WiC Watches: The Witcher
By Dan Selcke
Image: Netflix/The Witcher
Episode 1: “The End’s Beginning”
First, the good: the casting on this show is strong, particularly Henry Cavill as Geralt. Leading up to the premiere, Cavill talked a lot about how passionate he was about the story, how he’d played the video games from CD Projekt Red and read Sapkowski’s novels. His commitment shows. His Geralt is grim, taciturn, and competent, resigned to being hated by the common folk wherever he goes and pushing his true feelings deep down inside himself, although he still can’t quite hide them all. Cavill pulls off comic moments, too, like when Geralt exposits to his horse Roach.
The physical details are solid, as well, from the white hair to the yellow contact lenses, which mark Geralt as something not quite human. And I’m not gonna lie: the leather pants are nice.
This first episode is based on the story “The Lesser Evil” from The Last Wish, the first book in the Witcher series. It’s about Geralt coming to a town, Blaviken, and getting caught in a feud between a sorcerer named Stregobor (Lars Mikkelsen) and a former princess-turned-bandit leader named Renfri (Emma Appleton). Stregobor, an advisor to Renfri’s parents, had it in for her from the day she was born, during an eclipse. To Stregobor, this meant she was a harbinger of evil, and he had her cast out. Renfri swears revenge, and here we are.
This part of the episode is pretty successful, with Mikkelsen and Appleton both solid in their roles. Appleton in particular manages to paint a decent picture of a character at war with herself in a short amount of time. In the end, Geralt kills Renfri and her band rather than let them terrorize the town, which they do in an effort to draw the coldly calculating Stregobor out of his tower. But Geralt gets no thanks for it. Instead, at Stregobor’s urging, the townspeople turn against him for bringing violence Blaviken, and he leaves unloved. The complications and contradictions of Sapkowski’s world come through effectively here.
There were things about this story that struck me as odd, like how the episode gloried in the brutality and violence of the fight between Geralt and Renfri’s men — the fight choreography is very bloody and eye-catching, if maybe a touch too stylized and Matrix-ish for this medieval-esque world — but was so shy about Geralt and Renfri’s sex scene. There’s a kiss and some flowery music and then we kind of cut away in a flash of soft light and Geralt wakes up later with his clothes on; it’s not even clear the sex even happens, which it definitely does in The Last Wish. The fight was a very hard R — RIP the guy Geralt pinned to a door and decapitated — and the sex was barely PG. It feels a little hypocritical, but I don’t know if it’s a pattern yet.
But the real problem with “The Ends Beginning” is the other plotline. We don’t just stick with Geralt. We also see what Princess Ciri is up to in the kingdom of Cintra, which is on the cusp of being invaded by the foreign nation of Nilfgaard. In the space of an episode, we meet Ciri, along with her grandmother Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May) and step-grandfather Eist (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), Cintra is invaded, both Calanthe and Eist die, and Ciri flees into the wild, pursued by the brutal Nilfgaardian knight Cahir (Eamon Farren).
This is a very odd adaptation choice, since all of these events take place years and years after Geralt kills Renfri, something Renfri alludes to when she talks about Calanthe recently winning a battle. We’re seeing events transpire in two timelines, although it’s not immediately clear that’s what’s happening. This is doubly strange because we’re going to see in a later episode how Calanthe and Eist get together, and we’ll meet Ciri’s parents, and we’ll see Geralt meet Calanthe as a younger woman. That would have been a great time to get to know some of these characters so we can feel something when Cintra is invaded and they all start dying. But here, we skip right to the end of their journeys without having developed any attachment to them.
There’s one bit where Calanthe tosses herself out a window, King Tommen-style, as her kingdom falls. The show treats this as a major moment, with sweeping music and dramatic framing, but it falls flat because we don’t know this character. It’s bizarre.
If I had to guess, I’d say the show is telling its story this way because it wants to have multiple threads running at the same time, the way Game of Thrones did. I think this fails to take full advantage of the source material. If showrunner Lauren Hissrich and company are lucky enough to adapt the later Witcher books someday, this kind of thing will happen naturally, but the earlier books are comprised of short stories, episodic adventures that are a perfect fit for episodic television. Hissrich is trying to retrofit some Game of Thrones-style sprawl onto a story that should be more intimate, and I think it’s the wrong choice. I would have preferred this episode just focus on Geralt’s story with Renfri and Stregobor, with maybe a few more scenes fleshing out their characters, rather than grafting on Ciri’s story before its time.