Welcome to the Couch Club, our recurring column devoted to all things #DCTV! This week, Tim Beedle discusses Sweet Tooth’s super cute hybrids...and the ugly thing they reveal about ourselves.
 

Sweet Tooth has got to be the most wholesome story about the apocalypse that’s ever been set to film.

The end of the world has always been a popular subject for genre entertainment, and over the years, we’ve seen a variety of approaches. There’s the action-packed apocalypse of Mad Max, the religious apocalypse of End of Days, the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead, the machine apocalypse of The Terminator, the literary apocalypse of The Road and Station Eleven, even the comedic apocalypse of Good Omens and Miracle Workers. But a feel-good apocalypse? That’s something new.

The fact that it works likely has a lot to do with how odd Sweet Tooth’s version of Armageddon is. Humanity-threatening viruses are nothing new in entertainment, but viruses that infect and kill most of the human race while somehow also giving birth to a new generation of human/animal hybrids? That’s not something I’ve ever seen before. Heck, even two seasons in, I’m not sure I fully understand it, but I don’t care—and neither do other fans of this very different DCTV series—because the hybrid children are absolutely adorable.

In fact, if you were to just see Sweet Tooth’s hybrids, you couldn’t be blamed for assuming the Netflix series is a kids show. Led by Christian Convery’s deer-boy, Gus, who was joined this season by dozens of additional hybrid children including Naledi Murray’s adorable pig-girl, Wendy, and Maya, a half-monkey played by M3gan’s Amie Donald, the hybrids represent Sweet Tooth’s emotional heart. But that’s also where the show ultimately gets you because it puts those kids through some horrifying things.

With the hybrids emerging at the same time as the virus, a scared human race looks to blame them for it, despite the kids being unable to carry or spread the virus. Making things worse is that the hybrids possess some sort of protein in their brains that can inhibit the virus for a time, but removing it means killing them. That’s all well and good for the sinister General Abbot, who leads a hybrid-hunting militia called the Last Men and is the show’s main villain. What’s perhaps more surprising is that it’s also not a problem for Dr. Aditya Singh, who lacks Abbot’s ruthlessness, but finds himself driven to create a cure in order to save his infected wife.

And yet, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. Singh is a particularly chilling character—a man who previously sought only to save lives and never would have allied himself with someone like Abbot. But desperation and a string of gradual ethical compromises results in some of Sweet Tooth’s most shocking and inhumane actions being done at Singh’s hands. And yet, we hear him say more than once that he’s “not a bad man.”

I’m sure that was true at one time. The problem is that once the guardrails of modern society are lifted and people believe their survival is at stake, it’s chilling—and disturbingly familiar—what actions they can justify to themselves. Dr. Singh doesn’t want to kill hybrids, he normally would never do something like that, but it’s just until he can unlock a cure that he can faithfully reproduce. A few hybrid lives are a fair tradeoff for saving thousands of human ones, right? Especially since some of the hybrids can’t even talk. That means they’re more animal than person, right?

Considering Sweet Tooth first debuted on Netflix in 2021, it’s never been possible to watch it removed from our recent real-world experiences with covid and the worldwide shutdown it caused. Fortunately, covid doesn’t kill everyone it infects the same way Sweet Tooth’s H5G9 virus does, but that sure didn’t stop it from bringing out the worst in so many. People were fighting in stores for rolls of toilet paper, shouting racist slurs at their Asian neighbors and storming government buildings because they didn’t want to get vaccinated or wear masks—the very things that could bring the pandemic to an end. I’ll be real with you, friends, if that’s how we act when we’re asked to stay home for a year, I don’t like our chances if we’re ever faced with a real nightmare virus like the one on Sweet Tooth.

Sweet Tooth has one more season to go, and it’s unclear how the series will ultimately end. Certainly, we can look to the Jeff Lemire comic that inspired it for a possible answer, but the series hasn’t been afraid to stray a bit from the source material, so there’s no guarantee both will finish the same way. What I can say is that I don’t think it’s going to end well for the remaining humans. Faced with a pivotal choice this season, Singh made the wrong decision, even though it should have been clear it would cost him everything he holds dear. At the same time, one of Sweet Tooth’s few truly selfless human characters—someone who had consistently tried to do the right thing—fell to the virus this season, showing that even in fiction, viruses don’t discriminate.

Season 3 promises to finally take Gus to meet his “mother,” the woman who helped create both the hybrids and, inadvertently, the virus. Perhaps she’ll be able to cure the plague that’s killed most of humanity, but with 99% of human life wiped out, the damage has already been done. The world of Sweet Tooth’s future would seem to belong to the hybrids. That they’re all so delightful means this is likely the ending that fans are hoping for. It might even count as a happily ever after.

Just as long as we don’t think too hard about what it’s saying about us.
 

Sweet Tooth’s first two seasons are now streaming on Netflix.

Tim Beedle covers movies, TV and comics for DC.com, writes our monthly Superman column, "Super Here For...", and is a regular contributor to the Couch Club, our recurring television column. Follow him on Twitter at @Tim_Beedle.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Tim Beedle and do not necessarily reflect those of DC Entertainment or Warner Bros., nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.