The Witcher season 2: All episodes reviewed and explained
The Witcher 2×02 “Kaer Morhen”
Episode 2 introduces a home and refuge for Geralt and Ciri in the form of Kaer Morhen, but Yennefer and Fringilla face a new danger as they’re taken captive by elves. In yet another reminder of how fickle power can be, we meet Filavandrel, once king of the elves, who now answers to Francesca Findabair, the new leader of their people. This should serve as a lesson for Yennefer, who’s spent her life seeking power only to have it taken away.
The episode opens with an oneiric sequence. Yen dreams of leading an ordinary life where she is not a mage and Geralt is not a witcher; they are peasants living off the fruits of her garden that he sells at market. There is infinite love in their eyes and words and they are elated at the prospect of having a baby and growing old together. The dream could never be directly prophetic; both of them are what they are, immutable and barren and dangerous. But they will form a family and have a daughter of sorts. It’s thanks to the elven baby and the robed figure appearing in the dream that Yen is able to secure another audience with Francesca, and the three mages realize they’ve been dreaming of similar omens.
Her manipulative instincts kicking in, Yen jumps at the opportunity to tell Francesca and Filavandrel that she is also an elf. They don’t buy it. “Do you sing our songs?” Francesca asks. “Have you ever shed a tear over anything elven?” Yen has no answer. She may have elven blood, but she feels little connection to the elves. Part of her arc this season is to acquire a sense of community.
That is precisely what we find at Kaer Morhen once Geralt and Ciri arrive. The audience has been misled to consider Geralt a lone wolf, but he actually has a family and a place to go back to every winter, brothers welcoming him home with affection and cheers, and a father figure imparting lessons. Even in the semi-empty, frozen walls of the witchers’ keep, there is warmth, pride, loyalty and love.
Yen has none of those things at the moment, only ambition. The Deathless Mother manifests differently in the dreams of all three women who see her, appealing to their desires and feeding on their pain, but also willing to offer solutions to their problems. Francesca and Fringilla emerge from their visions resolved to make an alliance, but Yennefer is still lost. “You’d rather be blind than see the truth,” the girl in Yen’s vision tells her, a nod to Yennefer losing her sight in the book.
In the show, the blindness is metaphorical, but it’s her magic that is gone. If Fringilla is on a journey of self-empowerment (“The path to true strength lies not in humble faith, but to believing in oneself”), Yen has never been so powerless. Her dear, beloved magic, what she loved most about herself, is gone in a sacrifice she didn’t know she was making when she unleashed her chaos at Sodden.
Yen desperately — but privately — mourns the loss of her magic because of what it represents: power, in its truest form. Power is what she has been seeking all her life, something to fill the void in the absence of purpose, love and family. Power, Yennefer believes, is the only thing that she could ever matter for. “I dreamed of being important to someone,” she said once, and when that dream seemed to shatter, she turned to power to fulfill her.
Elsewhere, Geralt discovers that not even Kaer Morhen is safe for Ciri. The keep is threatened by a mutated leshy that possesses the body of of his fellow witcher Eskel. Vesemir and Geralt fight the monster and kill it. Geralt realizes that nowhere in the world can be ever truly safe for Ciri and there is no point in hiding or running away. It takes seeing her in danger to understand he cannot always be at her side, that Ciri deserves to be able to defend herself. Her best chance is to face her fear and her enemies, to “find power and purpose.”
By the end of the episode, Ciri and Geralt strike a balance in their complicated relationship; they are no longer complete strangers thrust together by destiny, but mentor and mentee. He imparts one important lesson: that witchers do not kill out of hate or fear, but to protect. In the beautiful last scene, Geralt places a wooden sword in the hand of the Lion Cub of Cintra and starts teaching her to fight.