Shadow and Bone Season 2 why doesn’t Mal stay with Alina?

Just when you think you’re about to get a happy ending, Shadow and Bone Season 2 leaves us with the massive question, why does’t Mal stay with Alina. If you’ve just made it to the end of the second season you might be wracking your brain, so here are the main points to consider.

If the title isn’t enough to tip you off, everything that is to follow will go into the details of the story for Season 2, so if you haven’t seen any of it yet and you don’t want to find out what happens next then you might want to take your leave now. For everyone staying around, it’s all to do with love, power and politics.

The finale sees the Fold being torn down with the help of Mal who on the brink of death gets Alina to kill him to give her the third and final amplifier. We’d already found out in an earlier episode that Mal was actually a descendant of Morozova, making him the Firebird amplifier that they need to complete the set.

In his death, Alina was able to absorb his power and use it to bring down the Fold, defeating Kirigan in the process. With the dividing mass of malignant energy and flying harbingers of death gone and the Darkling out the equation it’s easy to assume that they would stay together.

However, Shadow and Bone Season 2 had no such happy ending. Mal leaves to take on the role of privateer as the new Sturmhond and Alina is left to fend for herself once again as Nikolai’s future wife. There is no overt explanation for why he doesn’t stay, so the notes below should give you enough to rationalise the the whole situation.

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Reason 1 – Politics and power

The first reason for why Mal doesn’t stay with Alina is that the political situation is incredibly tenuous in the aftermath of Shadow and Bone Season 2. The Fold is down (yay!!!), but the fold is down (oh!!!). What this means is that the great divide is no more, so everyone’s going to be happy without the fear of the Darkling and his mass of mess, but the barrier between nations is also down, so everyone will be butting shoulders from now on.

The only way for Alina to help fix the world is in the alliance to the new King, which means that Mal can either stick around and watch, or hit the road. This is the solution both Alina and Mal go for with the former wanting to spare her love and the latter wanting to get away from seeing his love betrothed to someone else.

You can see how fragile things are even with the alliance in Episode 8, so without it there would have been an instant blood bath (or at least a bigger blood bath than the one we got). They sacrificed their own happiness to make the world a better place, or at least that’s what they were trying to do.

Reason 2 – Was it really true love?

The next reason why Mal didn’t stay with Alina is a bit more complicated that the first one. It comes down to what Mal was saying about destiny. How can they truly know that it was true love when it seemed their paths were always going to cross due to the magical bond between them.

When he finds out that he is the descendent of the Morozova line, AKA the living Firebird, he realises that the only reason he stopped at the orphanage in the first place is because of this. The only reason that he was drawn to Alina is because of the power that was dormant inside him.

With the first explanation above already enough to spark the separation, it also acts as a way for them to find out now whether or not it was true love after all. If they go their separate ways, but come back together again then the idea is that their feelings are more than just magical forces of attraction.

Reason 3 – Nothing is the same anymore

Now that he has died and been reborn, with his power absorbed by Alina, he’s no longer the same person as he was before. It’s the same situation for Alina, but on the flip side of the coin, so it’s possible that they don’t stay together because they’ve fundamentally changed.

You can see this in Episode 8 of Shadow and Bone Season 2 as they both seem happy enough with the situation. Alina smiles after she uses the Cut to finish off the powerful attacker at the bloody coronation and it’s a similar situation with Mal in his life as a privateer.

Things are clearly going to get dark again in Season 3, and a big part of this will be about how much they’ve all been changed. Nikolai adds to this with his own burgeoning demon, so the question is whether or not Mal and Alina can get back together again now that they’ve changed so fundamentally.

Alina is using the Cut for a start, plus we know she’s got all three amplifiers inside her. If that isn’t enough, we also know that she used merzost to bring Mal back from the dead, so it’s possible that she’s polluted with it now, at least a little.

It could be a similar story for Mal, who was revived by merzost. If you throw in Nikolai, who appears to have become a merzost shadow monster himself and we’re back to the possibility of a dark love triangle in the next season. And that’s all why Mal left Alina at the end of the second season.

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