(courtesy IMP Awards)
What a journey this has been!
What started as a reasonably small story about a hybrid boy/deer living in the depths of Yellowstone National Park, or really just Yellowstone since civilisational constructs have largely fallen into disuse in just under a decade of apocalyptic decay, has grown over three immensely heartfelt, thoughtful and staggeringly imaginative seasons into a show with some fairly meaty things to say on a whole host of current societal ills.
It’s been a massive shift but throughout its exemplary storytelling, Sweet Tooth, based on the graphic novels of Jeff Lemire, has kept its narrative eyes very much on the humanistic prize, never wavering from the fact its story was not so much about the end of the world, though it provides the context for the wider storytelling arc, but about how people alarmingly and reassuringly stay the same.
It’s essentially been a battle between the old and the new, between the supremacy of one form of life and thinking, long the top dog on the evolutionary pile, and an emerging form which will inherit the earth and reshape the world society and civilisation operates.
And it has done so in ways that have seized the heart, concentrated the mind and made audiences take a long, hard look at the various worldview assumptions that power all of us, and whether they would, and more importantly, should survive the end of the world as we know it.
In its third and final season, it’s crunch time, as you’d expect from a final act, and Gus (Christian Convery), Big Man aka Tommy Jepperd (Nonso Anozie), Bear aka Becky (Stefania Lavie Owen), Wendy (Naledi Murray) and Dr Aditya Singh (Adeel Akhtar) are on their way north to Alaska to find Birdie (Amy Seimetz), Gus’s mum and the scientist who played a key role in the emergence of both hybrids and the humanity decimating virus known as “The Sick”, and hopefully find a way to save the world.
So, yeah, not great, epic and intimidatingly lofty narrative ambitions at all.
The impressive thing is that for a season with such massively expansive aims, both narratively and emotionally, where the fate of the world hangs in the balance – there’s a new variant of “The Sick” raging rampant across the world known as the “Doomsday Virus” and if it’s not stopped, that’s it for humanity (not the hybrids though who are immune) – Sweet Tooth‘s final arc never feels like it’s bitten off more than it can chew.
That’s doubly impressive when you consider there are multiple, if somewhat interconnected, narrative threads underway from Gus et. al on their way to the near top of the world where they hope to find a cave which Gus and Dr Singh see in their visions where “The Great Crumble” as it’s known began, through to the people who want to stop them, led by almost cartoonishly villainous Helen Zhang (Rosalind Chao) and the family and hangers-on, and those people already in Alaska at an isolated outpost, led by Siana (Cara Gee) who have given Birdie sanctuary as she works to find a cure.
With all that going on, it would be more than easy to get lost in the shuffle but Sweet Tooth‘s third season somehow does not, keeping its many strands working smoothly together to tell a story that is blockbuster in so many ways, but which for all its consciousness-bestriding messaging and huge action set pieces, remains resolutely and movingly intimate.
Thus, while Gus has the weight of the world on his shoulders, driven forward by a tenacious need to find his mum and discover his origins, and he has to battle all kinds of opposing forces, he is allowed very special moments when it all gets too much and he has to fall into the arms of someone like Big Man or Birdie.
He is, when all is said and done, just a kid, and Sweet Tooth never drops the ball there, letting him goof off and have fun and respond to things as a non-adult would; sure, he has wisdom and tenacity well beyond his years, as evidenced so beautifully in the nuanced and touching ship-set emotional intensity of fourth episode, “Beyond the Sea”, but he’s has the reasoning and emotional capabilities of a kid and that’s where the capable adults like Big Man and Birdie come into play.
Thus, while we’re dealing with a BIG extraordinary premise – though in a post-COVID, it’s more hauntingly possible than anything – with wide ramifications for life on earth, humanity and civilisation, Sweet Tooth always remember that people are at the heart of this story, and Gus and his fellow hybrids like Wendy and Siana’s daughter Nuka (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) most of all, and that being less than ten-years-old, they will approach things in a way adults may not.
But that’s also key to the big idea at the heart of the third season, and indeed, Sweet Tooth overall.
It asks us whether our prejudices are justified – they are not, of course and the show preaches in ways strident and quietly meaningful that fear of the Other is a deadend road to nowhere good – and asks why it is that instead of embracing the wonder of the new and different, many reason retreat into fear and bigotry, clinging to a fast-disappearing status quo rather than seeing what this brave new world has to offer.
As it turns out ———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- not a lot for Homo Sapiens and the longevity of their species; as the show ends, it’s people 0 hybrids 1, with the Earth about to be inherited by the very people that Zhang, and earlier General Abbot (Neil Sandilands) spent so much time fruitlessly hating and persecuting.
We even get ———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- an epilogue of sorts seeing Gus an old man in the Yellowstone utopia he and Wendy, who’s clearly his wife, and their descendants have built on the ashes of the old world where no humans are left alive.
It’s a brand new day and whole new Earth, Sweet Tooth brilliantly arrives with heart (it never verges on twee, leavening its more earnest moments with adroitly placed humour), humanity and some brilliantly thoughtful and balanced storytelling, bowing out with a whole of hope and possibility, its clear message that the world may change and we have a choice – go with that and reap the rich rewards or fight it and pass into irrelevance pointlessly raging against the dying of the light that wasn’t all that bright to begin with.
No prizes for guessing where this most wondrous of shows lands.
Sweet Tooth streams on Netflix over three seasons of eight episodes each.