Right now, the team at Netflix is in the middle of shooting the fifth and final season of The Witcher, its monster-hunting fantasy show based on the book series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. We haven't seen season 4 yet — it's due out sometime later this year — but the streamer made the wise decision to film the final two seasons back to back, which means production is going to keep rolling on until the finished story is in the can.
Beyond the very obvious boon that the show will hopefully be finished and released in a timely manner (*cough, cough* Looking at you HBO *cough, cough*), it also means that we're already getting news from the set of The Witcher's final season before season 4 even has as release date. For example, a few weeks back, the sleuths over at Redanian Intelligence shared a ton of pictures that they had captured from the season 5 shoot, showing new Geralt actor Liam Hemsworth and the rest of his hansa duking it out with a group of knights in a woodland field surrounded by beehives. Now they've got another dispatch from the production: the Wild Hunt is coming in season 5.
If you've played The Witcher video games by CD Projekt Red, you're probably very familiar with the Wild Hunt; they were the nefarious group of skeletal armor-wearing elves who pursued Ciri in the third game, aptly titled The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. They also appear in Sapkowski's books, primarily in the final novel, The Lady of the Lake. We've seen them in the Netflix franchise a few times already; they briefly appear at the end of season 2, in the middle of season 3, and during The Witcher: Blood Origin spinoff, where we see the origin story for their leader Eredin.
Of course, Netflix's take on the Wild Hunt has a few key differences which will almost certainly effect how they appear in the show. Beware FULL SPOILERS for The Witcher book series ahead.
The Wild Hunt will be major antagonists in The Witcher season 5
In the final book of The Witcher Saga, Ciri uses her world-hopping powers to jump to a parallel world, which happens to be the homeworld the Aen Elle elves. There, she encounters King Auberon and his general Eredin, the commander of the Wild Hunt. They each want Ciri's power for their own ends, and the entanglements with the Aen Elle mark a dangerous point in Ciri's journey where she has to find a way to escape and get back to the Continent in order to reunite with Geralt and Yennefer.
The main difference for the elves in the Netflix show is that they aren't actually on a parallel world. During the Conjunction of the Spheres in The Witcher: Blood Origin, we see humans and monsters get trapped on the elves' world, rather than the elves get stranded along with the other races on a different planet. King Auberon does not exist in Blood Origin, though it's possible the show will find some way to introduce him. At the end of the prequel, we see Eredin get trapped on a totally different planet, which is a blasted wasteland. This marks the beginning of his tenure as the leader of the Wild Hunt.
This all raises serious questions about how The Witcher season 5 will handle the Wild Hunt and the Aen Elle. Perhaps the show will have Ciri end up on the wasteland planet where we saw Eredin, rather than on the mysteriously beautiful land of the Aen Elle from the books? Perhaps we'll learn about a group of elves who ended up building a civilization on another world? However Netflix approaches this plotline, it will almost certainly need to invent a lot of new material because of the changes it has already made from the source material.
Unlike a lot of the previous deviations the show has made, I'm more curious than alarmed by this. The Wild Hunt is a memorable part of Sapkowski's books, but if I'm being honest I felt they were a bit underutilized in The Lady of the Lake. That's part of why The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt video game worked so well, because it dramatically expanded their role and turned them into the world-ending threat they were only hinted at being in Sapkowski's books. Netflix has already given the Wild Hunt a little more focus than they've gotten by this point in the book series, and while it hasn't always worked, it's encouraging that the team behind the show clearly wants to involve the Wild Hunt more in the story. We'll see how it shakes out.
The Witcher season 5 is currently filming. We're on the lookout for a release date for season 4, which is due to come out sometime in 2025.
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