The Witcher writers wanted to clear up those confusing timelines

The Witcher was a hit, but the confusing timelines threw fans for a loop. The writers begged the showrunner to make them more clear, but she “refused.”

The first season of The Witcher debuted on Netflix last December, before the world crumbled, and it was a hit. Viewers liked the high fantasy aesthetic and enjoyed following the adventures of professional monster hunter Geralt of Rivia, sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg, and the wayward Princess Ciri of Cintra.

However, sometimes figuring out exactly what was going on could be a challenge, especially in the beginning. That’s because the show did this thing where Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri were all living out different stories, but unbeknownst to us, they were happening at different times. Like, in the first episode, Geralt is dealing with a clan of bandits while Ciri deals with the sack of her city, and we aren’t told that the former is happening well over a decade before the latter. Things eventually leveled out, but those early episodes are weird.

As it ends up, the show’s writers thought so, too, because they tried to convince showrunner Laruen Hissrich to include a timeline, as she shared on Twitter:

"The writers came up with a whole timeline, based around the fall of Cintra, that they begged me to put on screen. I… well, I refused. I was completely stubborn about not revealing that Ciri and Geralt weren’t in the same timeline at the beginning."

This isn’t the first time Hissrich has defended the timeline idea. “What was important to me is starting off and making sure that we understood who Geralt was and who Ciri was, and then, in Episode 2, who Yennefer was,” she said a while back. “And one of our early decisions we made was actually just to introduce Geralt and Ciri in Episode 1 and to hold Yennefer for Episode 2 for that exact reason. There’s only so much you can take in…We need to let the characters live and breathe in this world a little bit. That was one of the reasons we structured the story that way.”

"To me, it becomes really evident, obviously, by Episode 4. This is the place where I think all audiences will go, ‘Oh my god. OK, now this is making a little bit more sense,’ where Queen Calanthe — who we see kill herself in Episode 1 — is younger and back to life in Episode 4. And hopefully, god, if I was watching this, I would want to go back to the beginning and see how they’ve been telling me this from the beginning."

I like that Hissrich is so open about her process, and obviously the timeline weren’t a dealbreaker for people, but I think the show was a success in spite of this timeline foolishness, not because of it. Why should a viewer have to wait until Episode 4 to figure out what’s going on? My biggest problem was that, far from endearing us to Ciri early on, it made the early parts of her story a muddling interruption to the parts that could actually follow without trouble. Had the fall of Cintra been held for later in the season, when it would have been chronologically appropriate, I think it would have hit a lot harder, and Ciri’s story would have been more interesting and memorable.

Happily, by the end of the first season, all of the characters were in the same place, temporally speaking, so there shouldn’t be any silly timeline shenanigans going forward.

We don’t know exactly when that second season will debut, but we know that, after a quick COVID-19 break, Hissrich and company are hard at work on it. In fact, fansite Redanian Intelligence reports that they’re currently in the midst of filming a big action scene at Kaer Morhen, the witchers’ keep.

We’re going to meet a lot more witchers in season 2; hopefully that anticipation can carry us through to whenever the show debuts, probably sometime in 2021.

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