Sweet Tooth’s villain is willing to kill babies to ‘turn the clock back to 2019’

In Sweet tooth, Netflix’s post-apocalyptic fable based on the DC Comic of the same name by Jeff Lemire, is humanity’s only hope to reject change and try, by any means necessary, to recreate life as it was before ‘The Great Crumble’. Or at least that’s what the show’s dapper and fascist antagonist, General Abbot (played by Neil Sandilands), would have you believe.

“When you start [put the villain] of your story together you start to go ‘What drives him anyway? What actually makes this work?’” showrunner Jim Mickle told Polygon via video in anticipation of Season 2, which drops on Netflix on Thursday. According to Mickle, what makes Abbot work as a villain is also what makes Sweet tooth work like a show: the futility of trying to turn back time, and the need to move forward.

In Sweet tooth, the apocalypse has been blamed on hybrids – a generation of children born with a mixture of human and animal traits, then abandoned in the wild. Most survivors mistakenly believe that hybrids are completely inhuman and that humanity as we know it is in its final days. But the greatest threat to hybrids are the hunters of the Last Men, led by a shadowy fascist leader, General Abbot, who captured our adorable hybrid hero Gus (Christian Convery) in the show’s season finale.

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

“Sure. You can get really literal with it [those connections] – and that’s where it starts to fall apart for me a bit, if you get too literal. But that goes in [Sweet Tooth’s] theme of ‘You can’t go home anymore’. That to me is what nourished abbot. […] A lot of the things that seem like adversity in the world are always framed in this “Go back to the good old days” thing, whether it’s to “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 that sort of thing is, it always seems to kind of stem from this weird, fuzzy, silly gold, nostalgia.

In the show’s second season, Abbot’s motivations, his army, and his dungeon full of hybrid kids naturally came first. He wages a campaign of hearts and minds among adult survivors, promising that he holds the key to the destruction of hybrids and a return to normality before the Great Crumble.

“That was a big part of what drove this story,” Mickle said. “In a way, you can look at that and say, ‘I understand exactly where it’s coming from. [Abbot]It’s basically someone saying, ‘I want to turn back the clock 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.” That has an appeal that is incredibly attractive. That’s 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 significance of his own past – and the role he plays in shaping the world’s future. That’s the point of view on disasters that Mickle hopes viewers take from the show.

“The world will never be the same again,” he said, describing his own experience of the global pandemic (Sweet tooth‘s pilot episode was filmed before production was forced to halt, with the remainder of the first season filmed in late 2020). “That became a theme of Season 2 that really hits home at the end. I think there’s a pessimistic way of looking at that. And then there’s a look like, That just means we need to move on and find out what the world will be like next.”

Sweet tooth Season 2 is now on Netflix.