This article contains MAJOR SPOILERS for The Witcher season 4 and The Rats: A Witcher Tale.
This week Netflix ended years of anticipation when it dropped The Witcher season 4, debuting Liam Hemsworth as the new version of Geralt of Rivia after previous star Henry Cavill departed the series. But that wasn't the only Witcher-related content the streamer released on October 30. It also surprise dropped The Rats: A Witcher Tale, an 83-minute special that serves as both a continuation of season 4, as well as a prequel that digs into the origins of Ciri's gang of thieving friends with whom she spent the entire season.
If you've seen season 4, you know things ended very badly for the Rats. It was heartwrenching enough to watch them all get brutally murdered at the hands of mercenary Leo Bonhart, but now we can get a better idea of who they were and what the group was like before its devastating demise in the season 4 finale.
Netflix's Witcher franchise has had a fairly spotty track record with spinoffs, from decent-to-good animated movies like Nightmare of the Wolf and Sirens of the Deep, to the train-wreck live-action miniseries The Witcher: Blood Origin. Where does The Rats fall on this spectrum?
Shockingly enough, it's good. Really good. I spent a large portion of my watch wondering if I was getting punk'd, because not only is The Rats an excellent standalone movie, it also might just be the most all-around solid piece of media Netflix has yet produced for The Witcher.
To understand why that's so utterly baffling, we have to discuss the origins of this spinoff.
The confusing history of The Rats: A Witcher Tale
Word first got out that Netflix was developing a spinoff about the Rats all the way back in November 2022, before season 3 had even aired. Reliable Witcher scoop site Redanian Intelligence reported that Netflix was beginning early development on the series; later, they followed up with another scoop that it was set to film in South Africa from April to September of 2023. They had also heard that the Rats spinoff was originally going to be an eight episode miniseries.
However, a few months later, RI reported that filming had wrapped for the spinoff on July 1, months earlier than expected. What happened? Was it pared down like The Witcher: Blood Origin, which was planned as six episodes but ended up being four? Did something else go amiss? The last report from RI's inside sources in August 2025 claimed The Rats “behind the scenes was a disaster," that was “worse than Blood Origin," and that "everything went wrong" on the production.
But whatever happened with The Rats, Neflix remained suspiciously quiet; the streamer never even officially announced this spinoff before its release last week. For all we know, Redanian Intelligence's information may have been totally off. But they later found out that the spinoff was being repurposed into a special, and that seems to have borne out. Their track record has been good enough for the past several years that I believe something changed during production on this thing.
All this brings us around to the present, where Netflix dropped The Witcher season 4, and then surpised fans with the additional Rats special at the same time. The Rats: A Witcher Tale came as a total surprise to everyone — and I do mean everyone. There was no press release, promotion, or notification to news outlets, only an article that went up on Netflix's Tudum blog around the time the special launched and a suggestion in Netflix to viewers who finished season 4 to watch The Rats next. As of this writing, The Rats doesn't even exist on the streamer's media center, which supplies images and production information for its shows to news outlets.
Knowing the somewhat intriguing history of the special, my gut reaction on learning that Netflix shadow dropped it was that it was going to be a mess of apocalyptic proportions. Why else would they keep everything so close to the chest, without even an ounce of promotion for this special? Their surreptitious launch strategy seemed to support the narrative that The Rats' production had gone awry.
Imagine my surprise when the exact opposite ended up being true. Not only is The Rats a fantastic standalone movie-length episode of television, it's far and away better than the vast majority of the mainline Witcher series. The writing is sharp, the location photography and sets are absolutely stunning, the special effects are used judiciously and to great effect, and the ensemble cast shines in a way they don't get a chance to in The Witcher season 4. I liked the Rats in the main show; I love them in their own special.
If you've already watched #TheWitcher season 4, don't forget to check out The Rats: A Witcher Tale.
— Winter is Coming (@WiCnet) November 2, 2025
The special is meant to be watched after the season, and largely serves as a prequel that fleshes out the titular gang of thieves who Ciri befriended in season 4. pic.twitter.com/jmbUcxIE7w
What is The Rats: A Witcher Tale about?
The Rats begins with Ciri (Freya Allan) being carted away from the town of Jealousy by Leo Bonhart (Sharlto Copley), the eccentric yet extremely deadly mercenary who slaughtered all of the Rats during The Witcher's season 4 finale. The opening cements us in the future of The Witcher series, where Ciri is at the mercy of this madman, before he decides to regale her with the origins of the group of thieves she called friends.
Does it make sense that Bonhart knows the intimate details of the Rats' lives? Not particularly. But the framing story is a fun device that teases a fantastic actor dynamic for Allan and Copley ahead in season 5, and feels very much in the spirit of the books, which occasionally use framing devices — and specifically uses one for Ciri's experience with Bonhart in the penultimate novel, The Tower of Swallows. It's easy to go along with it.
We then jump back in time six months, to the most daring heist of the Rats' career, where they first encountered Bonhart. We get to know all six members of the crew much better: that would be Mistle (Christelle Elwin), Kayleigh (Fabian McCallum), Asse (Connor Crawford), Giselher (Ben Radcliffe), Iskra (Aggy K. Adams), and Reef (Juliette Alexandra). Each member of the crew has a big personality, and those personalities get to really shine in the special. They don't all necessarily get the same sort of backstory development as, say, Mistle, but by the end you'll feel like you know these characters and their unique skills much better. Reef and Iskra in particular shine with more screentime.
After a heist turns up a piteous reward, the Rats decide to set their sights higher by robbing the coffers a burgeoning fighting ring run by the gangster Dom Houvenaghel. This sets them on a collision course with Houvenaghel's cousin, Bonhart, as well as a washed up witcher named Brehen, played by '80s movie icon Dolph Lundgren (Rocky IV, Universal Soldier). An opportunistic slave trader with ties to Mistle's past has brought a manufactured monster to the ring with the intention of winning lucrative military contracts, and he happens to be storing it right on top of the loot.
Brehen is the Rats' answer. The only catch is that he's a drunk who turned his back on the witchering trade a long time ago. We learn why throughout the movie, and it deepens the lore from The Witcher's very first season in a way I found really satisfying.
The dynamic between Brehen and the Rats is fun, recalling Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai. Over the course of the film they go from reluctant comrades to true friends, as Brehen relearns his witcher skills and the Rats prepare for the big heist. It culminates in an emotional but not entirely surprising fashion once the film hits its climax, and Leo Bonhart arrives on the scene. He's only got one witcher medallion around his neck in this movie, and you know what that means.
The monster itself is also very cool, both because of how it ties into Mistle's history and because of how well the movie pulled off the special effects for it. It's easily one of the creepiest monsters in The Witcher Netflix franchise, up there with the Striga from season 1, the hand monstrosity from season 3, and the Rusalka from season 4. Its design is terrifying, its movements unnatural and terrifyingly fast, and its bit of humanity heartbreaking. The monster represents not only an immense obstacle for the crew, but a chance for redemption for Brehen and Mistle, which doesn't work out quite the way they want.
Lastly, I need to shout out the writing. While the framing story doesn't make complete sense and does feel like an obvious attempt to repurpose The Rats from a prequel spinoff into a special more closely tied with season 4, the dialogue in this special is largely very good, with lots of quotable, memorable lines. If the mainline Witcher series was as tightly written as The Rats, I feel like it would get much less grief from the fandom.
Verdict
The Rats: A Witcher Tale is arguably the strongest spinoff Netflix has yet made for its fantasy franchise, which is all the more impressive considering its reportedly troubled production cycle. The Rats has the feel of a very good questline from one of The Witcher video games, with an interesting cast of characters, a scary and unexpected monster, and a witcher making a valiant stand. This movie is a far cry from the mess that I expected, and is quickly becoming one of my favorite pieces of The Witcher television franchise as a whole.