Sweet Tooth’s third and final season is now streaming on Netflix, and with it the story of Jepperd and Gus has come to an end. Some surprising twists and turns were in store for the final eight episodes of Sweet Tooth, enough that even readers of the Jeff Lemire comics couldn’t have predicted it all. Ahead of the premiere of Sweet Tooth season 3, ComicBook spoke with series stars Christian Convery (Gus aka Sweet Tooth) and Nonso Anozie (Tommy Jeppered) about the final episodes and how those moments came together. Spoilers for Sweet Tooth season 3 follow!
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Since the very first episode of Sweet Tooth the series has been building toward a major reveal, with the surprise in front of viewers this entire time. James Brolin has served as the narrator for the entire series, and the final episode of Sweet Tooth (like the comic before it) confirms that this entire time that Brolin has been speaking he was actually an older Gus regaling his grandchildren with tales of his early life.
“As we were filming the last episode I got to meet James,” Convery revealed. “I remember it was very brief, but so incredible because he’s been there since the very start of the filming, narrating, guiding you throughout this story, this incredible story, all these different factors in it, and finally getting to meet him, knowing that he’s old Gus, was so incredible if we were walking by in the studios, got to shake hands, we got to talk about it. We had so much to say and I got to see a little bit of him telling the story to the kiddos live, I was watching from afar. It was so beautiful to see.”
The reveal of Brolin as an aged Gus isn’t the last frame of the series though, that belongs to a bit of footage that is a little more ambiguous. After their business in the cave, where it’s not clear if Tommy Jepperd will survive the return journey from Alaska, he sits down and asks Gus to tell him a story. As the series prepares to come to a close it wraps up with a tease that maybe Jepperd survived and is living out his life with Gus and the rest of the hybrids. Or is he?
“You’ve got to remember that at that moment that we’re seeing that image of big man sitting down, Gus is telling a story and it might not necessarily be happening,” Nonso Anozie revealed. “So I think personally it’s down to the viewer to decide whether Big Man made it or not. I think I talked with Jim about it and he said he liked it that way. So you get the image of him making it. But did he actually make it? Is the question that you’re left.”
Anozie went on to reveal that they didn’t receive the script for the final episode until a week before they began filming it, noting how surprised he was by the reveal that his character seemingly survived the events of Alsaka unlike in the Sweet Tooth comic book. However when they got to set, series showrunner Jim Mickle offered some insight to him that made his appearance there a little more ambiguous.
“We got the last episode (script) literally a week before we filmed it because they were re-editing stuff and rewriting stuff. And so we didn’t know about until about a week before we got the last episode and the script. And I was pleasantly surprised. And then it wasn’t until we actually filmed it and the set was there that you get to see how it’s going to turn out. And we even had a bit of the voiceover playing as well. So it was wonderful. Even to the narrator, when you see him as an old man and you see Wendy as an older woman, it was a beautiful touch, beautiful touch. It was so well done.”
All three seasons of Sweet Tooth are now streaming on Netflix.