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 onJeff 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. According to Mickle, what makes Abbot work as a villain is also what makes Sweet Tooth work as a show: The futility of trying to turn back time, and the necessity of moving forward.
In 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. Most survivors wrongfully believe that hybrids are completely inhuman, and 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 fascistic leader, General Abbot, who, in the show’s cliffhanger season finale, captured our adorable hybrid hero, Gus (Christian Convery).
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. You can get really literal with [those connections] — and that to me is where it starts to fall apart a little bit, when you get too literal. But that goes into [Sweet Tooth’s] theme of ‘You can’t go home again.’ That, to me, is
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