Review: The Witcher: Blood Origin is a chaotic, cringeworthy mess
By Daniel Roman
Episode 3: “Of Warriors, Wakes, and Wondrous Worlds”
“Of Warriors, Wakes, and Wondrous Worlds” throws us back into the action with its opening scene as Éile runs screaming to a portal while being chased by the angler fish-worm monster. This creature design is pretty cool, but we don’t spend much time with it; as soon as Éile is back through, Syndril pulls the plug on the portal, slicing the beast in half mid-lunge as it tries to devour her.
We discover that the party is much closer to Xin’trea than they were before, close enough to conveniently put them right next to Meldof, who uses a classic Terminator line and tells them to follow her if they want to live.
The majority of Episode 3 takes place in and around Meldof’s hidden cavern abode, where a plan is quickly hatched to use the angler worm monster’s heart and some dark magic to turn one of our heroes into the first prototype witcher. There’s some debate over who it will be: Syndril volunteers to become a “monster” in order to fight the other monster, but Fjall and Éile determine it has to be one of them since they’re warriors.
There is one particularly irksome plothole here, which is that Syndril and Zacaré know how to make a monster because they tried to use it to bring their mother back to life…however, since the process requires a monster heart and monsters had never been on the Continent before Blood Origin, how did they come up with the spell in the first place? Another one of those moments you just have to shrug and go along with.
A witcher’s wake
Despite Fjall’s insistence that it should be him, Éile insists right back and decides it is her who shall undergo the painful transformation. But since it’ll take all night to prepare for the ritual, the group decides to get well and truly smashed first by holding a wake for her.
The wake is really the heart of the episode, and features a lot of nice character moments. Meldof’s explanation of how she mixed Gwen’s ashes together with the ore to make her hammer stands out. There are still weird moments, like how no one but ScÍan seems alarmed by the revelation that Fjall was lying about there being a secret passage into the castle, but on the whole the wake is one of the better sequences in the show. The bit where Éile sings again for the first time since the premiere is probably one of the best scenes in the entire series.
That leads to a cute moment between her and Fjall where they kiss and fall asleep in the woods together…which is swiftly ruined when she wakes up to realize that Fjall has already taken the first witcher elixir to keep her from doing it herself, since it’s basically a death sentence.
Onto the ritual itself: the CGI is a bit wonky, and Zacaré’s chanting feels pretty goofy. Sophia Brown and Laurence O’Fuarain’s acting does most of the heavy lifting, but it’s undermined by funny choices, like the melodramatic wailings from Syndril when it seems that Fjall has died.
But lo! Ultimately, the first prototype witcher is created. His very first act is to do the dirty with Éile, because if there’s one thing we know about witchers it’s that they slay monsters and have an outsized libido. Sapkowski would probably approve.
The following morning, ScÍan returns from a secret trip to the castle. We’re led to believe she’s selling out the heroes, but really she uses the funds she was paid to bring in Fjall to buy sellswords in order to ambush the soldiers sent to help her with all the backstabbing. The battle scene is quick and sets the stage for the seven warriors plus their sellswords to sneak into the castle wearing pilfered armor, which is how the episode ends.
We know that a lot of content was cut out of the original Blood Origin, with the episode count dropping from six to four. It’s really noticeable here; this should be the point where the stakes are raised, but we simply haven’t learned enough about most of the characters to care. The group generally feels more like a Dungeons & Dragons party than anything else, right down to Zacaré’s awestruck, “did we just win?” exclamation after the skirmish in the canyon.
But it’s with the palace plotline that Blood Origin’s biggest problems start to become impossible to ignore.
Blood Origin’s lowborn/highborn dynamic is problematic and careless
As with the wake, there’s a feeling that we’re missing pieces of the puzzle as we quickly skim through various scenes with Merwyn, Avallac’h, Balor and Eredin. First Avallac’h discovers Balor’s book of monoliths in his room and steals it. Then Balor comes and tries to kill him for it, only to be betrayed by Eredin and locked up along with his apprentice Fenrik (Amy Murray).
From there we cut to Avallac’h trying to open a portal only for it to fail. Eredin immediately balks when it doesn’t work on the first try. The passage of time just feels a little weird, especially since it’s set against the wake, which is all occurring in one prolonged evening.
Things get really dicey when Merwyn goes to persuade Balor to help her in her mission to colonize other worlds. Balor chafes at Merwyn’s offer, telling her that she only sees him as a “lowborn who’s risen far above his station,” and she snaps back that he sees himself that way; she sees him as a singular genius.
The first time I heard that line I literally paused Blood Origin because I was so taken aback; how did that line made it through multiple rounds of edits and into the final show? Netflix’s Witcher franchise has generally been really bad in how it’s handled the story’s overarching themes of prejudice, from leaning into things like the “evil doppler” in season 1 (something which was clearly meant as a stereotype in Sapkowski’s books) to justifying a pogrom against the witchers in The Nightmare of the Wolf. But the class dynamics introduced in Blood Origin take things to a whole new level.
The lowborn/highborn elven classes introduced here are not something from Andrzej Sapkowski’s books, but created by Netflix specifically for this prequel. There is a throughline in the limited series of Balor feeling like everyone is talking down to him, which is spun multiple times to say that, really, it’s Balor who’s looking down on the highborn and causing his own internal struggle.
Saying it’s problematic feels like a gross understatement. Maybe if it were done with far more nuance and care it would have actually been a fascinating mental dilemma to examine. But Blood Origin uses the broadest of strokes and it comes off as tone-deaf and thoughtless. It’s even more baffling when you consider that there are two distinct groups of elves who emerge because of the Conjunction of the Spheres — the Aen Seidhe and Aen Elle — who are not explored in the spinoff. Instead, Netflix make up as generic a class structure and explores it in the most hamfisted way possible.
Ultimately, Balor agrees to help and leads Eredin’s forces into another world. He’s obviously serving his own agenda and it’s hard to imagine why anyone other than a total moron would trust him, but it’s what was needed for the finale to start, and so we must simply shrug and go along.
The Witcher: Bullet Point Origin
- Fenrik dissing Merwyn with sign language in the prison cell was hilarious. I don’t know if I laughed at the show or with the show, but I laughed.
- Fjall’s revelation that there’s no secret entrance to the palace feels like it should have gone over way worse than it did. Aside from ScÍan, no one else even seems remotely concerned about this despite the fact that it kind of derails their entire plan.
- During Callan’s long monologue at the wake, I started wondering why exactly we were getting this deep look into his psyche. Then we see that Meldof has fallen asleep during his story. The Witcher: Blood Origin continues to show it’s not afraid to make jokes at its own expense, and you know what? I laughed at it.
- Meldof’s scene where she reveals the monoliths were made by dwarves and that she’ll help kill the empress was really good, largely because of how solid Mills and Novelli’s acting is. It did still feel like something was missing though, because we’ve only just met Meldof and her claims that she now feels empty because of not having anything else to do after avenging Gwen haven’t had time to percolate.
- Minnie Driver’s narration reached a whole new level of ridiculous in this episode, describing things like the way the air felt around Fjall when he came out of the cave. Driver is wonderful, I’ve seen her in enough to know it’s not her fault. The narration is unneeded at best and cringeworthy at worst.
Verdict
“Of Warriors, Wakes, and Wondrous Worlds” felt like a shorter episode than those preceding it, largely because it’s so focused on our group of heroes getting to know one another and Fjall’s transformation into the first prototype witcher. While there are some good bits at the wake, on the whole this episode was pretty rocky, especially where the palace segments are concerned. This was the episode where I fully embraced the fact that The Witcher: Blood Origin is far more concerned with telling a D&D-type ensemble adventure rather than anything even tangentially related to Sapkowski’s Witcher.