Sophia Michaels
The finale left viewers with a lot of questions and plenty of intrigue, and if the show is renewed for a third season, we can expect to see Alina and the gang face off against the shadows once again.
The end of “Shadow and Bone” season two left viewers with plenty of questions and intrigue. After a long and bloody fight, light had triumphed over shadow and the Fold was gone, with Alina (Jessie Mei Li) having killed General Kirigan (Ben Barnes). Alina had managed to find two amplifiers, though she was still not strong enough to destroy the Fold. With the help of Kirigan’s mother, Baghra (Zoë Wanamaker), they set off to find the third amplifier, which turned out to be Mal (Archie Renaux). Desperate to avoid killing Mal, Alina devised a plan to stop his heart for two minutes with the aid of a Heartrender. However, during a bloody final battle, Alina was forced to stab Mal through the heart in order to use her enhanced powers to destroy the Fold and kill General Kirigan.
Afterwards, Alina recalled something Baghra had said about merzost, a way of creating something out of nothing that always requires a sacrifice from the person trying to use it. Soon after, Mal came back to life, though things were already different for him as he no longer felt the magnetic pull that initially led him to Alina. In the end, Alina encouraged him to go out into the world as a privateer.
At Prince Nikolai (Patrick Gibson) and Alina’s coronation, a woman in the audience stands up and appears to use her jurda parem-enhanced powers to try to kill everyone in the room. Alina moves to attack her, but she shoots a shadow from her hands instead of her usual ray of light. This hints that somehow, either by killing Kirigan or using merzost, some of his shadow summoning powers have been passed along to her and possibly to Prince Nikolai as well.
So at the end of “Shadow and Bone” season two, Ravka is definitely not free from shadows. The disconnect between the Grisha and the otkazat’sya still remains, and remnants of The Darkling seem to have found their way into both Prince Nikolai and Alina. Mal and Alina’s relationship also hangs in the balance, as does the status of what appear to be nascent feelings between Prince Nikolai and Alina, not to mention Kaz (Freddy Carter) and Inej (Amita Suman). If the show is renewed for a third season, we can expect to see Alina and the gang face off against the shadows once again.
