The Witcher: Which season or spinoff is most faithful to the books?

Right now, Netflix is deep into production on the fourth season of its monster-hunting fantasy series The Witcher. Thanks to some recent interviews with the show's new lead actor Liam Hemsworth, who is taking over the role of Geralt of Rivia following the departure of Henry Cavill, we know that production should be wrapping up any day now. Soon, the trickle of information about The Witcher season 4 will begin getting heavier as it moves into post-production and we near its eventual release date, which is expected to be sometime in 2025.

With all the recent Witcher talk from Hemsworth, it's gotten me thinking back on the series as a whole and some of its ups and downs. The Witcher is in an interesting spot as far as adaptations go; it's based on the series of books and short stories by Andrzej Sapkowski, but also tries to pay homage to the wildly popular Witcher video games by CD Projekt Red, which serve as a sort of fan fiction sequel to Sapkowski's work. Especially in western countries like the United States, many fans are even more familiar with the video games than they are with Sapkowski's actual books, and this can create an interesting disconnect in expectations.

But over the years, The Witcher show has developed a reputation for making some pretty big deviations from the source material. Taking a long view, how has The Witcher adhered to or strayed from Sapkowski's writings? To date, there have been three season of The Witcher and two spinoffs, the live-action limited series The Witcher: Blood Origin and the animated film The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf. With season 4 on the horizon, let's look back at them all and discuss which did the source material dirty and which honored it best onscreen. Starting at the bottom and working our way to the top...

5. The Witcher: Blood Origin

If any part of The Witcher franchise deserves to go at the bottom of the list for faithfulness to the books, it is obviously The Witcher: Blood Origin. Set thousands of years before The Witcher story we know, Blood Origin told the story of the Conjunction of Spheres, when worlds overlapped and monsters, elves, and humans were all ejected from their own homeworlds and stranded on the Continent together. This is a major part of The Witcher's lore, essentially the origin story for why the Continent looks the way it does and why it even needs witchers in the first place.

That sounds like a pretty solid bit of story to expand on in a spinoff...except Blood Origin wasn't actually about the Conjunction of Spheres. The event happens at the very end of the series, in a montage scene overlaid with narration that glosses over it in the narrowest terms imaginable. Instead, Blood Origin is a Seven Samurai-type tale about a misfit group of warriors who band together to take down the corrupt elven empire and the evil sorcerer at its heart. Suffice to say, none of that has any root in the source material whatsoever.

The Witcher: Blood Origin feels like the powers behind the franchise wanted to make their own fantasy series and simply tacked the established Witcher name on it to get more viewers. We don't know a lot about the Conjunction of Spheres from the books or games, but Blood Origin sidesteps even what little we do know, like the formation of the Aen Seidhe and Aen Elle factions of elves, and instead just goes off wildly on its own. It even messes with the origin of the witchers by introducing a "protowitcher" created by the elves. Nevermind that in the books, witchers are specifically made on the Continent after the Conjunction of Spheres because so many people are getting eaten by monsters left and right.

The Witcher: Blood Origin is a fun watch if you want to play a drinking game or something, but in terms of fidelity to the text, it leaves a lot to be desired.

4. The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf

Our next entry on the list is the other Witcher spinoff, the animated film Nightmare of the Wolf. This is an interesting one, because while I'd say Nightmare of the Wolf is on the whole better than the second season of the mothership Witcher show, it's still less faithful to the books — which is saying something considering The Witcher season 2's deviations.

Nightmare of the Wolf is all about Vesemir, the mentor figure for Geralt of Rivia and eldest witcher at Kaer Morhen by the time of the books. Vesemir features only briefly in Sapkowski's novels, but his presence still looms large in Geralt's mind. He's even more beloved of a figure in the games, which expanded him into an iconic character in his own right.

Nightmare of the Wolf had a lot of room to play with Vesemir's origin story. We learn very little about his early days as a witcher in the books, so Netflix could paint with a broad brush to make young Vesemir a fleshed out, memorable character. And Nightmare of the Wolf largely succeeds at that; Vesmir is a lot of fun in this film, even if he does feel a little too similar to the tongue-in-cheek kind of characters you'll find in Netflix's other big animated monster-hunting series, Castlevania.

Where The Nightmare of the Wolf starts to come apart is in the way it handles the pogrom against the witchers of Kaer Morhen. This is a hugely important event in The Witcher lore, where an angry mob of peasants are manipulated by some opportunistic sorcerers into storming the witchers' keep and murdering almost all the witchers alive at the time. Nightmare of the Wolf messes with the details of this; in the books, the witchers don't actually lose the ability to create more witchers during the pogrom the way they do in Nightmare of the Wolf, Geralt and his friends Lambert and Eskel aren't all present, and Vesemir is not the only senior witcher to survive.

All of that's pretty forgivable, but the cardinal sin of The Nightmare of the Wolf is why the pogrom happens in the first place. In the books and the games, this terrible event is treated as a cautionary story about how xenophobia and fear of the other can lead to great violence. The peasants believe the witchers are monstrous in their own way, breeding monsters as much as slaying them, and so they take out their fears by murdering the lot of them. The details are kept purposely vague as they're lost to history, but Sapkowski spends a lot of time and effort emphasizing that much of what people think they know about witchers is wrong, and that leads them to make bad judgments about them. The pogrom plays very clearly into that theme.

By contrast, Nightmare of the Wolf actually justifies the pogrom in a way by showing that some bad apple witchers were creating monsters, actually. They just wanted to stay relevant, and so were causing people to get gobbled up across the countryside so that they could keep a job! That moral ambiguity is very cool at face value and does fit with the tone of The Witcher world, but when you stop to think about what it means in relation to the books' sobering examination of xenophobia, it completely undermines the power of the Kaer Morhen pogrom story. The whole point is that these opportunistic sorcerers and angry peasants attacked a whole group of people because they were afraid of them. Nightmare of the Wolf says they were right to be afraid; even if not every witcher was involved, some of them were still committing a great evil that needed to be stopped. It completely betrays the spirit of Andrzej Sapkowski's novels, enough that it bumps Nightmare of the Wolf down the list to number four.

3. The Witcher season 2

The only reason that The Witcher season 2 isn't lower than Nightmare of the Wolf is because it does include a few recognizable moments from Andrzej Sapkowski's written works, notably the premiere episode, which adapts the short story "A Grain of Truth." That story goes down a little differently in the show, but it's close enough that it still feels like a pretty strong interpretation of this iconic short story.

Beyond that, well...not very much about The Witcher season 2 is recognizable from the book series. This season is (very) loosely based on Blood of Elves, which is the first full-length Witcher novel that Sapkowski wrote. There are some noticeable growing pains in the book as Sapkowski got used to the rhythm of writing novels about Geralt's adventures after years of sticking to short fiction. Blood of Elves is, in my opinion, the worst of The Witcher books; it struggles with pacing in ways that some of the others don't, and generally speaking, it's a bit of a bridge story as the author shifted from one style of storytelling to another.

That said, there is plenty of good stuff in Blood of Elves, including the Shaerrawedd set piece (which would later appear in The Witcher season 3), Geralt's first encounter with the Redanian spymaster Dijkstra and the sorceress Philippa Eilhart, and a climactic duel with a bunch of mercenaries in the streets of Oxenfurt. The Witcher season 2 jettisons most all of that, and changes what little it keeps so much that it's completely different from the novel. It builds tons of entirely new plotlines, especially at Kaer Morhen, where characters like Eskel are killed off (he survives through the books) and the witchers battle a Baba Yaga-like figure called Voleth Meir.

And then there's the fact that The Witcher season 2 takes away Yennefer's powers, something which never happens in the novels. It very much feels like the show went this route of disempowering Yennefer because they didn't know what to do with her for the season, since she only features in Blood of Elves near the very end of the book. Her story feels like the show treading water until they can reach more compelling book material for Yennefer, and it simply did not work very well.

There are some nice nods to The Witcher books in season 2, such as Geralt and Ciri's short journey to the Temple of Melitele to meet with the priestess Nenneke. But nods are all we get; in terms of actual plotlines or character arcs that match the books, The Witcher season 2 sidestepped practically all of it in order to do its own thing. The dip in quality is noticeable.

2. The Witcher season 1

The first season of The Witcher is unique because it adapted a bunch of short stories rather than a traditional novel. Pulling many of the most important tales from Sapkowski's collections The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny, The Witcher season 1 established the world of the Continent on the small screen and introduced us to characters like Geralt of Rivia, Princess Ciri, and Yennefer of Vengerberg.

It holds up surprisingly well, and a large part of that is due to how good a job it does at adapting some of those specific short stories. The showdown at Blaviken, the terrifying monster hunt against the Striga, the ball in Cintra where Geralt helps unite Ciri's parents and accidentally claims her as his Child Surprise...all of these are crucial foundational moments for the series, and The Witcher season 1 nails them. It also does a solid job with the tone of the series; The Witcher season 1 has a bit more horror than some of the follow-ups, and that's a plus.

In terms of its book accuracy...well, let's just say that most of the storylines revolving around Geralt are relatively accurate, while those for other characters like Ciri and Yennefer are completely off the beaten path. Ciri doesn't really come into the scene as a main character until the final few stories of Sword of Destiny; the show expanded her role significantly, and a lot of that material is pretty forgettable. It even botched the one short story where Ciri is introduced and first meets Geralt at Brokilon Forest by not having their paths cross there at all.

One of The Witcher season 1's most interesting difficulties is that the show made the choice to expand on a bunch of things which are only referenced in passing in Sapkowski's novels. For example, in the books Geralt realizes Yennefer was a hunchback before her body was reshaped when she became a sorceress. The show gives us two whole episodes of hunchback Yen, followed by a few more episodes of Yen pining to have a child. Both of those beats exist in the book, but the show's emphasis on them feels like it skews the power balance between Geralt and Yennefer. He remains a cool, collected witcher to the viewer, while we see all of Yen's painful backstory, the vast majority of which was invented for the show.

Sometimes, less is more. This is also true of the climactic battle at Sodden Hill, something which happens offscreen in the short stories. The show expands it into a proper onscreen set piece, and the result is less powerful than the quiet, terrible moment in the short story where Geralt finds a monument to all the mages who died there — including Yennefer, who he believes is gone for good. The second season brought back some part of that scene, but by then the damage had been done.

Tack in a few other issues, like the show's absolutely horrible handling of the doppler (another story element which is used as a metaphor for xenophobia in the books where the show said "actually they were right to fear you" instead), and we end up with a mixed bag. The Witcher season 1 honored the source material in some ways, totally missed the point in others, and went so far afield in yet other places that it bares little resemblance. But when it stuck to the books, it stuck to them relatively well.

1. The Witcher season 3

While The Witcher has had its share of pitfalls, the show's third season was an enormous step in the right direction. The Witcher season 3 adapted one of the most beloved books in the entire series, The Time of Contempt, and it included pretty much the entire story — even if it did change the details a bit.

It's interesting, because by the time The Witcher season 3 came out we already knew that Henry Cavill was leaving and the most vocal segments of the fanbase had pre-emptively turned on the series. This resulted in bizarre takes, like this one from Forbes which fantasizes about an alternate reality where Henry Cavill was the co-showrunner and the series was more faithful to the books...while simultaneously complaining about several of the most book-accurate elements of the season. Whether The Witcher season 3 was faithful to the source material or not, people were ready to hate on it.

And that's a huge shame, because on the whole this season was not only far and away the best, but it is also by far the most accurate to the novels. The Time of Contempt is a fairly compact book that's all about the coup at the mage stronghold on Thanedd Isle. We get a few chapters before the coup, the coup itself, and then a couple of chapters after which cover Ciri's journey through the desert and Geralt's recovery at Brokilon to wrap things up. The show included all of that material, as well as some of the Blood of Elves stuff that didn't make the cut for season 2, like the battle at Shaerawedd and Geralt's trap for Rience.

Yes, The Witcher season 3 did change things. The coup itself goes down very differently, and the fates of many characters like Francesca Findabair, Yennefer, and Rience are much changed. But here we're talking about details being shifted one way or another, as opposed to previous seasons which had whole new plotlines that either went against the spirit of the books or lowered the overall quality of the series. The Witcher season 3 still invented plenty of new stuff — Geralt doesn't fight a single monster in The Time of Contempt, for example — but all of that new material feels like it's there to support the overall book story being adapted. So even when things get weird, like Cahir's odd (fully invented) storyline where he murders his elven friend Gallatin to get into Emperor Emhyr's good graces, it feels more forgivable.

Helping it all go down smoothly are numerous sections which are pulled directly from the book. Ciri's time in the desert is one of the single most faithful sections of Netflix's entire franchise. Geralt's duel with Vilgefortz of Roggeveen pulls some specific choreography word-for-word from the text. His meeting with the information brokers Codringher and Fenn has lots of Sapkowski's dialogue. These examples abound, and it really shows in the final product.

The Witcher season 3 includes every major beat from The Time of Contempt, and then supplements it with a bunch of extra material to make for a fuller season of television. That's a stark contrast to some of the deviations in earlier seasons. We're debating the finer details here, not whether the shape of the entire season was wildly different from the books. And for that reason, The Witcher season 3 takes the crown as the most faithful season or spinoff of the franchise.

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