One of the only exciting announcements to come out of 2020 was word from Netflix that The Dragon Prince would get to produce all seven of the seasons its creators had planned. As any fan can tell you, there are few greater disappointments than a story not told in its entirety, and television is infamous for cutting beloved tales short. Knowing that the series would be completed as the creators intended was a relief.
But having seen the final season of The Dragon Prince… there’s really no ending in sight.
Of course, there’s a conclusion to the many of arcs we’ve been following for our central characters. But The Dragon Prince series ends at point of rebirth and asks enough new questions to easily power another series. One has to presume that’s what the creators are hoping for, similar to how Avatar: The Last Airbender got a spin-off in The Legend of Korra. (It’s relevant to note that one of the showrunners, Aaron Ehasz, was the head writer on Avatar.) While there are no guarantees, it would be shame to leave Xadia now as things only continue to get more interesting.
There’s a lot that needed wrapping up in the final season and frankly not enough time to do it. As a result, certain storylines do get cut short, and not every character gets their due. But there are so many who do, and a lot of good gritty character work resting within. After the destruction of Katolis, all the characters are telling from loss and unsure of where to turn. Many of our usual heroes are separated into camps and struggling with challenges of very different natures than before.
The first character to take a fall is King Ezran. After seasons and seasons of being an advocate for forgiveness, mature far beyond his years, losing his home breaks something inside him. We watch him consider crueler paths that he never would have before, and it strains his relationship with brother Callum almost to its breaking point. Callum is still struggling with the desire to use dark magic as a means to solve problems, living in fear of its affects upon him. And Claudia has now tied herself to Aaravos, a Startouch elf with terrible plans for Xadia and its inhabitants. While enacting revenge against the world for what was done to his own daughter, Aaravos adopts Claudia as a sort of surrogate child, and she does the same in return after losing her own father, Viren. And tagging along behind them is Terry, Claudia’s Earthblood Elf boyfriend.
There are many themes running throughout the final season, but a newer one that caught my interest is a discussion around innocence and goodness being the purview of youth. There is a suggestion being made—by Aaravos, of course—that people gain complexity as they grow older because they learn that the world is painted in shades of gray and compromises are necessary. Pointedly, this idea is trotted out for both Terry and Ezran, two characters who have classically shown the most optimism, compassion, and uninhibited kindness throughout.
Terry has a rough go this season as he struggles to decide how far he can follow Claudia and her commitment to darker things before his sense of self breaks. Ezran is similarly afflicted, of course, in the aftermath of all he loses. But this theme seems to shine a focused light on a rather different question: What happens to truly good people when they feel trapped or used or hurt beyond reason? And more importantly, how do you hold on to the better parts of yourself when everything seems to keep going wrong? Let’s just say it resonates right now, at this moment in time.
There are characters who we get to know for the first time in this season, and the two greatest additions on that front have to be Rayla’s dads, Runaan and Ethari, finally reunited once Rayla rescues Runaan’s spirit after it was trapped in a cursed coin by Viren in the very first season. They’re a vibrant pair who bring a lot of much-needed comedy to the table, particularly as they get to know Callum, who’s in love with their daughter. (There’s none of “we’ll kill you if you hurt our precious baby girl” nonsense, but they do enjoy razzing the kid and letting him blunder his way through things.) Another highlight of the season is the friendship between Corvus and Soren, which only grows closer and weirder with time. They kind of adopt Terry, which is very cute.
The show manages to keep an enviable balance of darkness and humor all the way through, even with its antagonists. Erik Todd Dellums is clearly having the time of his life voicing Aaravos, and manages to makes the Startouch Elf as charming as he is insidious and he is clever as he is all-in for the sake of drama. Claudia never loses that goofy weird girl she started out as, no matter how much evil she embraces, and it’s consistently one of the strongest points of the show. The only place where things get truly eclipsed by darkness is in Karim’s betrayal of his sister Janai, and his refusal to back down from outright hateful ideology. When Karim finally receives an ultimate answer to where that path leads, it’s another of the most satisfying moves of the season.
The question of how to defeat Aaravos is one that no one can seem to answer with any confidence through the final season, and even the better options get tossed out the window one by one. But the question remains: Can you really vanquish the Devil? Because he always comes back, and he is precisely who Aaravos is based upon (albeit with far more understandable motives built in). In that manner, the series showdown was destined to be something of a question mark, making it hard to satisfy. If you’re hoping for a clear ending and a hard stop, you won’t find it.
What you will find is a very different future than the ones any of these characters thought they might have. And a lot of sneaky questions that have been lingering in the background finally coming forward. (This includes one that I’ve been wondering about since the first season, and I was elated when it was finally addressed for the first time.) This doesn’t feel like a goodbye to Xadia, but rather the ending of an introduction. There is so much more that it might show us, and I hope it gets the chance.
