Earl

Season 2 of Sweet Tooth is on its way, and the new trailer introduced a bunch of new characters, especially an army of Hybrids led by Gus against General Abbot. Among the new kids we can spot an elephant boy: that’s Earl, portrayed by Navi Narayan. His presence in the series comes as a surprise, as Earl was one of the main characters of the comicbook sequel, Sweet Tooth: The Return, set three hundred years after the conclusion of the original story. The show’s Earl looks cute and very young, while his original counterpart is older, and definitely scarier: let’s see together.

Earl was born underground, like all the other humans: as Father told everybody, generations before the evil Hybrids had spread a plague that had decimated God‘s people, humans of course, and had cast them down in the abyss, conquering the surface world. Earl had no reason not to trust what he was told, if not for his dad, who called Father a liar, and his big sister, Mel, who was of the same opinion. One night, all the bad things his father had told him about Father and his Militia turned out to be terribly true: some Wood Masks, the foot soldiers of the Militia, broke into their house, and they took him away, despite Mel trying to stop them. The Wood Masks said it was God’s will, as if that explained anything. Earl was terrified, and even more so when he was brought into Father’s palace, where a series of subterranean tunnels led to a high-tech lab. Here, he was subjected to horrifying experiments, that turned him into an artificial Hybrid: when the painful injections and the gruesome genetic meddling and splicing was over, Earl looked like an elephant, unrecognizable from the human boy he used to be. Apparently, he was the first success in a long series of deceased patients: Father had tried to turn people into Hybrids for years, first with adults, who all died, and then with children. Earl was the only one who had been successfully transformed, but he was deemed a failure nevertheless: Father wanted to use his artificial Hybrids as a Trojan horse, injecting them with a lethal virus that, once released on the surface, would have exterminated the real Hybrids, letting humans reclaim the surface world for themselves. For some reason, however, the virus didn’t stay alive in Earl’s body: as Father concluded, they needed a pure Hybrid, a true one, to act as a vessel. At that point, Earl was just another failure, and Father tortured him as if it was his fault. Despite now being useless to Father’s plans, however, Earl was kept alive for some other long-term plan.

Years passed, Earl was kept in a cell too small for him and regularly subjected to torture and humiliations at the hands of the scientists and the Wood Masks. He was sure he would have spent his entire life in the cage, until one day someone else was brought to occupy the cell in front of him. They were two small kids, a human girl named Penny and a Hybrid boy named Gus. The last one looked just like the deer-boy called Tekkietsertok, the one that according to the prophecies some old people like Pikton used to tell him as a boy, would have come and saved them all. Earl didn’t care much about the prophecies, all he knew was that the kids were prisoners just like him, and he didn’t want them to suffer like he had. There wasn’t much Earl could have done, chained and caged like an animal, but then someone unexpected arrived: Nanny Tu, one of Father’s women, came down to the cells, willing to free Gus. She had almost succeeded when she was spotted by a Wood Mask, who attacked her and the kids. As the Wood Mask was about to tear Gus’ horns from his head, however, Wendy stole from him the keys, and used them to open Earl’s cage: without a second thought, he crushed the Wood Mask’s skull against the cell bars, effectively freeing everybody. Tu stayed behind, and the three prisoners escaped on their own: on the run, the trio arrived to the labs, where Gus discovered a bunch of tanks with corpses who looked just like him. He was a clone, the perfect copy of the Gus from the legends. As they were there, a squad of Wood Masks intercepted them: the soldiers believed they had to capture the two running kids, but when they realized that also Earl was free it was too late for them. Venting on them all the wrath accumulated after years of torture, Earl tore them apart with his bare hands, reducing them to a pulp of dead meat. After the carnage, the three escapees tried to hide, but they were found… by Mel, who had come to the rescue of Wendy, and found her gigantic baby brother instead. Unable to speak, Earl expressed in a hug all the things he wished to say, including the hope of coming back to a life and family he missed so much.

Despite his monstrous and imposing appearance, Earl is still a boy at heart, a terrified little boy taken from his family and locked in a cage for most of his life. As an elephant Hybrid, he’s formidably strong, capable of crushing bones like twigs; he also has strong tusks, a virtually impenetrable skin and a prehensile trunk he uses proficiently as a third hand, and his smell and hearing are much better than a human’s. With all hope and happiness extirpated from him, Earl is now filled with rage and thirst for revenge… but deep down, he still dreams he can come back to his loved ones, hoping against all hopes that his family will accept him even if he looks like a monster.