Photo: Susie Allnutt/Netflix/Susie Allnutt
“It’s going to be a long road ahead for all of us.”
Those words — which Yennefer writes to Geralt at the end of her first letter in The Witcher’s season premiere — might as well be a promise to the audience: Despite some recent public woes for Netflix and the broader streaming landscape, The Witcher isn’t going anywhere. The main series has already been confirmed to return not just for a fourth season but a fifth season. A second anime spinoff movie, Sirens of the Deep, recently cast one of its leads. And a full-blown episodic spinoff based on characters that haven’t even been introduced yet is already shooting in Cape Town.
But if Netflix is confidently barreling forward with its Witcher-verse, it’s doing so at an especially perilous time for the franchise. Last year’s prequel miniseries, The Witcher: Blood Origin, was dead on arrival, earning dismal reviews after a troubled production that saw extensive reshoots and a six-episode order slashed down to four. Fans of the books have grown increasingly critical of the show’s liberal approach to adapting its source material. At the end of this season, Henry Cavill will depart the role of Geralt to be replaced by Liam Hemsworth. Even the structure of season three is a little off-kilter: The first five episodes debut today, with the remaining three slated to arrive next month.
And so — a full year and a half since the last episode of The Witcher — this season-three premiere arrives with a lot to prove. More than anything, it proves that pretty much everything interesting about The Witcher happens within the orbit of, well, the Witcher. This wasn’t a problem in season one when the show was mostly built around its gruff hero taking on a monster of the week — but as the story narrows to being about a bunch of people hunting for Ciri, it will need to make sure those people are actually interesting.
That doesn’t happen here. Picking up shortly after a strong season-two finale that saw Geralt pointedly refusing to forgive Yennefer for her betrayal, “Shaerrawedd” does its best to clear the decks and get the plot zipping along again. In a montage strung together via Yennefer’s unanswered letters to Geralt, we see roughly a year of Ciri’s training in the art of magic: lifting rocks, making a tree bloom and die, getting a geyser to spew from a lake. Meanwhile, whenever brigands show up and try to kidnap Ciri, Geralt spirits everybody away to an even more remote location, and the whole process begins again.
This time jump is, among other things, a useful way to get Geralt and Yennefer smiling at each other again as quickly as possible — and while I’d rather the show actually did the hard work required to convincingly mend this broken relationship, I’ll settle for dispensing with their conflict speedily enough that the plot can head in a more fruitful direction.
And with the internal conflict more or less resolved in a matter of minutes, The Witcher shifts its focus to the biggest external threat left on the table: Rience, the burn-scarred mage still obsessed with hunting Ciri down. This leads, mostly, to some pretty good fight scenes. There’s a battle with an armadillo-like monster called a jackapace, which Rience dispatches to track Ciri down; a lengthy sword battle in which Geralt handily dispatches a bunch of dudes; and a fist-pumpingly gnarly moment when Geralt breaks both of Rience’s magic-shooting hands. There’s also — as might be contractually warranted — a classic gravelly Geralt monologue on which he muses on a long-dead Elvish rebel who led her followers to their deaths: “Neutrality. It won’t get you a statue, but it’ll certainly help in keeping you alive.”
All of that is squarely in line with what made The Witcher a hit for Netflix in the first place. But what to make of the show around it? The Witcher keeps insisting on making its world bigger, but it never seems to get any deeper. The show is lousy with half-baked subplots built around on half-baked characters. Francesca Findabair, the Queen of the Elves, is, like the rest of the Continent, obsessed with finding Ciri. Here, she faces opposition from Gallatin, a new character who serves as a leader in the Elvish guerilla group called the Scoia’tael. Their conflict, which essentially comes down to resource allocation, manages to be both dull and confusing at the same time.
More promising, at least in theory, is the courtly intrigue in Redania. King Vizimir wants to marry Ciri and has ordered his spymaster Dijkstra and the sorceress Philippa Eilhart to track her down. But these characters were introduced in the middle of season two; since then, all they’ve done is talk about the interesting things they might someday do.
Maybe the introduction of Vizimir’s younger brother Radovid — clearly a schemer in his own right — will light a fire under everybody in Redania. Maybe, as the season progresses, even one of these subplots will stop feeling like the busywork that surrounds The Witcher’s core Geralt/Ciri/Yennefer triumvirate and start feeling interesting in its own right. There are signs, at least, that the show is interested in using the best stuff from its own history. In addition to Jaskier — whose shtick, even at its most tiresome, is at least something The Witcher can count on to lighten the mood — the episode brings back Geralt’s dwarven ally Yarpen Zigrin from all the way back in season one’s “Rare Species,” and Ciri’s buddy turned enemy Dara, who has been around since the beginning.
But none of that is why we’re here, right? Maybe it’s unfair to expect The Witcher to deliver on more than the Witcher, but this late in the game — and especially when Henry Cavill has one foot out the door — it would be wise for this series to show off what else it can do. And maybe that’s why “Shaerrawedd” ends by splitting up that core trio, with Geralt going off on his own to hunt for Rience while Yennefer leads Ciri off for an intensive magic study at Aretuza. After so much training, it’ll be interesting to see what both Ciri and The Witcher can do when she’s out of Geralt’s orbit.
• If you didn’t recognize him, that guy burning all the portraits at the end of the episode is Emhyr var Emreis, the emperor of Nilfgaard — revealed, at the end of season two, as Ciri’s father.
• Meanwhile, Jaskier sneaks off and tells Philippa he’ll help get Ciri to Redania if she can stop Rience, even as Rience gets Stregobor to heal his broken hands. I really hope it turns out Jaskier is playing Philippa and the rest of the Redanians because this is an objectively terrible deal that seems — among other things — like it will destroy his friendship with Geralt, and we’ve already seen that story.
• Yennefer and Geralt’s habit of beginning their letters to each other with the phrase “Dear friend” comes straight out of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves, in which Yennefer taunts Geralt for awkwardly using the phrase. Even after the events of season two, making Yennefer so earnest and simpering here feels like a misstep to me; I don’t need the show to be totally faithful to its source material, but her spiky dynamic with Geralt in the books is a lot more fun.
• Shaerrawedd, the very Elvish-sounding name of the ruins (and the episode), is probably a reference to Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest.
• More fun with Elvish: Francesca calls Ciri “Hen Ichaer,” which translates as “Elder Blood.”
• Prince Radovid, King Vizimir’s firstborn son in the original stories, has been rewritten in the Netflix series as his younger brother.
• Radovid is a fan of Jaskier’s “Song of the Seven,” which you might have heard in The Witcher: Blood Origin.
• In case you couldn’t tell under all those burn scars: Sam Woolf has taken over the role of Rience from Chris Fulton, the actor who played him in season two.
• The monster killed by Geralt in the maze, which he identifies as a jackapace, looks and acts exactly like a shaelmaar, which plays a memorable role in the Witcher 3 video-game expansion Blood & Wine.
• In case you ever need to settle something on the Continent: The Witcher-verse “rock, paper, scissors” is “boulder, parchment, dagger.”
