WiC Watches: The Witcher
By Dan Selcke
Image: Netflix/The Witcher
Episode 4: “Of Banquets, Bastards, and Burials”
Okay, I’m getting more used to the show’s way of doing things. The series still has a campy fantasy feel to it. The Ciri sections in particular are a little hokey; they feature her trying to navigate her capture by the dryads of Brokilon Forest — an all-female band of nymph-like warriors — and drinking the “Water of Brokilon,” which looks like radioactive tree sap. Her visions are nicely evocative, though.
But the bulk of the episode takes place in Cintra, and it’s pretty solid. Geralt is present at a feast designed for Queen Calanthe to field suiters for her daughter Pavetta (Gaia Mondadori). There’s some comedic relief from Jaskier, some solid character-building for Calanthe and company, a forbidden romance between Pavetta and a cursed knight named Duny (Bart Edwards), a fun action scene, and engagement with one of the story’s main themes. All in all, it’s a good time.
But it also throws into relief how silly it was to tell this story out of order. Remember when I was confused in the premiere over why the show was killing off Cintran characters without first developing their personalities? Well, it develops them here, and it does a pretty good job. Sure, it’s a reach to have Calanthe strut into the banquet hall fresh from battle and covered in blood, but she still gets in a lot of good zingers and emerges as a charismatic woman who takes shit from no one. Eist, her future husband, is cool-headed where she is hot-tempered; we see how they could make a good match.
If we’d seen this stuff first, the scenes where Cintra fell would have been a lot more effective. But I guess the show was too eager to sprawl, or it had to fill a time quota (all of the episodes so far have been roughly an hour long) or something. Whatever the reason, it was a bad call.
Then there’s the matter of that important theme I mentioned. Although it’s been brought up before, this is where the story really starts focusing on the concept of “destiny.” Duny shows up at the banquet to claim Pavetta’s hand in marriage, arguing he has a claim based on the Law of Surprise. You see, way back when, Duny saved the life of Pavetta’s father, King Roegner of Ebbing. As a reward, Duny invoked the Law of Surprise: King Roegner would pay him back by giving over whatever he did not yet know he had. That ended up being a daughter, Pavetta, just then kicking in Calanthe’s womb.
Naturally, Calanthe is none too eager to let her daughter marry some dude just because her husband almost got himself killed back in the day and Duny was on the winning end of a bargain she never struck. Did her husband bring this baby to term? No; she did, so why should she have to be part of it? And being able to claim a person without their consent is weird and dicey to start with.
But clearly, the Law of Surprise is strictly followed in this world. Apparently, it ties Duny and Pavetta — who by happy coincidence are actually in love — together by the bounds of destiny. Calanthe can order her knights to kill Duny if she wants; Eist and other people at the banquet are going to step in and stop that from happening, so seriously is the Law observed on the Continent. Then, when Calanthe tries to sneak attack Duny, Pavetta explodes in magical power, holding the hall captive. She only stops after Geralt downs some witcher potions and snaps her out of it. After that, Calanthe has no choice but to acknowledge the power of destiny and let her daughter and Duny be wed. Hell, she does the honors herself.
But…why? That was the question I had when reading the books, and I still had it here. Is destiny some kind of magical force in this world, one possibly invoked by the Law of Surprise? That’s how the show treats it; characters talk about destiny with breathless intensity. When Geralt invokes the Law of Surprise as reward for stopping Pavetta’s magical outburst, Calanthe cries out in shock, because he’s laid claim (without knowing it) to Pavetta’s unborn daughter: Ciri. The druid Mousesack (Adam Levy) tells Geralt that he and the child are now destined for each other, and if the show follows the books, indeed they are.
But again…why? If Geralt doesn’t put stock in the Law of Surprise — and he claims he doesn’t — then why should it matter if he invokes it? He could just ignore it. But it comes to find him anyway. It feels like the Law of Surprise and destiny are important merely because the story says they are, and for no other reason.
I will say that I think all of this actually works better onscreen than it does on the page. On paper, the Law of Surprise and the power of destiny didn’t make much sense to me. But it helps to see flesh-and-blood actors in awe of and fight for these concepts. Contrived as they seem to me, these things are clearly real to these characters, and that’s probably enough.
The Cintran episode is an adaptation of the story “A Question of Price” from The Last Wish. In that story, Calanthe summons Geralt to the feast. Here, Jaskier nags him into coming to protect him from jealous husbands at court. The book’s version makes more dramatic sense, but I’m really enjoying Joey Batey as Jaskier, so I’m down with the change.
I haven’t mentioned the Yennefer part of the story, which involves an invented-for-TV subplot where Yennefer defends a nobleman and her baby from an assassin sent by the woman’s husband, who’s upset she hasn’t produced a male heir. Yennefer is able to take a bite out of the assassin, but both the noblewoman and the baby die, and Yenn has a morbid monologue next to the tiny corpse.
It’s another good showcase of Anya Chalotra’s abilities, and the special effects-driven fight scenes were fun. I am very ready for these characters to start meeting up.