The COVID pandemic gave rise to many a strange dynamic.
One of them, and the one that impacted this reviewer most when it came to consuming everything from movies to streaming shows to books, was a willingness to dive into all kinds of plague-related and end of the world-set storytelling; you’d think that would be the last thing you’d want to indulge in as the world shuddered under the impact of society shutting down and countless deaths, but somehow, watching all those pandemic shows made the one you were actually going through not feel quite so terrifying.
And the worst of the pandemic ebbed, and suddenly the appetite for these kinds of shows did too, meaning that when Sweet Tooth season two came long in April 2023, this reviewer at least kept pushing it to the bottom of the queue, despite having thoroughly season one.
But with season three just released, and the pandemic receding into common memory, it seems a good time to watch season two before saying goodbye to Sweet Tooth, a grimly imaginative show based on the graphic novels by Jeff Lemire.
Eight episodes strong, this is the middle part of a saga which sees Gus (Christian Convery), a hybrid deer/person – the arrival of a human-engineered flu (ironically meant to increase longevity) that wipes out 98% of the people on the planet coincides with a spike in births of children who are both animal and human – out in the real world, far from his childhood haven in the backwoods of Yellowstone, and discovering just how evil this terrible new world is, and yet also, how good some other people can be.
People like his new protector and friend, Tommy Jepperd (Nonso Anozie), a onetime hybrid kid hunter who recoils now that he collected these kids on behalf of a nasty MAGA-like militia called the Last Men, led by the maniacal, evilly-cartoon like General Abbott (Neil Sandilands), and Bear aka Becky (Stefania LaVie Owen), the leader of a hybrid-protecting group of young people called the Animal Army, who have come of age in a whole new world and who have chosen compassion over baseless fear.
As season two opens, Gus is trapped in a zoo that was once a sanctuary for hybrid kids who were looked after with fierce maternal care by Aimee Eden (Dania Ramirez) with the original inhabitants including Wendy (Naledi Murray), a half pig-half human girl who is Aimee’s adoptive daughter and the ———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- sister of Bear, all of them being kept as prisoners by General Abbott as the hoped-for secret ingredient in a cure being developed by fellow inmate, Dr Aditya Singh (Adeel Akhtar) who is driven by the need to heal his wife, Rani (Aliza Vellani) who against all the odds have lived with what’s called The Sick for nine years.
It’s a terrifying situation for everyone, made all the worse by the fact that a new variant, known as the “Doomsday Strain” of The Sick is rolling through, which is capable of killing up to 99% of those it infects.
Things are much darker and far more grim in season two of this show, and yet somehow Sweet Tooth manages, in amongst all the sage commentary about bigotry and fear and how most reason and compassion go out in the window when they prevail, to point a way to the far better angels of our nature.
While groups like the Last Men militantly craft a violent future that clings to the idea that the past can be resurrected, others like Bear and Sheperd embrace the idea that the old has gone and the new has come and that their job is to usher in a new age of humanity where the hybrids shall indeed inherit the earth.
The important demarcation is that the last Men et. al don’t see kids like Gus and Wendy and a host other characters like Teddy Turtle (Christopher Sean Cooper Jr) and Finn Fox (Yonas Kibreab) as people though they manifestly so; among the many wonderful things Sweet Tooth with storytelling that is simultaneously wondrously hopeful and apocalyptically dark, is come forcefully against the idea of the Other, the erroneous sense that if you differ from the mainstream you basically less than and not human.
It’s an abhorrent idea that has powered many a fascistic cancer of belief, and it’s present in a broken world where far too many survivors are desperate to blame the hybrids, who are really the next stage of human evolution and immune to the virus which is wiping out everyone else – in this respect, Sweet Tooth has many corollaries with The Girl With All the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge by M. R. Carey – and who will, it’s presumed outlive everyone.
The time of old school Homo Sapiens is at an end, thanks to scientists like Dr Gertrude Miller (Amy Seimetz), who is Gus’s long-lost mother Birdie, who is trying to atone for her role in the downfall of humankind, at least the old variety, by trying to get to the bottom of what caused the mess in the first place.
While the search for Birdie takes a narrative backseat in season two, she appears in a series of flashbacks which explain more fully how the pandemic came to be me and how rampant self interest and science for science’s sake trumped all other considerations and destroyed the world.
Well, at least the world as it was, but as Sweet Tooth beautifully articulates, in ways magically sweet and hopefully transcendent, all that tampering gave way too to a new world of people and ideas, and its kids like Gus and Wendy who are going to come into their own in years to come, protected by the likes of Sheperd, Bear and Aimee, all of whom will likely die one day of The Sick’s new virulent strain but not before getting those kids they love to a place where they can fend for themselves and thrive.
Possessing a certain magicality and fantastical wonderment, Sweet Tooth is not afraid to be dark and menacing too, appreciating that where there is love and compassion there is also hatred and cruelty, but that the former is stronger than the latter and that with people brave enough to take a stand, might just reshape the world as we know it and as it’s coming to be.
Sweet Tooth season two streams on Netflix.