Sweet Tooth

“This is a Story”, Season 3 Episode 8

What do I know about this series going into it?

I think I’ve scrolled past it on Netflix a few times. There was a kid with antlers in the picture? I’m not certain.

Recap

We open inside a boat or house. No, now we’re on a beach, with a suitcase full of clothes washing up on the shore. No, now we’re in a room decorated with Christmas lights. A metal tube that reads “Hybrid Specimen”. A rock on which is scrawled “Aimee Eden 7 years old”. An electric traffic warning sign half-buried in the snow. Over all of this is a narrator spouting cliches; the only thing of substance he says is “Who will be left to tell this story?”

Good question. Gosh, I wonder if whoever the narrator is talking to already knows the answer?

Finally the story begins proper. The boy with the antlers is crying over a woman on the ground, screaming, “No!” Someone identified by captions as “Jepp” shouts, “You killed her!” There’s a brief fight. The bad guys win (I think) and say something about a Beast approaching. Their leader is Mrs. Zhang; Antler Boy tries to grab a knife to attack her but she easily overpowers him. He gives her a speech about how evil humans are: “Animals don’t destroy everything around them.” He says that he tried to defend people, and he looked for the good in them, but he’s now lost faith in trying to save humans.

Save them from what?

“The biggest mistake humans ever made was you,” says Mrs. Zhang. “If spilling your blood brings back human birth” – aha, so something magic happened that made all humans in the world start giving birth to hybrid human-animals? Luckily, Mrs. Zhang explains a bit more: it was a virus called “The Sick” that made people start giving birth to hybrids, and she wants to engineer a new virus that will do two things: undo that first virus so humans can be born once again, and kill all the existing hybrids. I’m not sure why this virology work is being done in a cave rather than, say, a genetics lab…

Elsewhere, we see a man – I assume this is the Beast – driving some sort of vehicle with guns attached to it, through a driving snowstorm, at night. Elsewhere elsewhere, a bunch of kids and adults talk about how they need to stop him. They grab harpoons and set off in vehicles of their own.

“He went to bed hungry.”

Meanwhile, in the cave, Mrs. Zhang is eager to create the new virus already. She tells a meek-looking man wearing glasses, identified as Dr. Singh, to kill Antler Boy already and save the human race.

But while she’s talking to Dr. Singh, the kid’s friend (whom Mrs. Zhang’s minions have been holding hostage) breaks free and threatens them: Let us go or I’ll light this dynamite! I’ll kill myself, and you, and destroy the magic tree that creates viruses! But Mrs. Zhang knows he’s bluffing: he’s willing to die for the kid, but not kill the kid too in the explosion. She’s right, and he lets the flare goes out. They are immediately recaptured, and she stabs the friend; Antler Boy calls out his name, Jepp, so I know he’s the one who shouted in the opening scene.

Back to the car chase. Two of the kids in the truck chasing the Beast are named Rosie and Ginger. Rosie mentions having given birth to quadruplets; Ginger is pregnant and her water just broke.

And in the cave, Mrs. Zhang desperately needs Dr. Singh to do whatever-it-is to the tree before Ginger gives birth, for some reason. And she somehow also knows, down to the minute, when the birth is going to happen. During this conversation, captions identify Antler Boy as Gus.

Back to the car chase. In the darkness and driving snow I have no idea who is chasing who and why. The good guys are trying to stop the Beast but there are at least three, maybe four cars involved and they’re turning their lights on and off and hitting each other and I have no idea what’s going on. It’s clear from the direction that Rosie and Ginger are good guys but it’s not clear who’s in which car, and I can’t remember if they’re the same kids we saw earlier. There are definitely far more characters involved in this chase than I thought at first (who or what is a “Nuka”?), and when captions say Rosie’s sons are “snarling” that makes me wonder even more. Did she give birth to four dogs? Not even hybrids, out-and-out dogs?

Anyway, in the back of Rosie and Ginger’s car is a guy with a harpoon; he’s going to shoot at the fuel tank belonging to the Beast’s car, hoping to force it to run out of fuel.

Unlike most cars. The heart of my Chevrolet, for example, is the volume knob on the radio.

The first shot misses. Well, they say “you missed”, but actually it was a direct hit; it just bounced off the fuel tank and did no damage. The friend fires again, and the same thing happens.

The third harpoon – the last one, of course – hits again but penetrates the tank this time and latches onto it. The good guys shout “Bullseye!” as if the other shots had missed. But the fuel isn’t dripping out of the tank fast enough to make the vehicle run out. We need to remove the harpoon head so the fuel can pour out! So one of the kids – I think it’s Ginger, but I can’t tell in the darkness and I doubt she’s doing this if her water just broke – climbs the chain to get to the Beast’s car and remove the harpoon. But there she encounters a hybrid dog (Rosie’s son?) that attacks her. She manages to latch the harpoon chain to the dog and climb into the cabin next to the driver.

The driver of the car is named Jordan. The girl who just climbed in is named Becky. So is the Beast the name of the car? And who are Rosie and Ginger? I don’t know where Jordan’s driving to or what he’s trying to accomplish, but it has something to do with saving the human race, and Becky has to stop him. So she yanks on the steering wheel and takes the tank over a cliff, possibly killing them both but I bet she’ll be okay and he’ll be dead. The others are shocked and stop their cars too. Ah, not over a cliff, it flipped over in the road (how does a tank flip over?!)

Meanwhile, the bad guys have Gus tied up at the base of the magic tree. Dr. Singh approaches Gus with the knife, talking about how he wants to “fulfill his destiny” so he can “be forgiven”. His demeanor and the dramatic way the scene is shot makes it clear that he’s secretly planning on using the knife to do the opposite of what Mrs. Zhang expects: fulfilling his destiny and being forgiven by betraying the bad guys, saving Gus rather than killing him. Gus closes his eyes: “I’m not afraid,” he says. But Singh hesitates before killing him (guess I was wrong about his intentions). “Think of Rani,” Zhang says to try to convince him. “Gargoyle,” Singh replies for no obvious reason, then adds, “Never mention my wife’s name again.” Apparently mentioning Rani was a big mistake and finally swung Singh to the good guys’ side: he stabs the guy holding Gus in place, enabling Gus to flee.

Fighting breaks out. And in the kerfuffle, an axe went into the magic tree. And the tree’s magic sap is on the axe. And something magic is happening: All of the humans in the scene begin staring at their pinky fingers, which have begun twitching, and then suddenly they all collapse. “You just gave everyone the Sick!” someone laments. All the humans in the world are dying, including the ones far away near the collapsed tank. Rosie’s half-dog quadruplet kids surround her and howl in mourning as she begins to die.

But Gus is going to stop it, because his friend Jepp is dying too. He cuts his own hand and puts the bleeding cut on the tree. “Is this what you wanted?” he shouts. “You can save him!” and he pounds the tree over and over again.

Suddenly he’s not in the cave with the tree. He’s outdoors with the tree, in a forest with otherworldly colors. And there’s a man there named “Pubba”, I assume Gus’s father. Based on the dialogue, it seems Pubba is long dead and this is some kind of afterlife. “What did that tree ever do to you?” Pubba asks Gus. “It’s trying to take my friend,” Gus answers.

How can you possibly know how long it was, if time was standing still?

Pubba tries to comfort Gus: You need to accept death as a part of life. (I’m hearing the Lion King theme in my head.) Pubba asks: What did you do after I died? Gus says that after a long time he left the woods, to move on, find a new life.

This hourglass running out is apparently very important, but even after rewatching the episode I have no idea why.

Pubba asks Gus what he learned about human beings. “There is good in people,” says Gus, “but it comes with the bad too.”¹

Suddenly in the cave in the real world, Jepp wakes up, coughing, and so does everybody else. “Are you ready to turn the page?” Pubba asks. “I’m ready,” says Gus. I have no idea what’s happening.

Jepp finds himself walking into the afterlife forest. “Gus!” he calls out, and Gus notices that Pubba has disappeared.

At least I finally know who the title refers to.

Gus agrees to come back (from the afterlife? what?) and leaves the forest with Jepp. At one point Jepp glances backwards and sees Pubba, but resumes walking. I still have no idea what’s going on.

Gus wakes up in the real world, in the cave again.² And now he knows what to do to save everyone. He sets fire to the magic tree with another flare. Zhang shouts “no!” but it’s too late. And everyone who had the Sick, in and out of the cave, including Jepp and Singh and Zhang and Rosie, magically recovers.

Except Jordan. I was right that he died in the tank flip and that Becky survived; I also learn her younger sister’s name is Wendy.

As they’re getting their bearings, the cave begins to shake and collapse; apparently the tree was holding it up. Jepp urges Gus to come with him and flee but he stands there staring like an idiot as rocks fall on top of him. At the last second, though, Dr. Singh shoves him out of the way and dies in his stead. “You’re free,” Singh says, “I am too.” So he got the redemption he wanted.

Gus continues to sit there, staring at the dying Dr. Singh, and this time the cave obliges by not collapsing so much while he’s trying to listen to Singh’s last words. But as soon as Jepp reminds Gus that they need to get out of there, the cave’s like, “Oh, right, I forgot,” and resumes collapsing.

Outside, Becky and Wendy free the chained-up dog hybrid. His mother, whose name I forget – ah, it was Rosie, the captions helpfully remind me – points a gun at them. But Ginger is about to give birth, so she goes to deal with that instead of shooting the good guys. (I guess Rosie and Ginger were bad guys, then?)

I think I’m finally starting to get a handle on some of what’s going on here. Ginger is Zhang’s daughter, and Zhang is desperate to reverse the hybridization virus before the baby is born.³

Gus and Jepp make it out of the cave, though a lot of the bad guys don’t. And Mrs. Zhang desperately begs her henchmen to kill Gus, now, before it’s too late⁴, but they’ve stopped listening to her. Then they hear the wail of the newborn baby. Ginger approaches, showing the child to its grandmother: It’s a hybrid otter-like creature. As Rosie promised, Ginger accepts and loves her child no matter what – but Mrs. Zhang is disgusted.

The narrator, who I’m starting to suspect is Old Gus, affirms that there would be no more human births, ever. Nature “had mercy” on the remaining humans but all of the children from then on would be hybrids.

Didn’t you just say that no more humans were being born, and the race was going extinct? That sounds like the clock ticking on humankind.

The good guys begin walking away from the cave, into the snow, leaving Mrs. Zhang behind. As the sun rises, Jepp collapses. He’s more injured than he let on, and he’s dying. Gus tells his friends to go on without him while he says the final goodbye to his protector, whom he calls “Big Man”. Jepp asks Gus to tell him a story; he tells his own story, which somehow includes future events that come after this conversation.

In that future, the characters who walked off find a building and fix it up. Then they get on a plane (apparently the building was an airport?) and fly away from wherever they are. Mrs. Zhang, in the snow, watches the plane fly overhead.

It’s farther into the future. They’re in a temperate forest, and it’s sunny – so my unspoken assumption all along that the world suffered from some massive snowpocalypse turns out to be incorrect. There are a lot of other hybrids there, all children Gus’s age, who are building a wooden home for themselves in the trees.⁵

Fade into the future. I was right, the narrator was old Gus. He’s telling the next generation of hybrids that Jepp’s name was Tommy Jeppard, which he never bothered to tell them throughout the story, having only called him Big Man. But it turns out Jepp didn’t die in the snow; there’s a flash back to the forest when Gus and the other kids were still building the house, and we see him sit down on a chair next to Gus. So he must have made it onto the plane, but we’re not told how.

Unresolved questions

• How did Jepp make it to the plane?

• Why did the cave collapse?

• What happened to the tree in the end? Is it still there, buried in the cave?

• Why did burning the tree end the Sick?

• Was there any way for Gus to make it so that humans give birth to humans and hybrids give birth to hybrids? Or was the tree stuck in an “only one species may survive” sort of mood no matter what he did?

• Are hybrids really pure of heart and free of racism? Or will there be discrimination between the fully-elephantine kids and the ones who are just humans-with-a-tail? Do predator hybrids eat prey hybrids? Is this a prequel to Zootopia?

Ratings

Story: 5/10. The episode simply didn’t have much of a plot. In retrospect, I spent two-thirds of it (half an hour!) waiting for the bad guys to get around to killing the good guy who they already had in their custody from the moment the episode opened. I can’t award a high score on plot when there’s that much dithering.

And yet I’m not giving it the 2 or 3 rating that it probably deserves. Why? Because I give the show the benefit of the doubt anytime things are unclear; if I don’t get the plot, then I assume the parts I don’t get were handled well. In this case, I understood very little.

Now, I strongly suspect Sweet Tooth benefits from this policy to an unfair degree. if things were clearer, I’d probably give it a much lower number, because I’d be able to see that there really wasn’t much to the episode.

Writing: 6/10. A difficult rating to decide on. On the one hand, there were too many cliches: Becky surviving and Jordan dying; the nonsensical platitudes spouted by Narrator Gus and by Jepp; the deus ex machina of Jepp surviving with no explanation. On the other hand, well... I wrote above that in retrospect I spent half an hour waiting for the bad guys to kill the good guy. This is because at the time I didn’t notice that it was half an hour! If you can stretch out the classic “just kill him already” scene that long and I don’t even notice? That’s impressive writing and no mistake.

Production: 3/10. Uninspired acting, uninspired music. Decent special effects but in some cases the CGI was a bit obvious. My biggest criticism is the lighting and camerawork; you can’t have your entire episode take place in a blizzard, in the dark, and expect your viewers to be happy (or even to know what’s going on). This car turned its lights on! Then it turned its lights off! Then it turned its lights on again! What the hell is happening? I have no idea. Awful.

Then there’s the harpoon part of the scene. It’s abundantly clear that, in the original script, the first two harpoons missed their targets altogether. At some point this was changed to the harpoons hitting the fuel tank and bouncing off – but for some unfathomable reason, they never changed the dialogue to match. So you have the characters lamenting that the harpoon missed, and the harpoon operator apologizing for having only one eye, even though he scored a direct hit all three times. That’s just sloppy work.

Everyone knows harpoons get sharper the more eyes you have. There’s a type of mollusc called a chiton with thousands of eyes; if it ever fired a harpoon, it would go through mountains.

Characterization: 3/10. The desperate desire not to have a hybrid as a grandchild gave a little bit of depth to Mrs. Zhang, preventing her from being a second-rate villain from The X-Men. But that’s the most character work this episode provided.

Clarity: 2/10. Let’s start with character confusion: Since a large portion of the episode took place in a snowy landscape, at night, with shaky cameras in a chase sequence, I have no idea who anybody is. I only knew that Becky or Rosie or Ginger were on screen when a caption said their name; if you showed me their pictures, right now, I wouldn’t be able to place a single one.

The cave scenes were, ironically, better lit. And with the steadier camera and better focus, I can identify the characters from those scenes without a problem.

But then we move on to the plot, and my God, I think this may have been the least accessible finale I’ve reviewed so far.

Let’s see: So there’s this magic tree. And at some point in the recent past the tree did something magic and killed most – but not all – humans with a disease called The Sick. And all the remaining humans stopped having human children; instead, they all gave birth to animal-human hybrids. This includes, somehow, children who were conceived before the magic tree went crazy, even though their DNA should be fully human. And somehow, if you kill Gus in front of the tree, and under the right circumstances, you can undo the change and humans will give birth to humans again. But that will also happen if anyone kills Gus anywhere. And if you hit the tree with an axe, then pull the axe out, the tree will kill all the rest of the humans with The Sick. But if you kill the tree with fire instead of with sharp objects, it instead stops The Sick, and everyone who was going to die from it wakes up again as if nothing happened.

Also, burning the tree pulls the cave down with it.

What the hell is happening?!

Closure: 8/10. The end of the human race: That’s closure, no question about it. But I’m left wondering what kind of society the hybrids end up building when they become adults. Do they have any technology at all, or did the show have a “technology is evil” outlook? If the former, why do the hybrids live in a forest instead of a city? If the latter, how did they construct their chairs and buildings, and why doesn’t that count as technology?

Do I want to watch the series now?

It’s not the greatest. If the show’s message is what I fear it is – technology is evil, humans need to return to nature, but we’re still allowed to build houses and chairs and wear clothes because that doesn’t count as technology – it will just annoy me. And there was definitely some sloppy work putting the finale together.

I’m curious about it enough that after I post this review I’m going to read a lot more about the backstory than I usually do, but I probably won’t actually watch the show.

1. As opposed to hybrids, all of whom are purely good and have no evil in them whatsoever, including the dog that attacked Becky.

2. Jepp is still unconscious, so I have no idea what it means that he went into the afterlife to bring Gus back to the real world.

3. It seems that whether you give birth to a human or a hybrid is set at birth rather than at conception, because magic. I wonder what happens if you take an ultrasound: does the baby look human or hybrid? Does the DNA change, and if so, when? Does hybrid DNA show up in an amniocentesis? Did the DNA change when the tree lit on fire?

4. Is she saying that killing him will still undo the hybrid virus, even without the magic tree? So why did she set up that elaborate ritual in the cave?

5. Where are all the adults? Clearly the Sick didn’t kill everyone, because there were plenty in the (ant?)arctic scenes that have made up the episode so far. So where are these kids’ parents?