Know how when you watched the first film out of the bloated The Hobbit trilogy and wondered how they were going to make two more movies when the first film took you more than halfway through the book? I didn’t see a problem squeezing the On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness into one season, but I was wondering about why they needed to stretch out the rest of the books. Plenty happen in Books 2 and 4, but 1 and 3 are like the cozy titles where the characters kind of just hang out.
Making up the latter half of the second book North! Or Be Eaten, Season 3 shows most of our cast finally arriving in the Winter City of Kimera, where they think they’ll be safe because the Green Fangs, lizard men, are kind of useless in the ice and snow. Low and behold, we’re introduced to the grey fangs, men who have been merged with wolves.
Tink and Artham are captive almost this entire season, but their tales are still interwoven into Janner and the other’s fairly well considering how passively heroic they have to be for most of the episodes. Most of the episodes are pure action, from Maralee and Janner Ice sledding with Gannon and battles, to divulging into the past as well as not having Sarah’s rebellion take place in the last book, which I thought was nice. I enjoyed the books, but I sometimes thought the pacing was a bit much and it was hard to enjoy Book 3’s shenanigans when I know Sarah and the others were left behind. Overall, I thought it was well paced. All in all, it feels like the second half of the second season, but from a technical POV I was impressed. I’m not in that aspect of the industry but the visuals remain strong given the relatively modest budget the show has.
Given all of this, I think if you like the series thus far, you’ll like it. The character designers went hard before on their green fangs just around Glipwood, but now we’re starting to enjoy more and more of the human designs. In particular, I adored some of the character designs of Podo’s privateer crew during the flashback in the second last episode.
Anyway, unlike other seasons where we have a big battle send off, this one there’s more of an emotional climax of having everyone reunited, the battle of Kimera was bigger than Sarah’s rebellion and happened several episodes before the final one. Overall the battles are fantasy style violence and care is taken to not scare younger viewers too much, while still emphasizing high stakes.
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