, A Quiet Place: Day One in London on Wednesday, and her plus-one was a cat named Schnitzel, who also stars in the movie. Photos show Nyong’o posing along co-star Joseph Quinn, smiling as she cradles Schnitzel in her arms.
Lupita Nyong’o with her cat, Yoyo. In addition to posing with a cat on the red carpet premiere of her new film, Nyong’o proudly dotes on Yoyo and mentions him often. Credit: Lupita Nyong’o/Instagram
A Quiet Place is a 2018 film about a family that lives a completely silent life on a farm after the civilization has fallen to monstrous creatures that can’t see but are exceptionally sensitive to sound.
The film received nearly universal positive reviews for its use of sound — and the complete absence of it for long stretches — as a tension-building device, and a 2020 sequel continued the story.
Day One, which hits theaters on June 28, promises audiences a look at how the creatures appeared and civilization collapsed.
Schnitzel’s role isn’t entirely clear, but if it’s anything like 2022’s Prey, cats will fill their usual niche as predators, highlighting the difference between terrestrial and extraterrestrial hunters.
Caring for a cat in a world like A Quiet Place could be a double edged-sword: a super vocal cat like my Buddy wouldn’t last very long unless he quickly learned to keep a lid on his constant commentary, but cats are also incredibly sensitive to things that pass beneath the notice of us humans.
Thanks to their incredible hearing, exceptional sense of smell, the advantage of an extra olfactory organ and whiskers that pick up even the slightest stirring, felines are keenly aware of their surroundings.
As for Nyong’o, while Schnitzel is not her cat, she’s the proud cat mom of Yoyo, an orange tabby she fostered in late 2023. It only took her three days of fostering the little guy before she realized “I could not give him up,” she said last year shortly after the adoption was made official.
“I never understood people whose phones were full of photos and videos of their pets — now I am one of those people,” she wrote when she adopted the tabby. “It may look like I saved Yoyo, but really, Yoyo is saving me.”
Lupita Nyong’o with Yoyo. Credit: Lupita Nyong’o/Instagram
Matt Damon rescued a stray living on the periphery of a Costa Rican jungle.
Matt Damon stopped by the Late Show With Stephen Colbert this week, and somehow they got on the topic of Damon’s cat.
The Oppenheimer actor described how he and his wife gained the feline’s trust while staying at an AirBnB in Costa Rica. The cat, who was living on the edge of the nearby jungle and “fighting for his life every night,” gratefully accepted food from the Damons and grew to trust them over the month they spent at the rental.
“By the end we were like, ‘We have to take this cat. This guy’s gonna die. Now he’s relying on us.'”
It turns out the little brawler was done with living rough and enthusiastically took to the life of a pampered house cat.
“He moves into our house, and I’m thinking ‘I have a little yard out in LA, it’ll be great out there [for him],'” Damon told Colbert. “He never went outside ever again.”
Damon’s cat had a serious health scare, but the story has a happy ending and it’s better to hear Damon tell it, so turn up your speakers/headphones:
Yes, Damon’s cat may be “jacked,” and he may even be the Arnold Schwarzenegger of felines, but surely he doesn’t compare to the OG of ripped and meowscular cats.
Making his debut in 1979’s Alien, Jonesy is one of the most famous felines in cinema history.
There’s a popular meme among Alien fans that depicts Jonesy the Cat walking nonchalantly down one of the starship Nostromo’s corridors with his tail up, carrying the corpse of the recently-spawned alien in his mouth like he’s about to present a dead mouse as a gift to his humans.
The joke is self-evident: if the crew of the Nostromo had allowed Jonesy to take care of business from the get-go, the alien would have been disposed of before it had the chance to grow into the monstrosity that haunted the decks of the Nostromo and the nightmares of viewers.
“Who’s a good boy? Who just saved his crew from certain violent death at the claws of a ruthless alien predator? That’s right, you did!”
Of course then there’d be no movie. No ripples of shock in theaters across the US as audiences were confronted by something more nightmarish and utterly alien than popular culture had ever seen before. No indelible mark left on science fiction.
Despite the film’s retrofuturistic aesthetic, it’s difficult to believe Alien first hit theaters almost half a century ago.
That’s testament to director Ridley Scott working at the height of his powers, the carpenters, artists and set dressers who created the starship Nostromo’s claustrophobic interior, the design of the derelict starship where the alien was found, and the bizarre creature itself.
The alien ship and creature designs were the work of Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, who was little-known at the time but floored Scott and writer Dan O’Bannon with his hyper-detailed paintings of grotesque biomechanical scenes.
Signourney Weaver and one of the cats who played Jonesy in the first film.
Kane explores the infamous egg chamber in the derelict alien ship.
Fan art of Jonesy
A close-up shot of the retrofuturistic tech used in the series, a design decision that departed from the gleaming visions of the future common at the time.
A set photo showing the first film’s crew on the iconic space jockey set.
Giger’s work, specifically his 1976 painting Necronom IV, was the basis for the titular alien’s appearance. The alien, called a xenomorph in the film series, is vaguely androform while also animalistic. It is bipedal but with digitgrade feet and can crawl or run on all fours when the situation calls for it. It hides in vents, shafts and other dark spaces, coiling a prehensile tail that ends in a blade-like tip.
But it’s the creature’s head that is most nightmarish. It’s vaguely comma-shaped, eyeless and covered in a hard, armored carapace that ends just above a mouth full of sinister teeth like obsidian arrowheads. There’s perpetually slime-covered flesh that squelches when the creature moves but there are also veins or tendons or something fully exposed without skin, apparently made of metal and bone. Maybe those ducts feed nutrients and circulate blood to the brain. Maybe they help drain excess heat from the creature’s brain cavity.
Regardless, it’s a biomechanical nightmare that the Nostromo’s science officer, Ash, admiringly calls “the perfect organism” whose “structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”
The alien, Ash declares, is “a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
The alien, also referred to as a xenomorph, “that thing,” a “dragon,” “the perfect organism” and various other names by characters in the series. Credit: 20th Century Studios
Part of what makes Jonesey so beloved is the fact that, together with the xenomorph and Ripley, he completes the triumvirate of survivors. We see Jonesy scurry into the protection of tiny confined spaces to escape the alien, hissing at it in the dark. We see him dart into the bowels of the ship after sensing the stalking creature, adding another blip to the crew’s trackers. Finally we see him settling into a cryosleep pod with Ripley, like so many other cats with their humans, when the threat has passed.
Jonesy — affectionately referred to as “you little shithead” by Ripley in the second film — appears in the franchise’s two most famous films, his own comic book series titled Jonesy: Nine Lives on the Nostromo, a 2014 novel (Alien: Out of the Shadows), and in hundreds of references in pop culture over the last half century, from appearances in video games (Halo, World of Warcraft, Fortnite) to references and homages in movies and television shows.
A page from Jonesy: Nine Lives On The Nostromo, which tells the story of Alien from the cat’s perspective. These panels depict Jonesy watching Ash and Dallas examining Kane in the ship’s medical lab.
He’s like the anti-xenomorph. Cats are predators, after all, and Jonesy might be the xenomorph to the ship’s rodents just like every ship’s cat in thousands of years of human naval endeavors. But to the crew members Jonesy’s a source of comfort, a warm, furry friend to cuddle with. Unlike the xenomorph he’s got no biological programming urging him to impregnate other species with copies of himself in one of the most horrific gestation processes imaginable.
Xenos are like predators on steroids, gorging themselves on their victims to fuel unnaturally swift cell reproduction and growth. As a result, over the decades some have speculated that the alien simply ignored the cat, deeming its paltry caloric value unworthy of the effort to kill.
The idea that Jonesy was too small to interest the alien is proved a fallacy in later franchise canon when we see the aftermath of a xenomorph consuming a dog. It’s indiscriminate in its quest for energy, feasting on adult humans and animals alike until two or three days pass and it’s a 12-foot-tall, serpentine nightmare the color of the void of interstellar space.
Just imagine sitting in a theater in 1979. Your idea of science fiction is sleek jet-age spacecraft, Star Trek and Stanley Kubrick’s clinical orbital habitats from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You’re expecting astronauts, heroes, maybe a metal robot or an alien who looks human except for some funky eyebrows, green skin or distinct forehead ridges.
Instead you get a crew of seven weary deep space ore haulers inhabiting a worn, scuffed corporate transport ship, complaining about their bonuses and aching for home, family and the familiar tug of gravity.
But home will have to wait. The ship has logged an unusual signal of artificial origin broadcasting from a small planet in an unexplored star system. The crew has no choice but to investigate. It’s written into their contracts, which stipulate the crew will forfeit their wages if they disregard the signal.
So they land, suit up, move out and find a derelict starship. An incomprehensibly massive vessel so strange in detail and proportion that it could only have been built by an alien mind, with unknowable motivations and psychology.
The egg chamber of the derelict alien ship, designed by Giger.
Inside, hallways that look like ribcages lead to vast chambers with utterly bizarre, inscrutable machinery that seems to consist of biological material — skin, bone, joints, organs — fused with metal. In one of them the corpse of an alien, presumably a pilot, is integrated into a complex array. It’s at least twice the size of a large human man. Its elephantine head is thrown back in the agony of its last moment, when something exploded outward from its body, leaving a mangled ribcage, torn papery skin and desiccated organs.
And beneath that, a shaft leading to another horror — a chamber that seems to stretch for kilometers in either direction, where leathery eggs are cradled in biomachinery and bathed in a bioluminescent cerulean mist.
The decision to enter that chamber sets off one of the most shocking scenes in cinema history, leads to the birth of pop culture’s most terrifying monster, and sent millions of theater-goers home with nightmares in the spring and summer of 1979.
It’s almost too much to handle. But take heart! The unlikely female protagonist makes it to the end, and so does the cat. What more can you ask for?
Jonesy grooming himself on the flight deck of the starship Nostromo. Credit: 20th Century Studios
For All Mankind shows us the future we could have had and the future that could still be if we celebrate our humanity instead of our differences.
The first few minutes of For All Mankind play out like a documentary for the Apollo moon landing, interspersing archival footage of tense staff in mission control with shots of engineers in horn-rimmed glasses poring over data, backup astronauts raising their glasses in a pub and nervous families sitting in their 1960s living rooms, crowding around televisions.
A news anchor cuts in to report he’s getting the live feed from the moon. We see the door of a lander open…and a Soviet cosmonaut strides out, planting the flag of the USSR on the lunar surface and becoming the first human to ever set foot on another world.
That’s the premise of For All Mankind. In this alternate history series, the fire that killed astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee on Apollo I’s launchpad — which indeed happened in real life — led to policy changes and a more cautious culture at America’s space agency, resulting in the US losing the first and most momentous achievement of the space race.
That’s the start of the what-ifs.
What if the Soviets beat us to the moon? What if the rest of the space race was even more competitive than it was in our history, with an America struggling to prove its primacy? What if the US and Soviet Russia continued to pour incredible resources into space exploration? How far would we go? What kind of incredible new technologies would we invent? How would all of it impact American politics, culture, identity and standing in the world?
Could it have led to a better future?
Werner Von Braun (Colm Feore) and Deke Slayton (Chris Bauer) in NASA mission control in For All Mankind. Von Braun and Slayton were real-life leaders at the space agency and formative figures in the space race.
The answer to that question is hinted at in the series’ title, and while the show is filled with tense moments of international, organizational and personal rivalry, it’s infused with rational optimism instead of the cheesy, manufactured aspiration we’re accustomed to. It’s more like asking: What could the human race achieve if we all worked together? Is that retrofuturistic gleaming vision of the future still possible, and how do we get there?
For All Mankind follows Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman), astronauts and best friends whose Apollo mission came within a few thousand feet of landing on the moon just weeks before the Russian landing.
They’re miserable as they sit in a dive bar just off NASA’s campus watching grainy footage of cosmonauts claim their glory, and blame themselves for their failure to land even though it wasn’t in NASA’s cautious mission plan.
Astronauts watch the Soviet moon landing from The Outpost, a dive bar frequented by NASA employees.
The scenes that follow look like they could have come from the 1995 blockbuster Apollo 13 as we meet the astronauts, their kids and their nervous wives, the eggheads and flight directors at NASA, and the political players who keep the space agency funded and protected from the wrath of President Richard Nixon.
With the agency rocked by the Soviet achievement and intense political pressure, it embarks on a series of bold new endeavors dictated by the White House. Not only will Americans land on the moon, they will build a permanent base there, and — embarrassed and spurred on by the fact that one of the cosmonauts was female — NASA will for the first time train a new, all-female class of astronaut recruits.
The later group includes hotshot pilot Molly Cobb, “token black girl” Danielle Poole, quiet but determined Ellen Waverly — and Tracy Stevens, astronaut Gordo Stevens’ beautiful wife who is an accomplished pilot in her own right. While the women manage the normal pressure that comes with astronaut training and the high stakes nature of the job, they must also contend with pushback coming from directions they don’t expect — including hostility from some of the wives of current astronauts, who feel their husbands’ jobs will be threatened by women in space.
A proud Gordo gives his wife her astronaut pin.Ellen Waverly, Molly Cobb, Tracy Stevens, Danielle Poole and another recruit are part of NASA’s first class of potential female astronauts.
For All Mankind is a science fiction show, but it’s also a drama and a thriller, putting viewers through the wringer of emotions.
There are funny and amusing moments as the show references celebrities, political figures and musicians from the 1960s onward, grounding the narrative in American culture. The fortunes of some celebrities and politicians change in the show’s alternate history while others stay the same.
In one running storyline — which you’ll only catch if you pay close attention to certain scenes and montages — John Lennon survives the attempt on his life, continues on as the grating, post-Beatles John Lennon most people would like to forget, and becomes just another aging musician cashing in on past glory alongside bandmate Paul McCartney and bands like the Rolling Stones.
The extension of the space race and continuation of US-Soviet rivalry impacts society in profound ways, many of them we may not realize from our historical perspective.
For example, DARPA created the internet because the US government and military wanted a decentralized communications network that could withstand nuclear attacks and remain operational even if major nodes are taken out in nuclear blasts.
That’s why the internet works on such a wide variety of hardware and why, even when major servers go down, our routers are able to move data packets via alternate paths. It’s difficult to imagine a time when the web wasn’t a medium for exchanging photos and videos of cute cats, but the early internet was populated by government officials, Pentagon brass and leading scientists in crucial fields.
In real life, restrictions were taken off the internet when the Soviet threat began to fade, allowing widespread civilian adoption of the technology and early dial-up services like AOL and CompuServe.
That doesn’t happen in For All Mankind’s alternate history as the USSR and communism remains a major threat, resulting in pop culture developing along a different cultural arc than the one we’re accustomed to.
While the pop culture references, sets, cars and costumes help ground For All Mankind historically, the show is at its best when it puts us in mission control and the command modules of high-risk space missions, constantly reminding us of the danger these men and women face while highlighting the commonality of astronauts, cosmonauts and later space explorers from other countries, all of them just human beings millions of miles from their families and everything they’ve ever known.
At the same time, the US and the USSR are playing a game of nuclear brinkmanship and astronauts are in many ways on the front lines as they figure out how to co-exist in unprecedented circumstances and places famously inhospitable to human life.
If astronauts tap a lunar mine too close to Soviet base camp, could that start a war? Are the Soviets spying on communications between NASA and its astronauts on the moon? What happens if someone gets hurt and their blood can’t clot in low/zero gravity?
NASA astronaut Danielle Poole shakes the hand of her Soviet counterpart as their modules dock in space.
Kinnaman, Dorman, Sarah Jones (Tracy Stevens), Sonya Walger (Cobb) et al shine in those scenes as they juggle the pressure of surviving in space with being exemplars of — and diplomats for — their country. Rather than be content painting the Soviets as the traditional bad guys, the show also gives us a close-up look at the people in the USSR’s space program and the pressures they face, particularly Polish actor Piotr Aleksander Adamczyk’s Sergei Nikulov in his relationship with his NASA counterpart, flight director Margo Madison.
In one of the show’s quieter moments, Poole (Krys Marshall) takes two cosmonauts to The Outpost when, during joint training exercises, they request real American cheeseburgers and whiskey. After a few drinks one of the cosmonauts grows somber and tells Poole how he held Laika, the Moscow street dog who was famously blasted into low Earth orbit in her own little module, before scientists were sure enough in the technology to risk human lives.
Although Soviet propaganda feted Laika as a hero and the official story said she survived until re-entry, the cosmonaut tells Poole that Laika died shortly after liftoff, terrified, alone and subjected to unimaginable forces as thousands of pounds of fuel carried her capsule heavenward via brute force.
(The west was no less barbaric: The French famously sent a street cat named Felicette into space while NASA used a young chimp named Ham. In all of those cases the animals were named only after their missions, as mission commanders didn’t want to risk humanizing them in the event of disaster. Had Felicette and Ham both died in space they’d be remembered only by their identification numbers as footnotes in early space history.)
Kinnaman grounds the show as Ed Baldwin, one of the second generation of astronauts who take the mantle from men like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
For All Mankind recently began its fourth season and because AppleTV’s marketing and promotion is curiously weak, it remains one of TV’s best-kept secrets. If you haven’t seen the show yet, now’s a great time to jump aboard with so many TV shows on hiatus for the holidays and many others pushed back or canceled in the wake of the parallel strikes that halted production for most of 2023.
For All Mankind
Network: Apple TV
Content rating: TV-MA for bad language, occasional drug and alcohol use and mature themes.
Ratings: 8.1 (IMDB), 93% (Rotten Tomatoes), 4/5 (Common Sense Media)
A look at Shadow and Bone, one of Netflix’s most exciting original fantasy epics ahead of its second season.
Title: Shadow and Bone (season 1, 2021, season 2 March 16, 2023) Genre: Fantasy Medium: Netflix
Shadow and Bone begins with a well-worn YA premise: A young girl lives a drab existence, dreaming of a better life, when she unexpectedly discovers via extraordinary circumstances that she’s Special.
Jealous rivals don’t like the fact that she’s Special and try to tear her down as she leads a revolution in a society ruled by idiotic adults, who Just Don’t Understand the complicated lives of teenagers.
Normally that would be enough for me to steer well clear of a movie or TV show, but a teaser for Shadow and Bone tickled my interest: It shows the protagonist, Alina, on a boat that’s about to cross the Fold, also called the Unsea — a pitch-black, swirling mass of cloudy mist smudged right across the middle of her country, dividing it in two.
As the ship approaches, Alina and the other passengers can hear the shrieks of the unseen nightmares that populate the Fold. The bow of the boat penetrates the Unsea, Alina closes her eyes, holds her breath, and the preview ends.
That short scene was enough to convince me to give the series a shot. At the very least I wanted to know what The Fold was, how it came into being, and what kind of creatures stalk its gloom.
The Fold is a wall-like scar that splits the country of Ravka in two, and many ships are lost trying to cross it. Credit: Netflix
While Shadow & Bone uses YA tropes as its jumping off point, it quickly sheds them in favor of clever world-building, affable characters and a well-established mythology that sets up the overarching heroic journey of its protagonist. It also ages its cast so they’re mostly in their twenties and thirties, and while Netflix may have played up the YA template while marketing the series to appeal to younger views, the show itself is geared toward adults of all ages.
The action is centered on a country called Ravka, which is modeled on Czarist Russia and has been split in two by the Fold. Ravka’s capital, Os Alta, is located to the east of the Fold while its major port cities and trading centers, Os Kervo and Novokribirsk, are situated to the west of the dangerous no-man’s land.
As a result, and despite the dangers, Ravka’s economy and unity depends on ships that regularly cross the Fold to move food from the breadbasket to the east and trading goods from the port cities to the west. Losing ships is the cost of doing business, not unlike crossing the Atlantic was during the days of colonial America, and it has a human toll as well: Alina, her best friend, Mal, and all the other children at the orphanage where they grew up lost their parents to the Fold’s horrors.
But Ravka has its blessings as well: A class of conjurors called Grisha who have the ability to manipulate elements. Grisha Tidemakers can control and shape water, Squallers can control wind, Healers can repair human bodies in ways normal medicine cannot, and Heartrenders can sense and manipulate hearts. They can sooth a person’s anxieties or ease them into a restful sleep, but they can also stop a person’s heart or tell if someone is lying by feeling the subtle shifts in their heartbeats.
The Grisha can mitigate the chances of a ship being lost to The Fold but they’re not immune to its dangers, and many of their number have been lost to its hazards as well. Making the crossing is a grim prospect for anyone aboard one of many ships that regularly journey across the so-called Unsea.
The Grisha are led by General Kirigan (Ben Barnes of Westworld and Narnia fame), who has the unique ability to manipulate shadows and destructive energy. It was Kirigan’s ancestor, the Black Heretic, who created the Fold, and Kirigan has vowed to redeem his family by destroying it.
Ben Barnes is General Kirigan, Ravka’s military commander and its most powerful Grisha, or conjurer.
Prophecy foretold a new kind of Grisha — the Sun Summoner, who has the power to call on the sun’s energies and manipulate light. It’s said the Sun Summoner will be the one to finally destroy the Fold and emancipate Ravka from the terrible toll it takes. In addition to protecting Ravka against her many enemies as its general, finding the Sun Summoner has been Kirigan’s life’s work.
Alina is the Sun Summoner, but you already knew that because Shadow & Bone is based on a YA series of books. But she doesn’t know it until she’s forced to cross the fold and one of its nightmarish creatures is about to kill her beloved Mal, drawing out her latent powers in a moment of desperation. The sudden burst of energy and light as she intercedes is so powerful that it’s spotted for miles outside the Fold, and soon survivors of the ill-fated ship arrive at the docks, telling of a woman who can call upon the power of the sun.
Alina Starkov, an orphan who occupies a lowly position as an assistant cartographer in the Ravkan army, learns she has the ability to summon the power of the sun.
In the series, Alina and her friends are aged up and appear as young adults. Mercifully, Shadow & Bone doesn’t mirror its genre’s traditional portrayal of adults as idiots, and unlike other big-time YA franchises, like Veronica Roth’s incoherent Divergent series, it doesn’t ask its audience to buy into an absurd society. Novelist Leigh Bardugo has clearly put a lot of thought and research into crafting her fictional universe. There’s rich lore, varied nations with their own distinct customs, prejudices and beliefs, a believable economy and conflict perpetuated by very human motivations and circumstances. Most of the characters we meet are just trying to get on with their lives and are caught up in the central drama.
Alina, played by 26-year-old British actress Jessie Mei Li, is mixed race, part Ravkan and part Shu. Shu Han, a nation based loosely on dynastic China and the Middle East, is in a perpetual state of conflict with Ravka, and Alina’s Shu appearance makes her the object of disdain, ridicule and ignorance even among her countrymen.
“I was told she was Shu,” the queen says in a later scene, when Alina is presented to the royal family and the court of Ravka for the first time. “I guess she’s Shu enough. Tell her… Oh, I don’t know, ‘Good morning.'”
Alina speaks up before a man by the queen’s side can translate.
“I don’t actually speak Shu, your highness,” she says.
“Then what are you?” the queen asks.
There’s a long pause, with Alina clearly unsure how to answer, before General Kirigin steps in.
“She is Alina Starkov, the Sun Summoner, moya tsaritsa,” Kirigin says. “She will change the future. Starting now.”
And with that, Kirigin claps his hands, enveloping the throne room in unnatural gloom with his shadow-manipulating ability. He turns to Alina, takes her hand, and there’s an eruption of ethereal light so powerful that the assembled aristocrats, guards and Grisha gasp and shield their eyes. The light solidifies into a bubble around Alina and Kirigin, its elements twinkling and orbiting them like stars, and the overjoyed king is convinced his nation has indeed finally found the prophesied Sun Summoner.
Becoming the Sun Summoner isn’t all flowers and rainbows. Alina feels the weight of expectations upon her. The king of Ravka is impatient for her to learn to control her newfound powers so she can tear down The Fold. Ravka’s aristocrats, as well as ambassadors and powerful figures from other countries, initially suspect she’s a fraud. Regular people, who have suffered the most from The Fold’s impact on Ravka, begin to venerate her as a living saint. And there are plenty of people who don’t want her to succeed or see her existence as a way to profit.
Shadow and Bone also has a parallel narrative following three lovable rogues from Ketterdam, an island nation west of Ravka. It’s clear early on that their journey will intersect with Alina’s at some point, but the series never feels predictable in the way the characters approach that point.
The Ketterdam trio, who call themselves the Crows, are led by Kaz, the owner of a tavern-slash-gambling den called the Crow Club. Kaz is practical, calculating and focused on making money, legitimately or not. Inej is another orphan of the Fold who was sold to a brothel in her early teens. She was bought out by Kaz, who recognized her intelligence, her light step and her talent for spying. Last but not least is Jesper, a wise-cracking, life-loving and fiercely loyal friend with uncanny sharpshooting abilities.
The Crows, lovable rogues of Shadow and Bone: Sharpshooter Jesper, spy and assassin Inej, and mastermind Kaz.
The Crows are the source of much of the series’ humor, despite being criminals and despite all of them having painful pasts. Jesper in particular is known for his wisecracks and his relentless, single-minded obsession with hiring “a demo man” — an explosives expert — for every job they do, regardless of whether the gig calls for it.
“Boss, I think we need a demo man for this one,” he tells Kaz at one point.
Kaz points out that the nature of their job is stealth, and the whole purpose is to get in and out without being heard or seen. You can almost see the gears moving in Jesper’s head as he thinks up reasons why they do, in fact, need someone to blow things up.
When word of the Sun Summoner’s appearance spreads to every corner of Shadow and Bone’s universe, the Crows catch wind of a contract offering a fortune to anyone who can abduct the Sun Summoner and bring her to Ketterdam.
Kaz believes the Sun Summoner is a hoax and views the job as a simple transaction, while Inej holds out hope that she’s the real deal, and if she is, the prospect of kidnapping a living saint weighs heavily on her conscience. Jesper is just content to go wherever there’s alcohol and explosions.
Once she’s revealed as the Sun Summoner, Alina feels the weight of expectations upon her, with everyone from the king to General Kirigan and regular people looking to her to save the kingdom.
A great strength of the series is that it begins from a familiar place and manages to regularly subvert expectations.
The production values are exceptional, and it appears Netflix spared no expense bringing Bardugo’s world to life. Ravka, Ketterdam and Novokribirsk feel like real places inhabited by real people, with authentic differences in culture, manner of speaking, dress and even the way they count money.
From imperial courts to military camps to the seedy underbellies of Ketterdam drinking clubs, the world feels like it continues to exist long after we turn our televisions off.
The first season takes several wild turns, which I won’t detail here because it’s very much worth watching, especially now: The long-awaited second season comes to Netflix on March 16, promising to expand on a series already bursting with lovable characters, thrilling adventures and political intrigue.
Of course all epic TV series will eventually be compared to the juggernaut that started it all. Shadow and Bone never tries to be Game of Thrones, and it doesn’t need to be — the first season carved out the show’s unique identity, and season two promises to make the world even bigger and more adventurous.
Pain In The Bud 