Image: Netflix/The Witcher
Episode 2: “Four Marks”
Once again, the best thing about this episode is the casting. Anya Chalotra is compelling as Yennefer, a young magically adept woman with a couple unsightly physical abnormalities. Her story gets going a tad too quickly — I feel like there was some build-up missing in that first scene where the young couple bullies her in the stables — but by the time we got into the thick of Yennefer’s magical training at Aretuza — think Hogwarts, but the teachers are a lot meaner — I was in. The bit where the one student accidentally mutilated her hand while trying to perform a spell was freaky, and Tissaia de Vries (MyAnna Buring) makes for a memorably stern instructor.
That said, I had no idea what the deal was with the ending where Tissaia turned the other students into eels and Yennefer swept them into the pool and it glowed and she smiled. In the books, we don’t meet Yennefer until she’s a well-established sorceress. I suspect Hissrich is making some of this stuff up, but it’s still the most enjoyable part of the episode, even if it is a bit hokey. Those skull-festooned pillars where Yennefer talks to Istredd (Royce Pierreson) especially look a little SyFy Channel original movie.
That’s kind of the sense I’m getting from this show in general. It’s taking itself pretty seriously — those skulls belonged to elves slaughtered when humans first came to the Continent, yikes — but there’s a low-rent campiness to the enterprise it can’t quite escape, even if there clearly is a lot of money up there on the screen.
Take the climax of Geralt’s story, which is adapted from “The Edge of the World.” This episode gives us some background on the elves of the Continent, who unlike the elves from The Lord of the Rings have been driven out of their ancestral lands by humans and are now living in hiding, scrounging for scraps and dreaming of the day they can take their revenge. Geralt, who himself isn’t well-liked by ordinary people, sympathizes, and gives a nice speech to an Elven lord about getting along in the world. But it somehow doesn’t have the impact it’s supposed to, perhaps because the episode didn’t let this story sit long enough — we blast through an earlier section involving a monster called a sylvan very quickly — or perhaps because the aesthetics of the scene (Geralt’s yellow eyes, the Elvan ears, the bright lighting) make it hard to take too seriously.
Another thing that’s breaking the immersion: Hissrich and her writers have decided to dip into modern colloquialisms and winking asides, with phrases like “That’s not a thing” and “So far, so good” dropped into the patter and reminding us that these lines are being written by a bunch of people in a room, not thought up on the fly by the characters. (Also see Jaskier talking about “delivering exposition.”) Look, I know that The Witcher isn’t based on real-life history, but it is, like a lot of high fantasy series, set in a vaguely medieval/Renaissance-era world, so modern turns of phrase sound off. It’s another cheesy tag, something else that makes The Witcher feel more like an expensive version of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys or Xena: Warrior Princess than the successor to Game of Thrones. (Not that Hercules or Xena were bad shows, but that they were goofy and they knew it, which I don’t think is the tone The Witcher is going for.)
Happily, Joey Batey helps brighten things as the bard Jaskier (known as Dandelion in the English translations of the books and in the video games). Sprightly and energetic, he brings just the right mischievous tone to the role, and his singing voice is pretty good! This cast is solid. I just don’t think the rest of the production is serving them well enough.
Over in Ciri’s world, she continues to run from Cahir. She meets a young elf named Dara (Wilson Radjou-Pujalte), a traveling companion invented for the show, and stays with a group of Cintran refugees until the Nilfgaardians inevitably attack and she’s driven into the wild again. This all plays okay — I liked Ciri disguising her blonde hair with mud — but I still don’t see why we’re spending energy on this plotline plucked out of time when we could be developing the more chronologically coherent storylines. This show could stand to focus up.