“Into the Badlands” airs Mondays at 10 p.m.
No show has ever looked like “Into the Badlands” before, and no show will ever look like “Into the Badlands” again. When the third season ends, it’s small comfort to say that at least the show continues to exist on Netflix as an undiscovered gem for potential new fans, and no spoilers, but current fans will have to decide for themselves how they feel about the ending. These final eight episodes, meanwhile, launch with at least a tinge of sadness. It’s been almost a year since the first half of the third season of “Into the Badlands” actually premiered, and at that stage, it wasn’t officially announced whether or not the show would be back for a fourth - watching then was a reason to get excited for what was to come. Love exists, but more often than not ends in tragedy it’s brotherhood and sisterhood which are the most worthwhile causes. No one seems to be a stranger at this stage in the series, which has really become about literal and found families trying to survive. This season, the big theme is on slavish devotion to a cause - evangelicism, one might say - at the expense of what matters: family. However, that complicated landscape speaks to the depth of the world that’s been created, and the fact that each character still left breathing has more story in them to be told. That focus, unfortunately, isn’t quite enough to make the complex nature of the narrative feel as cohesive as it could be, and the sprawling nature of the various storylines may be a factor in why things are wrapping up with this season - it’s easy to imagine that a fourth season would get even more convoluted. He’s not the only major addition to the cast over the course of its run, but it’s impossible to imagine the show without him now.
#How many episodes in into the badlands season 3 series
Frost’s role in the series has become easily one of its most important elements: Not just comic relief, he has proven himself as a dramatic player, and in (with, of course, no shortage of help from the show’s stunt team) come to hold his own in the fights. “Badlands” has grown over the seasons, learning from its mistakes when it can - such as the first season’s relative dearth of humor, which the producers addressed nimbly by adding “Shaun of the Dead” star Nick Frost to the cast. However, while literally half of the production on this show is devoted to the action scenes, if you were just to fast-forward to those scenes, you’d still be missing a lot. While every nuance of a “Game of Thrones” battle sequence gets picked over, “Badlands” has been quietly delivering epic-scale violence with its own unique aesthetic for years. The character work was always relatively blunt from scene to scene, mostly for the sake of efficiency given how much each episode had to pack in, but it was just as present as the beautifully designed costumes and gorgeous scenery.Īll with the constant promise of great action, rooted in Hong Kong traditions, bloody and brutal and jaw-dropping.
Midway through Season 3, it’s a lot less easy to describe what’s going on, as over the course of the previous 24 episodes countless alliances have been destroyed, with presumed heroes finding their dark side and presumed baddies revealing their decent hearts. The world surrounding them was rich with details and a rich and colorful aesthetic, and the ensemble included fascinating characters (including some truly powerful women), and all of them got to fight each other in some of TV’s most creative fight sequences, every episode. In its first season, “Badlands” began with a relatively simple narrative: In a post-apocalyptic landscape, a warrior (Daniel Wu) takes on the cause of helping a boy with unexplained magic powers as rival rulers tried to harness his abilities.