Review: The Witcher: Blood Origin is a chaotic, cringeworthy mess

Episode 4: “Of Mages, Malice, and Monstrous Mayhem”

The finale of The Witcher: Blood Origin is all about the battle at the palace in Xin’trea. It’s the shortest episode of the limited series and feels like it. Perhaps we can call it mercifully quick.

Episode 4 starts with Balor finally deciding to sacrifice his apprentice Fenrik in order to permanently gain access to Chaos magic. He promptly uses it to banish Eredin and all his soldiers to another world, setting up their eventual transformation into the Wild Hunt.

There’s an uprising in Xin’trea, but we still don’t know how anyone will eat dinner

The uprising in the palace hits all of the show’s usual highs and lows. The action scenes are largely solid, but make little sense. After liberating an imperial grain store, they discover it’s empty. The Empire has been hoarding food…but not really because they also have no food.

This raised a huge question for me: the primary reason that Merwyn talks about colonizing other worlds is because there is famine on the Continent, and she wants to use world-hopping to feed her own people. She also wants to “civilize” those other worlds, which is obviously bad, but the question of where everyone will get food if Merwyn’s plan is thwarted is never touched on. We’re just supposed to expect that if the bad empire is overthrown, suddenly everyone can eat. Shrug and move along.

Fortunately, Éile’s great at giving speeches, and since everyone likes her music they decide to riot anyway in spite of their empty bellies.

There are a lot of quick beats in the climactic sequence; ScÍan, Meldof, and Brother Death have a cool fight in a hallway, Fjall gives in to his monster side and fights Balor’s beast, and Éile comes face-to-face with Empress Merwyn. Éile and Merwyn’s showdown is kind of silly despite a solid effort from both actors; the script is too cheesy to take most of it seriously. That gets worse when Éile stabs Merwyn, leaving her to either remove the knife and bleed out or find a physician to heal her. Instead, Merwyn limps her way to her throne room, sits on the throne and puts on her crown, then mutters “remember me” to literally no one as she pulls out the knife and a mob of lowborn rush to kill her. Though it’s supposed to be a dramatic sendoff for the character, it comes off as funny.

This show is not about the Conjunction of the Spheres…until the last 5 minutes

Meanwhile, Fjall completes his transformation into a pseudo-monster and fights the beast. O’Fuarain’s turn is compelling to watch, especially in the first scenes where he decries Merwyn’s actions while he breaks free. The actual fight is surprisingly brief; it almost feels like an afterthought to all the other things going on in the palace. The CGI in this episode is noticeably better than the previous three though, which is good considering how much of it there is. The choices though…

After Fjall and the beast crash through a window onto a balcony, Éile arrives and throws a knife into its eye. The beast swats her, then takes to the air while Fjall turns into a witcher-version of the incredible Hulk, becoming huge and beefy and punching a broken statue arm so that he can take its giant ornamental sword and hurl it into the beast’s face. That’s it; all they needed him for was to throw that sword and the beast is dead. It feels anti-climactic, but the sword throw is a nice callback to the battle in the first episode where Fjall threw his axe.

Things quickly get much more real as Fjall turns on his allies, ripping the unfortunately named Uthrok One Nut (Dylan Moran) in half before punching Brother Death’s face so hard he loses an eye. I’ll admit, that moment where Brother Death went down had me on the edge of my seat.

But The Witcher: Blood Origin quickly reminds us that we don’t need to worry about anything too much. Éile sings to relax Fjall, then gets close enough that the two can profess their love to each other one last time before she stabs him in the heart. This is supposed to be the big emotional climax of the series, but due to a few weird shots I found myself laughing throughout the entire thing. Something just didn’t click.

But the final blow falls when Balor emerges from the portal and promptly toasts a guard with his newfound fire magic. He goes on about how all his life everyone dismissed him, which would have been way more effective if we had ever seen even ONE person dismiss him over the course of the series.

To stop Balor’s rampage, Syndril claims he needs to merge his power with Balor’s and then use it to destroy the monolith. He manages this with Zacaré’s help, eradicating himself, Balor, and the monolith in the process.

And then the Conjunction of the Spheres happens. Ever since Netflix announced The Witcher: Blood Origin was a show set during the Conjunction of the Spheres, the marketing has made it sound very much like this is something that would be explored in the show. But in reality, the Conjunction happens literally five minutes before the end and is entirely explained by Minnie Driver’s narration.

The Conjunction of the Spheres is a celestial event that strands humans and monsters on the Continent; we do see humans show up right at the very end of the show, but the fallout isn’t explored at all, beyond a woman hanging up a help-wanted poster for a monster slayer outside her inn.

Driver’s narration carries us right through to the final scenes as a montage reveals the fates of our remaining heroes. ScÍan is reunited with her clan’s lost sword Soulreaver, Brother Death survives but is missing an eye, Zacaré builds a cairn for her dead celestial twin ScÍan, and Éile burns Fjall’s remains.

The most absurd bit comes when we see Eredin’s merchant lover mourning the fact that he has gone missing. We then get a final shot of Eredin on the blasted plane where we saw the Wild Hunt in The Witcher season 2 finale. As he kneels, bearded and shabby in the dirt, he sees a skull half-buried before him…which he takes out and puts on his head like a helmet. Okay, sure, why not? It’s clearly meant as the origin of the Wild Hunt, but comes across as a laughable afterthought.

The final scene skips forward “six moons” to reveal that Éile is pregnant (because Minnie Driver literally tells us before we have a reasonable chance to notice). As she sits with Meldof and Ithlinne in a tavern, she asks for the young prophetess to try and foresee her child’s future. Ithlinne suggests that Fjall and Éile’s child will start the lineage that will one day lead to the birth of an important person in the mothership Witcher saga. The strong implication is that it’s Ciri, since her song will “end all times,” and we know from the books and games that she has a particular ability to travel through space and time. I guess the whole “witchers are sterile” thing didn’t apply to prototype Fjall.

We don’t learn for certain who Ithlinne is referring to, because as she recites the final words of her prophecy Minnie Driver takes over and the scene cuts back to Jaskier. The bard is still in the forest jotting down the last of her words. As he shouts for her to tell him who she means, the scene suddenly shifts, and Jaskier is still drenched in blood in the middle of the battlefield where the Scoia’tael came to rescue him at the beginning of the series. As rain pours around him, he walks off with the elven guerrilla fighters and the credits roll on The Witcher: Blood Origin.

Was it a good journey? I suppose your mileage may vary. Blood Origin was a chaotic mess at the best of times, and often humorously bad. Netflix had an entire spinoff which they could have devoted to exploring some of the earlier parts of Sapkowski’s lore, and instead tacked on a few small things to the end of a totally unrelated story that actually undermined important parts of the mythos.

That said, Blood Origin is so unconcerned with its source material that it’s harder to be mad about it than it is to be mad about, say, The Witcher season 2. It feels clear that Netflix was really shooting to make a short little fantasy show that capitalized on The Witcher name while being as free from the actual lore as possible.

The Witcher: Bullet Point Origin

• There is a post-credits scene which reveals that Avallac’h was actually in Cintra watching Ciri during the first season. Since season 1 of The Witcher played up the idea that Geralt was watching Ciri in the very same scene, now having Avallac’h be there almost undercuts what we’ve already seen.
• Ithlinne says the Aen Seidhe are lost in time, alluding to the idea that Avallac’h succeeded in figuring out how to use the monoliths to time travel. It’s not clear how much time has passed for him between Blood Origin and The Witcher season 1.
• Meldof is just fun to watch; props to Francesca Mills for how much she made that character pop. Her back and forth with ScÍan this episode was a highlight.
• “I was a fertile thing to be traded. I was unseen Fjall,” Merwyn tells her former lover after she chains him up in the hopes of making him her baby daddy. There’s a compelling irony there, but it’s hard to tell if The Witcher: Blood Origin did it intentionally or not.
• It’s hard to be certain about the passage of time in this show, but it seems like the “unstoppable” Golden Empire may have ruled for a few weeks to a month in total?

Verdict

The final episode of The Witcher: Blood Origin wraps up the series with all the inconsistency we’ve come to expect. But since the episode was so short and so focused on the battle at the palace, it felt even less put together than the rest of them. Blood Origin started with its strongest episode and ended with its weakest.

2022 has been a year filled with quality fantasy and sci-fi shows. The Witcher: Blood Origin is not one of them.

Episode grade: D-

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