How Shadow and Bone Is Avoiding The Witcher’s Timeline Confusion

Shadow and Bone is Netflix’s upcoming television series based on the popular Grisha trilogy and Six of Crows duology by author Leigh Bardugo. It joins The Witcher as another one of the streaming service’s fantasy adaptations. However, even though Shadow and Bone will adapt two series taking place at different times, it will not take The Witcher‘s controversial — and often confusing — route of following multiple timelines at once, opting instead to take a different path.

Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy follows war orphan Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li) as she struggles with a newfound power that could save her country. The Six of Crows duology takes place after the events of the trilogy and tells the story of a group of young criminals performing a daring heist. The two series take place in the same world but can easily be read independently. Showrunner Eric Heisserer and Bardugo chose to combine them for the Netflix series and consolidate the books’ timelines.

This approach differentiates Shadow and Bone from The Witcher, which follows three separate timelines: Yennefer’s (Anya Chalotra) journey to becoming a sorceress, Geralt’s (Henry Cavill) monster hunts, and Princess Ciri’s (Freya Allan) flight from her home. The combination of these timelines can often be confusing, as there are no visual cues denoting the change in time. Neither Yennefer nor Geralt age like normal humans either, so their physical appearances remain roughly unchanged no matter what timeline they’re in. Despite the confusion, the timelines do catch up to each other by the end of season 1, meaning that season 2 will have a more traditional chronological approach.

Both The Witcher and Shadow and Bone are adaptations of book series with complicated chronologies. According to showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, season 1 of The Witcher features three different timelines so that viewers could get acquainted with Yennefer and Princess Ciri, who do not have prominent roles in the short stories The Witcher‘s first season is based on. Characters from Bardugo’s Six of Crows do not feature at all in the Grisha trilogy, so she and Heisserer worked to create completely new prequel stories for these characters so they could exist alongside the events of the original trilogy, not in a separate timeline.

According to Heisserer, these prequel stories will mainly focus on Kaz Brekker (Freddie Carter), Inej Ghafa (Amita Suman), and Jesper Fahey (Kit Young), who are all main characters in Six of Crows. Based on the series description, which mentions that Alina will have to contend with “dangerous forces at play, including a crew of charismatic criminals,” it seems like Heisserer has found integrate Kaz, Inej, and Jesper’s beginnings as a group into Alina’s journey. This means that characters who never meet in either series will cross paths, a prospect that Heisserer and Bardugo hope will excite fans.

By combining two vastly different series, albeit ones that take place in the same universe, Heisserer and Bardugo are straying from the original books and creating something entirely new. This sets the series apart from other major fantasy titles like The Witcher or even Game of Thrones, which follow their original material more closely. In The Witcher‘s case, this led to some confusion with the multiple timelines, as the show covered material from different stories and books. Shadow and Bone‘s approach to adaptation, on the other hand, promises a new take on Bardugo’s world that will surprise longtime fans of the books with new stories, all while avoiding any chronological confusion.

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