Sweet Tooth season 2 villain kills babies to ‘turn the clock back to 2019’

You can also find out more about the following: Sweet Tooth, Netflix’s post-apocalyptic fable based on Jeff Lemire’s DC Comic of the same name, humanity’s only hope is to reject change, and try, by any means necessary, to recreate life just as it was before “the Great Crumble.” Or at least that’s what the show’s dapper and fascistic antagonist General Abbot (played by Neil Sandilands) would have you believe.

“When you start to [put the villain] of your story together you start to go ‘What is actually driving him? What’s actually making this work?’” showrunner Jim Mickle told Polygon over video in anticipation of season 2, which hits Netflix on Thursday. Mickle says that what makes Abbot so effective as a bad guy is what also makes him likable. Sweet ToothWork as a Show: It is futile to try and turn the clock back, but it’s necessary to move forward.

You can also find out more about the following: Sweet Tooth, blame for the apocalypse is heaped on hybrids — a generation of children born with a mixture of human and animal qualities, and then abandoned to the wild. The majority of survivors are wrong in believing that hybrids have no human qualities and the end is near for humanity. But the greatest threat to hybrids are the hunters of the Last Men, led by a shadowy fascistic leader, General Abbot, who, in the show’s cliffhanger season finale, captured our adorable hybrid hero, Gus (Christian Convery).

Image: Netflix

When asked if Mickle saw any real world relevance to the idea of a society that says “our children are different from us, and therefore civilization has ended” he wasn’t shy about agreeing.

“Definitely. “Definitely” is a phrase that you can use in a literal sense. [those connections] — and that to me is where it starts to fall apart a little bit, when you get too literal. That goes into [Sweet Tooth’s] theme of ‘You can’t go home again.’ That, to me, is what fueled Abbot. […] A lot of the things that seem like opposition in the world, it’s always framed in this thing of ‘Go back to the good old days,’ whether it’s make ‘America great again” or it’s Let’s go back to a time when no one read these booksOr Let’s go back to a time when, you know, gender was gender — whatever those kinds of things are, it always sort of seems to come from this weird, vague, fool’s gold, nostalgia.”

In the show’s sophomore season, Abbot’s motivations, his army, and his dungeon full of hybrid children naturally came into primary focus. He campaigns to gain the hearts and minds of adult survivors. He promises that he has the solution to the hybrid problem and can restore normalcy to times prior to the Great Crumble.

“That was a big part of what drove this story,” Mickle said. “In a way you can look at that and go “I understand exactly where it’s coming from.” [Abbot]’s basically someone going ‘I want to turn the clock back to 2019 when we didn’t have to worry about this. You didn’t have to worry about masks, you didn’t have to worry about vaccines.’ There’s an allure to that that is incredibly appealing. That was where the story really came together.”

Abbot’s foil, of course, is Gus the deer boy, who spends much of season 2 coming to terms with the meaning of his own past — and the role he has in shaping the world’s future. That’s the viewpoint on cataclysms that Mickle hopes viewers take away from the show.

“The world is never really going to be the same,” he said, describing his own experiences of global pandemic (Sweet Tooth’s pilot episode was filmed before production was forced to halt, with the rest of the first season filmed in late 2020). “That became a theme of season 2 that really comes home at the end. I think there’s a pessimistic way to look at that. And then there’s a look like, We have to look at the future and see what it will be like..”

Sweet ToothSeason 2 of Netflix’s “The Walking Dead” is available now.