Having them show up for the finale is cool, and It's exciting to see everyone all together, but you can’t help but notice how out of place the Crows feel among the ranks of Alina and Nikolai’s people. The Crows spend the final battle scattered with a few minor assists from each of them but ultimately contributing very little to Alina’s world-saving plan. This is fitting going up against the Darkling, but this diversion keeps them busy all the way until the finale where finally Inej can come in with the blade and save Alina’s life a few times. The Crows are tasked to carry out a plot invented wholly for the show in which they track down a weapon of folklore in Shu Han capable of slaying shadow. ![]() With the Crows' fight in Ketterdam finished halfway through the season, they needed a way to keep the characters relevant and get them involved with the main plot. Capturing these character moments in the broad strokes but failing to capture all the underlying meaning that makes them interesting does such a disservice to these wonderfully complex characters. It’s not just a challenging fight for her, it also forces Inej to question all she has done and stands for. Inej sees Dunyasha as a literal manifestation of all she has done wrong. Inej sees Dunyasha as her Shadow, a concept from her Suli culture that doing something wrong gives rise to a shadow that, with enough bad actions, will grow large enough to seek retribution. The assassin is called Dunyasha, and she’s just as adept an acrobat as Inej. Inej’s fight in the novel is not against a taxidermist but an assassin, still hired by Pekka Rollins but this time a young girl much like herself. Similarly, Inej’s standoff against the assassin loses some of its bite. ![]() Kaz had actually been working with the Dregs for a while, only losing them after the Fjerdan mission went awry and when he fights them it's not only to get their manpower but to literally reclaim the club that was once his home base. The fight Kaz has to try and recruit the Dregs to his side actually has quite a different context in the book. So to see the most interesting moments in their story condensed into a less impactful version of itself can’t help but be a little disappointing. It’s a far cry from the massive, magical plot happening with Alina, but it's just as fascinating. The Crows are scrappy, cunning, and more than willing to get their hands dirty, and that’s what makes watching them have to constantly improvise against unexpected problems so engaging. We get quite a few iconic scenes from the book like the Troupe distraction, Inej ( Amita Suman) versus the assassin, and Kaz ( Freddy Carter) fighting off all the Dregs, but these events lack the same punch because we haven’t gotten the time to understand why it’s happening or the insanity it's taken for them to pull this off. Seeing the Crows take down one of their biggest enemies, Pekka Rollins ( Dean Lennox Kelly), only halfway through the season is a bit disorienting for fans of the books. What we see from them is a mix of events pulled from both books in their duology and things created wholesale for this new version of the story. We finally have all six crows (well, the sixth is in a cage) but what they’re allowed to do is still very much dictated by the plot of Shadow and Bone rather than their own narrative forces. Season 2 seemingly doubles down on their role as secondary characters to Shadow and Bone’s plot. RELATED: 'Shadow and Bone' Season 2: Biggest Changes from the Grishaverse Books But Season 2 manages to simultaneously draw a lot directly from the Crows’ books while feeling like it clips their wings in the process. It was somewhat understandable in Season 1 as we only had half the Crows and their story was almost entirely new to account for their presence in Alina’s story. It’s not glamorous, it’s not grand, and it leaves the Crows in Shadow and Bone feeling somewhat out of place. Their stories aren’t grand world-saving adventures but intricate narratives of trickery and subterfuge as they fight their way through some of the seediest underbellies their world has to offer. They operate in the shadows, they’re underhanded underdogs, and they work for themselves before anything else. Chosen one with special powers leads a resistance to change the world. ![]() Shadow and Bone is a pretty straightforward hero’s journey, collect-the-artifacts-to-save-the-world kind of story.
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