The Witcher is here. Netflix’s adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels comes at a crucial time for the streaming service. Will the show give Netflix a monster hit that can help it stand up to new competitors like Disney+ and HBO Max? Will it attract Game of Thrones fans eager for something to fill the space left by the departure of HBO’s phenomenon? We’re gonna find out here, episode by episode.
First, some preliminaries: The Witcher follows lead character Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), a professional monster hunter who makes his way around the fantastical continent looking for work and dealing with beasts both animal and human alike. Other important characters include Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), a sorceress-in-training, and Ciri (Freya Allan), a princess whose life undergoes a major shake-up.
So does this show have what to takes to gain a following in a post-Game of Thrones world? Let’s start at…
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.
Episode Grade: C+
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.
Episode Grade: C+
Image: The Witcher/Netflix
Episode 3: “Betrayer Moon”
“Betrayer Moon” is definitely the strongest episode of The Witcher yet. Right off the bat, it benefits from drilling down (mostly) on only two stories: Yennefer’s ongoing training as a sorceress and Geralt’s battle with a striga, a frightful monster that’s actually a king’s daughter, transformed by a horrible curse.
Between Renfri, the striga, and Yennefer, Sapkowski seems to have a habit of writing about women painfully transformed by magic. But rather than dwell on the potentially weird implications of that, “Betrayer Moon” draws out the parallels. Watching Geralt battle the striga means more to us because the episode reminds us how he felt fighting Renfri, another cursed princess, back in the premiere. And watching Yennefer go through her ordeal — she sheds her hunchback and facial deformity through a brutal transformative process at Aretuza — means more because it mirrors what’s happening with the striga. The episode cuts back and forth because Geralt’s fight with the monster and Yennefer’s ordeal, underlining their suffering.
This is easily the best part of the episode. Alex Garcia Lopez goes all in on the brutality of both scenes. We watch as Yennefer’s body contorts and twists, folds and splits. And the striga is a wonderfully designed monster, all dripping black claws and hungry mouth. Its wailing shriek, joined with Yennefer’s, provides the soundtrack. If David Cronenberg directed an action movie, it might look like this.
The episode has less success in the slower, talkier parts. A lot of the language is still awkward (Istredd to Yennefer: “No amount of power or beauty will ever make you feel worthy of either.”) and the script muddles up some details regarding the why and the how of the striga. (Also, King Foltest’s counselor Lord Ostrit (Jason Thorpe) sure did confess to cursing the king’s daughter awfully quickly, didn’t he?)
Geralt’s part of the episode is based on the short story “The Witcher” from The Last Wish. Naturally, writer Beau DeMayo has to add a bunch of material to make it fit the confines of a one-hour drama, but the new stuff doesn’t feel like filler. I liked Geralt meeting with some of the poor and downtrodden people of Vizima before talking to King Foltest (Shaun Dooley), since they’re the ones mostly suffering on account of the striga. I liked the council of sorcerers deciding who to send where in the world and giving us a better idea of how that whole operation works, and I liked Anna Shaffer as Triss Merigold, even though she wasn’t in Sapkowski’s short story and her hair wasn’t red. She was folded pretty naturally into the narrative, and we might as well get to know her a bit before she becomes more important later.
I still don’t like that the show is juggling multiple timelines rather than just telling its story chronologically, although that did allow it to draw those Yennefer-striga parallels, so maybe they’re going somewhere with it. Speaking of Yennefer, Anya Chalotra was terrific again; she was particularly radiant stepping out after her transformation and dazzling the king of Aedirn into accepting her into his service, forging her own destiny even though the council wanted to send her elsewhere. That’s pretty on-brand for Yennefer.
That said, the nudity during Yennefer’s transformation scene was a bit weird. In the first episode the show was too shy to even confirm that Geralt and Renfri slept together, and now we’re leering at Yennefer’s breasts as she has a waking hysterectomy.
Overall, though, this was an improvement. If this is a preview of what the show can be like with more focus, I’m in.
Episode Grade: B
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.
Episode Grade: B+
Image: Netflix/The Witcher
Episode 5: “Bottled Appetites”
We’re into the back half the season, and “Bottled Appetites” returns to the hokeyness of the first couple episodes. I mean, the hokeyness has always been there, but “Bottled Appetites” does less to distract from it.
“Bottled Appetites” is based on “The Last Wish,” the final short story from…The Last Wish. And apart from a few deviations — in the book, Geralt and Dandelion really do find the genie while innocently fishing, and not because Geralt is losing sleep after “Of Banquets, Bastards, and Burials” — it’s actually pretty faithful to the text.
And that’s a good thing, mostly, but it also means the episode has the story’s weaknesses. When reading the book, I didn’t quite get what was happening when Geralt woke up in a jail cell, having apparently been put under a spell by Yennefer and made to rage around town punishing people who had been mean to her. It still discombobulated me here. We actually get a better look in this episode at why Yennefer might be mad at some of these small-minded townsfolk who dare to try and collect taxes from her, but it’s still not developed in any meaningful way. Maybe they could have shown Geralt on the warpath?
There’s also an elf character who exists mostly to be in love with Yennefer from afar. They get more use out of him here than in the story, I suppose, since they make him the healer who tries to help Jaskier after the genie screws up his throat, which leads them to Yennefer. I don’t know why he’s present for the climax, though.
But hey, these are quibbles. This is the episode where Geralt and Yennefer meet! How does it go? Obviously, Cavill and Chalotra have chemistry, which the episode tries to make damn sure we notice by having them bathe together. That more or less works, but I have no idea what writer Sneha Koorse was thinking when she decided that Geralt should meet Yennefer while the sorceress is magically conducting a mass orgy. There’s a line between story-driven nudity and shameless titillation, and this episode falls on the wrong side of it. It’s even worse towards the end, when Yenn is trying to trap the genie and we leer at her bare heaving chest as she casts spells.
And if you’re going to have shameless nudity, at least level the playing field. There were a ton of breasts in this episode but nary a penis to be seen, despite a lot of naked dudes. I guess Jaskier does mention his equipment after Yennefer heals him. See if you can pinpoint the moment during his song when she grabs his dick: “Toss a coin to your witcher, o’ valley of PENIS.” Funny, right?
Right?
I’m also a little put off that Anya Chalotra is clearly much younger than Henry Cavill, but I’m not in charge of casting for Netflix and will just have to move past it. As always, the episode is fun and earnest, but I think it’s coming off as goofier and broader than the producers want it to.
I got the same feeling from Ciri’s part of the story. She’s still in Brokilon Forest, where there’s always a bright yellow light in the background no matter the camera angle, and trying to figure out if she should become a the dryad or leave the protection of the wood. She opts for the latter after a doppler — a shape-shifting creature — disguised as Mousesack comes to collect her, something that does not happen in the books at all. They’re pretty off the beaten path with Ciri, so I’m not sure where this is going next, although I’m pretty sure I know where it’ll end.
Episode Grade: C
Image: The Witcher/Netflix
Episode 6: “Rare Species”
A solid structure and some genuinely affecting character moments make “Rare Species” one of the show’s best episodes so far.
Let’s start with the structure. Now that Geralt and Yennefer, at least, have met, we don’t have to split our attention between three different timelines. Having these two in the same place allows writer Haily Hall to focus on them and their hopes, dreams and fears.
It helps to be working off “The Bounds of Reason,” one of the more rollicking adventure yarns from Sapochnik’s early books. The plot: there are a bunch of people who are all looking to kill a dragon, some for gold (the murderous reavers), some for the promise of land (the dwarves), and Yennefer because she thinks she can strip the dragon for parts and use them to make herself fertile again. So we’ve got a bunch of eclectic characters with competing goals off on an adventure. It’s a classic because it works.
I like that “Rare Species” takes the time to build camaraderie among those characters rather than rushing towards the conclusion; I think the hour-long runtime actually suits this episode. I liked the early campfire scene, where these rivals crack jokes, eat monster meat and get to know each other. The self-important knight Eyck is enjoyably pompous, if extremely expendable, and the mysterious Borch Three Jackdaws — an older adventurer after the dragon for unknown reasons — draws some pathos out of Geralt, whom Borch recruited for this venture. All along, Henry Cavill has been making a herculean effort to bring some seriousness to a character who’s always a line away from camp, and this episode features his most impressive work yet. Geralt may have yellow eyes and white hair and know how to recite the names of 1,000-and-one fairy creatures, but when he and Borch talk about species dying out, and he stares off into the middle distance, you feel something. There’s an ache and a yearning at the center of Geralt. You can build something on that.
I was also genuinely impressed by his scenes with Yennefer. While ascending a steep mountain to find the dragon, Borch falls, inspiring the gang to do some “what’s it all about?” soul-searching. Geralt ends up in Yennefer’s tent, and while they do have sex (as Yenn predicted), what really drew me in was their conversation. The two of them lay on Yenn’s bed afterward and just…talk. What do they want out of life? What do they regret? What do they mean to each other? “I dreamed of becoming important to someone,” Yenn says of her desire to be able to bear children again. “Someday.” “You’re important to me,” Geralt replies. It’s sweet and direct and well-played by these actors. This is the first time I’ve really believed in one of the relationships on this show. You can also build something on that.
Their fight at the end of the episode hurts to watch, a little, as does Geralt taking out his anger on Jaskier, who I’m glad to see is capable of being more than comic relief. It’s a good episode for our main characters.
That said, the special effects kind of let the episode down at the climax. When the adventurers do finally encounter a dragon (with a twist), it looks…kinda rough. I’m used to watching the dragons on Game of Thrones and it’s hard not to compare. Also, Geralt and Yennefer seem pretty OP, fending off all those reavers by their lonesome. Although I liked the bit where Yennefer shanked the head guy in the throat.
As you can probably guess, the reavers aren’t given anything remotely resembling deep characterization. The dwarves are a tiny step above them, and Borch’s pair of fierce black Amazonian warrior-esque protecters come dangerously close to being exotic stereotypes. Still, overall, the dragon story is a winner.
The Ciri story, on the other hand, just feels like it’s running in place. Ciri and Dara fight off the doppler. Dara leaves Ciri, and I have already forgotten that he existed. At one point the doppler attacks Cahir in what we discover at the end of their fight is the back of a bar, and I don’t know why they fought. It has something to do with Ciri being the fulfillment of same prophecy so vague it’s hard to care. You know how fantasy stories love their vague prophecies.
And while I’m getting used to it, I still don’t like how the show dips into modern vernacular. One of the dwarves calls Eyck “a fucking dumbbell.” At one point, Jaskier marvels that dragons “are, in fact, a thing.” Geralt sounds as incredulous as any high schooler when he finds out why Yennefer is after the dragon. “Seriously?” he asks. “You? A mother?” I’ve said this already, but the show’s use of this familiar language marks it as a campy diversion rather than a serious work of fantasy, which I think is what it’s trying to be? Maybe the finale will clear things up for good.
Episode Grade: B
Image: Netflix/The Witcher
Episodes 7 and 8: “Before a Fall” and “Something More”
It’s finale time! The Witcher ends its first season with a good old-fashioned two-parter. These two episodes go big. Yennefer and several other mages of the Continent stand against the coming Nilfgaardian army, which threatens to roll over the Northern kingdoms after sacking Cintra. Although we’ve been following the likes of Cahir and Fringilla all season, we still don’t really know what Nilfgaard is after, but at this point I don’t think we need to. They’re clearly animated by some kind of religious fervor, and it makes them seem more like monsters than men. And that’s okay; not every villain needs to be fully three-dimensional. The Nilfgaardians are scary in their simplicity. Stopping them feels important. We’re with the mages as they stand against the invaders at the Battle of Sodden.
We don’t actually see this battle go down on the page, only hearing about it after the fact. Hissrich, who wrote this episode, and her team have a terrific time coming up with ways magic users could battle back and forth. Nilfgaardian mages lob fireballs and then turn to dust, paying off the earlier scene at Aretuza where Fringilla successfully performed magic but then watched her hand wither away. Triss Merigold makes poisonous mushrooms blossom out of the Earth. Arrows are fired through portals. Metal worms mind-control people into dropping pellet bombs on their own allies. Plant gate! There’s just a ton of imaginative stuff here. It’s fun, and it all looks terrific. If they skimped on the budget elsewhere this season, it was because they were saving it for here.
The Niifgaardian armor does look like crinkly trash bags, though. Can we change that for season 2?
Image: The Witcher/Netflix
I also liked how the episode included characters who had been set up earlier in the season, like Triss and Tissaia de Vries and even King Foltest, so we had some people to fear for beyond just Yennefer, who’s the star of the show. I also liked new addition Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu), a militarily minded mage who shares a tête-à-tête with Yennefer that actually lands:
"Vilgefortz: “First, she shuns the military. Now she’s a military expert.” Yennefer: “First he speaks to her as though she’s not there, and then he loses a limb.”"
Too much of the dialogue this season smacked of the writers trying and failing to be clever — and there was still some of that here, don’t you worry — but that one actually worked. Either cut back on the Casablanca repartee or make sure all of it is that good, please.
Anyway, these episodes belong to Yennefer, with Geralt and Ciri more or less sidelined during all the big events. What’s impressive is that it more or less works; the show put enough work into developing her character that Yenn can carry a two-parter on her shoulders. I thought her final hero moment was a little cheesy, with Tissaia giving her a bottom-of-the-ninth pep talk about letting her power “explode,” but Anya Chalotra was excellent as always, and I liked the development of her relationship with her fellow mages. Maybe she’ll be able to soften up a bit now that she’s put everything on the line and lived to tell about it?
Although, come to think of it, I didn’t like how we didn’t get a firm resolution to the battle. King Foltest shows up at the last moment to reinforce the mages, which implies that the Northern Kingdoms win, but we don’t actually see it happen. I mean, I know it happens because I read the books, but what about people watching this for the first time? Did the message get across to you?
Image: The Witcher/Netflix
So I’ve been complimenting the big finish in “Something More,” but I actually enjoyed “Before the Fall” more. We get a nice, contemplative scene between Yennefer and Istredd that makes them both seem more like real characters with wants and needs, something I wasn’t really getting from Istredd in particular before. I also loved the meeting of the mages, where a majority of them opted not to help defend Cintra from Nilfgaard on account of Cintra never taking them seriously enough before. That felt pretty true to life. I thought the episode lingered too long on the sequence where Yenn messes with the new sorceresses-in-training, but you can’t have everything.
The scenes in Cintra, which were basically the same scenes we saw in the premiere but from Geralt’s point of view, were also strong: moody and exciting, and carried as much by imagery and acting as dialogue, something I think the show could stand to do more of, especially when you have someone as good as Henry Cavill working for you.
But it does make those scenes from the premiere doubly baffling. I complained in my first review that the episode was showing us climactic moments without first giving us a reason to care. Here, we did care. Seeing Calanthe fall out that window was more affecting after I’d gotten to know her better, so…why did we have to see it at the beginning, when it was a hindrance rather than a help? Why spoil this moment before we can appreciate it? “Before the Fall” confirmed to me that the three-timelines conceit was a bad idea. We got to a good place, but the show made us jump through some silly stupid hoops first.
Geralt’s journey in “Something More” was…fine. The flashbacks to his childhood with his mother were interesting, and I’m sure will prove important later on. Unfortunately, his part of the episode was plagued with that clever-but-not-really dialogue problem. Geralt, after being bitten by a zombie: “Not a happy ever after after all.” That’s a dumb thing to say to someone else, let alone by yourself.
Image: The Witcher/Netflix
I also didn’t like Geralt’s line when he and Ciri finally meet up at the end of the episode, in the woods besides the farmhouse where Ciri had been taken in by a kindly woman. “People linked by destiny will always find each other,” Geralt says, as if the show hadn’t been pounding the “destiny is all” theme into our heads all season.
In fact, that whole ending sequence felt off to me. In the books, Geralt and Ciri unite outside the house. Why have Ciri run into the woods first? Why close the season with her asking about Yennefer? Doesn’t the fulfillment of destiny make for a powerful enough moment without doing…whatever that line is supposed to do? Tease the relationships to come, I guess? This moment is supposed to be about Geralt and Ciri. I feel like Hissrich didn’t trust the moment like she should have.
Overall, though, this was a strong finish to a wobbly season of TV that improved as it went along. I’ll gladly watch a second season.
“Before a Fall” Grade: A-
“Something More” Grade: B+
Image: The Witcher/Netflix
So is The Witcher good?
The Witcher is a big, lovable, gorgeous, occasionally moving mess of a show. There’s no doubt that it’s made with conviction and passion — a porcupine man walked into a banquet and nobody laughed; the people behind this show clearly believe in what they’re doing. But I don’t know if their ability quite matches their ambition…yet. Long-form television isn’t a sprint.
Still, in this season, there was always something getting in the way of my investing in the story, even if it did a lot of things well. For example, the casting on the show is great, particularly for the four leads (I’m including Jaskier; try and stop me). But too often, the script gave them groaners. If the show doesn’t want to veer into camp — something that’s always a danger when you’re dealing with elves and wizards and whatnot — Hissrich and company should stop with the jarring anachronisms, choose their words more carefully, and trust their actors to sell emotion without dialogue.
And then there are those timelines. The good news is that, now that our main characters have caught up with each other, we should be able to go forward through Blood of Elves more or less chronologically. But c’mon, who’s bright idea was it to tell these stories like this, and are they fired yet? The show put the cart before the horse, showed us emotional moments before we were able to understand them, and needlessly confused the audience.
The jury’s still out on why the show did it this way. Personally, I still blame Game of Thrones. I think Hissrich felt she needed to turn Sapkowski’s collection of short stories into a continuous narrative with multiple threads running at the same time, and if she had to twist the narrative into nonsensical shapes to do it, so be it. I think that was the wrong approach to the source material, which Hissrich and her team should trust more. If a standalone episode is what you need to tell a story right, then have a standalone episode.
Speaking of Game of Thrones comparisons, the show needs to tone down the gratuitous nudity — not all the nudity, just the gratuitous nudity, the nudity that has no narrative purpose other than to trot some naughty parts in front of the camera — always a woman’s, by the way. It’s weird, show. And if you still want to be gratuitous, at least be equitable when it comes to gender.
But that song? Gold.
I enjoyed watching The Witcher. Yes, I know I complained a lot, but you have to understand: griping is fun. The show is already renewed for a second season, and I’ll be watching when it drops. Will you?
Season Grade: B-
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