Sweet Tooth Season 3: Showrunner Breaks Down Spoilers, Changing Ending
Sweet Tooth creator Jim Mickle breaks down season 3's big ending changes and major twists.
Sweet Tooth has officially come to a close on Netflix with the final batch of episodes premiering last week on the streamer. The story of Gus and Jepperd has officially come to an end, and in doing so made some major changes to the DC Comics source material that it was based on. Ahead of the premiere of Sweet Tooth season 3, ComicBook spoke with series showrunner and executive producer Jim Mickle about all the major spoilers from the final batch of episodes, along with some of those huge changes that were made from the Jeff Lemire comics. Spoilers for Sweet Tooth season 3 follow!
Sweet Tooth Season 3 Skips Major Comic Storyline
Readers of Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth may have quickly realized even before season 3 began that the Sweet Tooth TV series was going to skip out on a major part of the comics, the dam storyline and its antagonist Walter Fish. For Jim Mickle and his collaborators, despite liking that plot thread, it started to feel like a retread of what they'd already done in Sweet Tooth season 2 with The Preserve storyline.
"I think the bigger thing was once season three really felt like, 'Oh, this is an odyssey for Gus,' We didn't want to stop and be anywhere too long until we got to Alaska," Mickle said. "So that was a big part of it, was just really getting them to see the full gamut of what that was going to be."
Season 3 also touched on elements of the dam storyline, where a prevailing theme was paranoia and who you can trust. The second episode of the final season dives into this with the reveal of the pregnant family.
"That to me, kind had a little bit of that flavor of who can you trust?" Mickle added. "And that whole episode, I remember kind of feeling like there was a Hitchcock kind of a paranoia thriller kind of thing happening in between there. And so some of that came out through there too."
Nathaniel Lees as Munaqsriri in Sweet Tooth Season 3
- NETFLIX)Sweet Tooth Season 3 Debuts New Original Character, Munaqsriri
One of the biggest additions to the larger Sweet Tooth mythology found in the show and not the comic series is the introduction of Munaqsriri, a fully grown hybrid that Gus encounters in the wilds of Alaska. Though he's a fully original creation for the Sweet Tooth TV show, there's a bit of a basis for him in the Sweet Tooth comics. A three-issue flashback arc takes place in 1911 reveals one of the first hybrids, a young deer boy born to an Inuit mother in Alaska. For Mickle that was partially the origin of Munaqsriri, the "what happened to him?" of that character, but also digging into an inverse of Gus himself, detailing what would happen to him without the love and care he grew up with.
"I think given that there's a lot of dualities in this story, it felt like having a Gus and having what would happen to Gus if everything went wrong, if he was not loved as a kid, if he was not what that would look like. It all kind of grew out of that and coming out of the comic book, and he's very lyrical, I think, with that backstory. And suddenly when we had to put nails to that and sort of put those into position, it really felt like, how do we express that? We had two great Inuit consultants who were awesome from Alaska (Aaluk Edwardson and James Dommek Jr.) and they really helped also to flesh out some of the history and what that meant, and that was super cool. That took on a whole new sort of reins that I thought we'd get into with the show, but I'm really glad we did."
Sweet Tooth. Christian Convery as Gus in episode 308 of Sweet Tooth. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
- NETFLIX)Sweet Tooth Season 3 Totally Changes The Cave in Alaska
When Gus finally gets to the cave in Alaska in the TV Series he finds a giant tree whose branches bear a striking similarity to his own antlers. Buried in it is an axe from Thacker that released the blood of the Earth, causing both The Hybrids and The Sick to happen. In the pages of Jeff Lemire's comic the contents are much more heady, with massive coffins each featuring the head of animal on their lids, inside the bones of old gods lie dormant and once open they began to reincarnate on Earth in the form of the hybrids. As you can imagine, this wasn't going to work for the TV Show based on tone alone.
"I wanted to be a little bit more grounded," Mickle revealed. "I remember Aaluk Edwardson, who was one of our consultants, shared this story with us that I think stuck for everybody. That was The Caribou Man, which was a story that was an Inuit kind of legend, and we always tried to kind of weave that in, and it just felt like everything was sort of heading in that direction, and if we went too big with this, it would sort of fall apart a little bit. I think also because another big reveal in the comic books is all that stuff with Fort Smith and him being the baby was pushed towards the back of the story, and we dealt with a lot of that at the beginning of season one. So it sort of felt like we had to jump off into something a bit more tangible in order to present that. I think another one was really making it about Gus. Obviously there's a lot of things that are beginnings of these stories, but really making season three about hybrids and humans and their place in the world, and can they coexist or will it only be one? And it felt like that was the clearest way to do that in our story."
Sweet Tooth. James Brolin as Old Man Gus in episode 308 of Sweet Tooth. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
- NETFLIX)Sweet Tooth Season 3 Reveals James Brolin as Old Man Gus
One of the biggest kept promises at the end of Sweet Tooth season 3 came with the reveal that comic readers have been waiting on since the first episode, James Brolin's series narrator revealed to be none other than an older Gus. Mickle confirmed that when Brolin was first linked to the series before the pilot even began filming that this was a possibility, he adds, "whether he knew that it was going to happen or thought that it was going to happen or get that far, I don't know."
"That was part of the plan at the beginning. There was definitely a moment coming into season three where it was like, 'Are we going to do, are we going to bring him? Is he going to have to do the whole thing, the scan? And yeah, he did. He was game, and I think he really loved it."
Sweet Tooth. (L to R) Nonso Anozie as Jepperd, Christian Convery as Gus in episode 308 of Sweet Tooth. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
- NETFLIX)Sweet Tooth TV Show's Ending Is More Optimistic Than Sweet Tooth Comics
One last final change made to the ending of Sweet Tooth the TV series versus Sweet Tooth the comic is the actual final pages. In Jeff Lemire's source material the final pages not only reveal an aged Gus that has shepherded generations of hybrids, but the heartbreaking reveal that he sees a vision of Jepperd, now long dead, who appears to him and takes his hand as he dies. This didn't happen in the series in part because the nature of the show is more optimistic than the comic.
"I remember we sort of had the question because there's those crazy moments that I think we never would've been able to afford, which was the hospital that they build where Wendy is nursing dying humans. Some really incredible imagery from the comic that it was like, we probably can't pull it off for we do if we wanted to, but at the same time, I kind of don't want to see that either because this really is about, this is the best of humanity passing forward. So that was a huge part of it."
The TV Show does deliver some ambiguity in its final moment as it reveals Gus and Jepperd drinking syrup together; however, since that sequence is part of a story that Gus is telling it's unclear whether it actually happens and if Jeppered is actually alive or not.
"I think there was a little bit of a western thing going on there," Mickle adds. "I think there was a little bit of John Wayne and The Searchers and keeping that idea alive and keeping the enigma of Big Man alive, so that was all part of it. I tried a couple different versions of that ending, and once that one clicked, it just really clicked into place, and I love that you can read it in a number of different ways."
All three seasons of Sweet Tooth are now streaming on Netflix.
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