It was the best of times, it was the end of times.
Full spoilers for The Shannara Chronicles continue below.
The Shannara Chronicles delivered a solid finale with “Ellcrys,” paying off its season-long fight against the Dagda Mor with a satisfying final battle and offering a solid emotional resolution to the quest to save the Ellcrys.
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The Season 1 finale resolved in much the same way that the end of The Elfstones of Shannara did: the reason the Ellcrys needed Amberle was because the Elven princess is the successor to the tree, and needed to sacrifice herself and become the next, healthy Ellcrys. It’s a credit to Poppy Drayton that the payoff ended up being as emotional as it was; she sold Amberle’s heartbreak over needing to say goodbye to Wil just as she fell in love with him, and her decision to give up her own life for the sake of the Four Lands carried some weight.
The biggest stumble in the episode is not explaining why Amberle needed to go to Safehold in the first place. (In the books, Amberle absorbed the Bloodfire into herself and took it back to Arborlon to sow herself, the seed.) The show never outright said any of this, thus meaning it could be easy for a viewer to miss that context entirely and think the entire quest wasn’t necessary. Even without underlining the importance of the Ellcrys’s quest, it’s clear by the end of the episode that the three core characters have grown in significant ways.
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Though Eretria was largely sidelined in the finale for the sake of its cliffhanger ending, her decision to sacrifice herself for the greater good was a solid parallel to Amberle’s decision. Because Season 1 ended at the same point that Elfstones did, the twist at the end with Eretria recognizing her captor is all new territory, and all the more interesting because of it.
Wil failed to save Amberle from her sacrifice, and it seems The Shannara Chronicles shelved much of his emotional fallout from that for a potential Season 2 (which MTV hasn’t announced). It makes sense to hinge his journey to save Eretria onto that, if indeed that’s the direction The Shannara Chronicles goes in, because it would make sense that Wil as a healer and warrior would want to save at least one of the two most important people in his life.
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Beyond the emotional and plot-driven moments in this episode, “Ellcrys” delivered the action sequences we’ve been waiting for all season. The final battle between the elf and gnome army and the demons was incredibly satisfying, and looked pretty great for fantasy on a TV budget. The same goes for some of the magical showdowns between the Dagda Mor and Allanon, and the final defeat at the end of the episode.
Then there’s the Bandon twist, which seemed to set him up for the Season 2 Big Bad. It was something more interesting than what I initially expected (aka him replacing Allanon as the last Druid) and could give Manu Bennett something more to do in a second season if stopping Bandon becomes his personal quest. The show didn’t seem to know what to do with Allanon for a good portion of Season 1, so this could be a good way to make him more integral to the story.
Though The Shannara Chronicles didn’t have a perfect first season, its finale offered satisfying to conclusions to its various storylines. Amberle’s sacrifice gave some weight to the quest to save the Ellcrys, and the final battle scene between the elves and the demons delivered some great action sequences. Now that the series has completed telling the story of its source material, The Elfstones of Shannara, it can improve on some of Season 1’s strengths in a hypothetical Season 2.
