Stream It Or Skip It: 'Sweet Tooth' Season 3 on Netflix, where Gus, Big Man and friends go on a final journey to help cure "the sick" (2024)

If you were a fan of Jeff Lemire’s comic series Sweet Tooth, you know that Netflix’s series adaptation isn’t nearly as dark as the comic is. But it’s still been a worthwhile watch, even if it gets a little too cutesy at times. As the series enters its third and final season, though, a lot of the cutesy stuff has gone by the wayside. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

SWEET TOOTH SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A snowy, mountainous landscape. Then we see footprints, a dead reindeer, and a cave. “All stories end,” says the narrator (James Brolin). “Ours ends here, where it all began, a long time ago.”

The Gist: We see the frozen H.M.S. Simpson. A sailor ensures a pregnant Indigenous woman that he’ll stop the captain from pursuing his quixotic goal of finding a cure to “The Sick.” Everyone on the ship has it, as evidenced by their quivering pinkies. But the captain insists he’s found the “cure of all cures” and wants to sail back to England.

Back to the modern day, where The Sick has wiped out 98% of humanity, with only animal-human hybrids being immune. In Alaska, Birdie (Amy Seimetz) looks at a baby picture of Gus (Christian Convery), a boy-deer that was one of the first hybrids, and sets out to not only reunite with him, but find the cure to The Sick once and for all. In the lower 48, Gus, Wendy (Naledi Murray), Tommy “Big Man” Jeppard (Nonso Anozie) and Becky (Stefania LaVie Owen) are in a Humvee, making their way west from Colorado. The goal is to get to Alaska to find Birdie.

Jep knows that this is going to be a long and difficult journey, especially as they try to traverse the Rocky Mountains, and he wants to be sure his three younger companions are up for it. They have to find clothes, food and other supplies if they have any hope of getting anywhere. Wendy sees two people who succumbed to The Sick inside car overgrown with plant life, which reminds her of what’s at stake.

The group finds a nearby abandoned casino and hotel, which they think is a treasure trove of supplies, but they’re not there alone; four senior citizens who used to go to that casino every day just decided to stay when all hell broke loose, and they’re not giving up anything to anyone. Gus comes up with an idea: If they like to gamble so much, he wagers the last bottle of maple syrup that he and his “pubba” (Will Forte) made against some supplies in a game of roulette.

Things only get tougher from there, for both the group and for Birdie. Avalanches, gun-toting bad guys on snowmobiles, and some really aggressive human-coyote hybrids, among other things, keep both Birdie and the group from getting much closer to each other.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sweet Tooth, created by Jim Mickle and based on Jeff Lemire’s DC comics series, may be an apocalyptic drama, but it has the hopeful tone of apocalyptic dramas like The Last Of Us.

Our Take: More than ever, it feels like Mickle and co-showrunner Beth Schwartz have concentrated the story of Sweet Tooth down to a few key characters, with the journey being the central conceit of the final season. Season 2 had many of the principals staying in one place, relatively speaking, as they deal with the situations they were in. But now they’re all on the move, with a final goal in mind. It’s that kind of focus that we hope will lead to a satisfying conclusion to the series.

Even though the overall tone of the TV version of Sweet Tooth has been brighter and more hopeful than the graphic novel series, one thing that always struck us was that Mickle and Schwartz were able to balance the twee and cute parts of the show with its darker themes. Much of the twee is gone now, mainly because we’re not seeing a lot of hybrid children this time around. Even the kids that are still around, like Gus and Wendy, have had to grow up a bit in the face of the danger they experience and their race to find a cure for The Sick before the rest of the human race dies out.

That’s not such a bad thing. Gus will still be experiencing interesting adventures as he and the group try to accomplish the impossible by getting to Alaska. At some point, Dr. Singh (Adeel Akhtar) will likely go along with them, still desperate for his own reasons to find the source of the disease and hopeful Gus holds some answers. And, while the final season has an antagonist in Helen Zhang (Rosalind Chao), who wants to wipe all hybrids from the earth, and her daughter Rosie (Kelly Marie Tran), it feels like the journey itself will be Gus and company’s biggest enemy, which is why we think the conclusion, whatever it may be, will be satisfying to watch.

Sex and Skin: None. Except for some salty language, Sweet Tooth is pretty family friendly.

Parting Shot: “Gus, we need to talk about Alaska,” says Dr. Singh as he finally catches up with Gus and his friends.

Sleeper Star: Cara Gee plays Siana, a friend of Birdie’s that has a hybrid fox-human daughter. Curious to see what her role will be as Birdie figures out how to get out of the clutches of the people who were looking for her.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Some of us are trying to make the world better. Some of us have a future,” Becky says to the senior citizen hoarders. “Do ya?” one of them retorts, with a hoarse laugh.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’ve stuck with Sweet Tooth to this point, there is nothing about the final season that would make you stay away from completing the story.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.