The Witcher showrunner on why she killed off fan favorite character

Another day, another discussion about the latest season of Netflix’s The Witcher. Over the holidays, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich took to Twitter to answer fan questions, including one that I’ve been wondering about a lot. It has to do with Eskel, our wayward witcher whose fate was vastly different in the show than in either the Witcher games or books. As far as changes The Witcher show has made, Eskel stands as one of the most memorable — and divisive — to date.

We’ll be getting into SPOILERS for season 2 of The Witcher below. Ye hath been warned.

The Witcher showrunner takes to Twitter to answer fan questions

While waiting for a flight over the holidays, Lauren S. Hissrich tweeted out to fans inviting them to hit her with their burning questions about the second season of The Witcher. While many were volleyed back and forth, one of the most interesting things to come out of the Q&A was when Hissrich started a thread with this:

“Let’s talk about Eskel,” the showrunner tweeted. “But before we do, we need to talk about Geralt.”

Hissrich went on to talk about the difficulties of transposing Geralt’s story from Blood of Elves (the novel on which this season was based) to the screen. Blood of Elves is one of the slower books in The Witcher series, and after the show’s long hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hissirch and her team worried that its story would be too slow. So it was decided that some changes were going to have to be made.

“In print, it’s a gorgeous unfurling of listening and learning, a slow and steady beautiful journey of how a Witcher becomes a father,” Hissrich wrote. “After writing several drafts of episodes, we faced an undeniable truth: that most tv audiences don’t want to watch 8 episodes of any character watching and waiting and reacting, much less the titular character with whom swords and adventure and bathtubs have become synonymous.”

"So how could we take the growth that we need to see in Geralt, but have it have all the appropriate ups and downs and cliffhangers and devastation and action that modern audiences expect? Enter the idea of a mystery Geralt needs to solve in order to learn about Ciri and her powers. And enter the idea that the mystery should unfold in the place where Geralt should have felt most protected and safe: his home. With his family. With the people he knows best.Except what happens when one of those people comes back home, and is acting completely differently than what Geralt expects? One of my favorite moments on screen is when Geralt first hugs Eskel. The concern and confusion on his face says it all: “Are you okay?” And Eskel’s not."

The Witcher killed off Eskel to “activate” Geralt’s plotline

Now we get into the meat of the discussion about Eskel, the witcher who was infected by a leshy in the second episode of the season and soon afterward transformed into a tree creature himself, before being killed by Geralt. Eskel is a staple of the video game series, though he only features briefly in the original novels by Andrzej Sapkowski.

Hissrich continued to explain the decision to give Eskel a very different fate:

"[Eskel’s] been infected by a monster that we don’t know yet, who is connected to Ciri in a way we don’t understand yet (and won’t for a while). But from the get-go Geralt knows this person so well, and can’t understand why he’s acting out of character: mean, and coarse and flagrantly disobeying Kaer Morhen rules by bringing women there, disrespecting the other brothers with whom he shares a deep history. The story unfolds, of course, as you’ve seen. Eskel admits he came home to seek help from Vesemir and his brothers; but the monstrous infection has taken over so deeply that he’s lost himself. Geralt makes a choice that breaks his heart: he sacrifices Eskel to save Vesemir. And now we have a mystery for Geralt to solve: what happened to Eskel? And how does it involve Ciri?"

As anyone who’s seen the entire second season of the show knows, the connection between those otherworldly monsters and Ciri is pretty major. While The Witcher’s decision to kill off Eskel early on bothered many fans, one of the show’s best changes was the care it put into introducing the idea of multiple worlds, which is key to the long-game story. Eskel’s leshy ties into that. And despite many fans missing the scarred witcher, it must be said that this change does make his shadow loom quite large over the season.

According to Hissrich, they originally had even more material planned for him. “We had several more flashbacks with Eskel laid out to demonstrate further to the audience how close Geralt and Eskel were in the past: to reinforce just how far Geralt had had to go in his heart in order to make that sacrifice,” she said. “I hope to return to them in the future.”

Yet Hissrich is not deaf to the cries of fans upset by this change, as evidenced both by her thoughtful responses as well as the fact that she’s willing to do open Q&A’s like this in the first place. “All of that said: fans miss Eskel. I understand that,” the showrunner admitted. “I also understand that we made the choice we needed to make in our storytelling, in order to activate Geralt. Is there a right and wrong? For fans, maybe. And maybe time will tell, for us too.”

Season 2 of The Witcher is currently available to stream on Netflix.

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