The beauty of The Shannara Chronicles, and shows of its ilk, is really in becoming versed in the intricate weirdness of its mythology. Its broader notions are unoriginal, but the way it’s laid out in the show is what makes it so effective. Wil, Eretria, and Amberle’s quest is one you’ve been on before, but it wholeheartedly abides by so many of the tenets of the Epic Quest rulebook that it ends up earning its stabs at a mythical, storybook-like ebb-and-flow structure. Here are the heroes, here is the villain (called The Dagda Mor, by the by, whose hideout looks like something straight out of an insane community instance in an MMO), the falling leaves of the Ellcrys represent the ticking clock, and the existence of every soul on the planet are the stakes.
It could have fallen apart quickly because of that bloated structure. Thankfully, co-creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough simultaneously manage to expand the quest to Safehold with engrossing tangents, yet keep the take-down-the-Big-Bad episodic structure that every genre series has favored since Buffy.
Take, for example, an interlude in episode seven, “Breakline,” where Amberle and Eretria spend most of the hour stumbling around the innards of an old, abandoned building when running from Elf Hunters. They don’t know it, but they’ve discovered the remains of some kind of high school dance – streamers lie over gym bleachers, the girls look through a yearbook and wonder why everyone is so happy, and Amberle warms up with a letter jacket. Later in the hour, Wil eventually finds them with the help of a dragon-like creature called a Roc.
Such oddities threaten to tip The Shannara Chronicles into twee obscurity (“They built great machines that reached the stars,” a fellow human tells Eretria, referencing our culture. She answers with something along the lines of, “Pffft, right”), but the show tiptoes that line with ease and precision. It keeps the nature of the world to the shadowy background and only pulls it forward when it makes sense for the characters and story. In that same vein, the magic takes a satisfying backseat (I can count on one hand how many times Will has used the Elfstones all season), and isn’t masturbatory like Shadowhunters. All-in-all, everything here feels more inventive than the cardboard worlds of other grasps at fantasy because Terry Brooks’ decades-old source material simply is more inventive.
I’ll be honest: a lot of my energy for the show lies in that background mythology. I want to know more about The Four Lands, the home of the gravely Gnomes, the mystical Shannara family, the awesome Iron Man-like beam that the Elfstones shoot from Wil’s closed fist – I’ve done my fair share of Google searches, but I also like the show enough to want to avoid possible spoilers. The foreground quest is serviceable but it’s yet to enchant as much as the world it resides in. Maybe my least favorite thing about The Shannara Chronicles so far is anything actually taking place in Arborlon while the trio of heroes are off saving the day.
The palace intrigue peaked at a Battlestar Galactica-esque game of guess-the-Cylon (here, guess-the-Changeling), but it was resolved before anything interesting could formally take root. Most annoyingly, it resurfaced two episodes later, as if the writers thought we had all forgot, and resulted in the ultimate demise of a main character. It’s also the home of the show’s somewhat disappointingly used headliners, Manu Bennett and John Rhys-Davies, who don’t get much to do besides growl and explain things, respectively.
Like the familiar chemistry between the characters on Teen Wolf, the dynamic amongst the leads on The Shannara Chronicles makes up for shortcomings elsewhere. Austin Butler is as vanilla as hesitant-yet-obviously-prepared action heroes go, but there’s charm there. He’s a bumbling truant uncaring of the world around him, but still unquenchably heroic; when he delivers banger lines — “Why don’t you just die already?” he growls to a shadowy, horned demon whilst dangling above a cliff — you’re more likely to step back than keel over forward in laughter.
Ivana Baquero’s Eretria grates the most early on, but she finds grooves away from being pigeonholed as the slutty seductress. A late-in-the-game explanation for her appearance on the quest feels solid and weird and largely logical – aka The Shannara Chronicles at its coolest. Poppy Drayton’s Amberle is served best; she’s an elven princes wrapped up in all the P.C., hyper-modern feminism trappings (the first time we meet her she’s quite literally running a gauntlet against a couple dozen men), but her emotional dips into sincerity feel true. She wants to befriend Eretria, she doesn’t want to fall for Wil; her struggle with both is the stuff shipping culture is made of.
