Unlike many of the naysayers, I’m fully pumped for the spin-offs of Fantasy. Those simpletons just didn’t understand why John Crow had to do what he did, and why Kyrion the Giant became the king of the little folk, and why Sandra Snark chose to become Empress of the South. Obviously it was a ploy all along, cleverly foreshadowed in an easter egg on the season 3 DVD box set. OBVIOUSLY.
Not sure how I feel about the time jump, but no show is perfect. Yeah, jumping ahead 5000 years and showing that John Crow’s descendant, John Croshaw, is driving around Melbourne, working as a mechanic in Malvern East and going out with the descendent of the mad lizard queen (who apparently conquered her issues in the last five millennia)? Yeah, quite a twist. I can see how everyone wouldn’t be on board with it, especially how it makes it seem like the world of Fantasy was our world all along.
I do like how John’s distant future as a mechanic and auto repair specialist was, once again, cleverly foreshadowed. See, there’s a scene in season 2 when he looks at the wheel of a wagon and says “Hmm, shoddy workmanship from the hill people.” And he’s right, because he says it right after the wheel has detached from the cart and is rolling down a hill, but the point is that he was the first person to notice it, so it was showing his mastery of…things with wheels. Obviously. Blatantly.
Now he’s a mechanic in modern-day Melbourne, ready to go and fix someone’s engine instead of fixing the entire nation’s problem with an evil magical princess sweeping across the land and burning everything in her path. I’m not totally sold on the twist, but I do appreciate the thought behind it. People can identify with a place that does car service work in Hawthorn. And the world of Easteros is our world! That’s pretty cool.
-Linda