Starts Strong, Fizzles Out, Crashes And Burns

I sometimes ponder what an extraordinary show Netflix could have had with The Witcher, if the streaming giant had given its production over to people who actually knew what they were doing and had the same deep love for the source material as star Henry Cavill.

Cavill, who made his way to these stories first by way of the video games, then the books, like so many fans, is leaving the show after Season 3. And you can see why. Despite the promise of Season 1, which I really enjoyed despite its somewhat confusing format, the second two seasons have been a mess. Season 3 started off strong, but by the end I was annoyed and confused and more than a little perplexed.

Season 3 starts off with Geralt (Cavill), Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) and Ciri (Freya Allan) on the run, moving from house to house in hiding before being snuffed out by their various pursuers. Geralt and Yen are not on speaking terms still, the witcher having not yet forgiven her for her betrayal in Season 2. (Like us, who have not yet forgiven the writers for torpedoing Yen’s character last season).

The good news is that Yen is back to her old self, closer to the actual character she’s based on, and Cavill as Geralt is as terrific as ever. Allan’s Ciri is also enjoyable, but whoever did her makeup did . . . too much. She’s supposed to be nimble and quick, not weighted down by a pound of face paint.

In any case, let’s look at the good, the bad and the ugly of Season 3, Part 1. This encompasses the entire first five episodes of the season. Part 2 releases on July 27th and will have three episodes, which I will review separately.

The Good

Cavill and Chalotra were the highlights of the season for me, though I am sad that Season 2 so badly disrupted their arc. I like Joey Batey as Jaskier, and he and Ciri have a wonderful scene where they narrate what Geralt and Yen are saying to one another from afar. Truly, one of the most endearing scenes in the entire series.

There are some great fight scenes as well, with Geralt’s distinct sword-fighting style on full display. There’s one monster fight that feels more like Elden Ring than The Witcher, and it’s super creepy and weird.

I very much enjoyed the scheming of Dijkstra (Graham McTavish) and Philippa Eilhart (Cassie Clare) as well, though I have mixed feelings about the Redenian court in which they do most of it. I find that few of the kings in this show are presented quite how I would picture them, and that’s true of the hapless Vizimir (Ed Birch) as well.

There’s also often a sense of distance and travel, which I like, with them riding over long distances or taking a “chain ferry” and so forth. This is inconsistent, however. Other times vast distances are shaved to nothing. But when it’s there and people aren’t just fast-traveling, it’s great!

Overall, I’d say that there were many engaging moments throughout the season, and there are enough good actors and material to make something great out of it all. I was entertained much of the time. Alas . . .

The Bad

We’ll have to break this up into sub-sections, but I’ll start with the final episode of Part 1. Episode 5 is the worst episode of The Witcher ever, and it’s not even close. The episode is told in flashbacks that Yen and Geralt are having as they discuss the ball at Aretuza. These flashbacks drip-feed new revelations to viewers. We see certain things happen and then later learn, through new dialogue or scenes, why they happened. This lends an air of mystery to the events. There’s even a song being played by a group of very annoying musicians that repeats, over and over, that not everything is as it seems. Oh thank you, Netflix, for setting that right on our noses.

In any case, what goes very wrong here is that the flashbacks repeat a ton of footage and dialogue each time. Instead of just showing us one line to let us know that we’re back at that particular moment, they play out entire season over and over again. It’s jarring, baffling and at one point I quite literally wondered if the episode had just started over by mistake. The structure isn’t the problem here, it’s the execution and the truly awful editing. If I were Netflix I’d have them redo the episode with tighter editing even now, even after release.

This all means that the big revelations at the end—the twist we all saw coming quite literally since the end of Season 1—is rushed and too easy for our heroes. The misdirect employed is also wildly obvious. The whole thing is trying to be too clever and fails at every twist and turn. I am honestly a bit annoyed I stayed up late just to finish the whole thing yesterday.

What else? Let’s list off a few things:

• The elves. I just despise how they portray elves in this. They’re literally just humans with pointy ears. That’s it. Perhaps the most atrocious elves I’ve seen in any TV show or movie. Even The Rings Of Power at least tried to make elves at least a little different from humans, even if it failed miserably. This is yet another reason why animated fantasy will ultimately be better than anything we ever get live-action.
• Along the same lines: Why are so many sorceresses not stunning beauties now? It’s like the producers decided that they needed to show less traditional versions of beauty, a more diverse range of “beauty” but—and this is important—the sorceresses in this are supposed to be Anya Chalotra beautiful for a reason. They have the ability to look how they want and their beauty is a weapon used to beguile kings. They often start out ugly or deformed (Yen the hunchback, for instance) and use magic to become extremely gorgeous—though few of them maintain an inner beauty to match. This is part of the story! I’m not asking for this because I want to ogle them, I just want the story to be accurate, especially after making such a big deal out of it with Yennefer in Season 1!
• They’ve made Jaskier into Scanlan from Vox Machina. SPOILER: I don’t really care that he’s now suddenly bisexual, but it really has made him almost indistinguishable from the Vox Machina bard. And it feels like a weird turn to take the character who, up to this point, has been a womanizer. I kind of enjoyed the weird flirty stuff between him and Radovid, but I would have liked it more if they hadn’t gone such an obvious route.
• The writing. Way too many modern turns of phrase. I don’t mind some of this but it’s constant and gets worse. And then there are weird choices, like Geralt not killing one of the bad guys he’s been trying to kill for no reason whatsoever. He had a perfect opportunity to quickly lop off the bad guy’s head and he just runs off, like Obi-Wan and Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi. So dumb.
• The editing. Oh lord, perhaps the worst part of the entire season. It’s so confusing! One scene has Ciri riding with the Wild Hunt in pursuit and it really feels like a dream, especially when Geralt shows up out of the blue to save her. But it’s not! It’s just a scene, plopped in after some other scenes, with next to no explanation. This is a problem throughout the season, with jarring scene changes, no sense of time or where we are. Characters are just suddenly together in a busy city despite earlier being in a remote winter hideout. Then, I guess, they go back to the winter hideout in order to make a long journey? It’s bad. Or suddenly Ciri is in a bathhouse with a bunch of drunk sorceresses, and this one scene is just awful enough that she decides to run away (off-screen)? What the hell is going on?
• The fast-travel. Far too much of it. The Continent starts to feel like a very small place when everyone is just anywhere they want to be at any point in time (without portals, I mean. It’s fine when fast-travel is carried out through magical portals designed for that!)
• The story is also just badly rushed from start to finish. It doesn’t help that we aren’t given place names so we’re always a little unsure where we are, but we also just barely get to know many of these characters and their motivations and the plot jerks and lopes forward, covering too much ground without enough understanding of the whys and wherefores.
• Why is Ciri’s dad being played by a 34-year-old actor, only 13 years older than Freya Allan? I think Bart Edwards does a fine job as Emhyr, but I don’t think he’s right for the role simply because he’s too young. And I find his character mysterious in all the wrong ways. They’re dragging the Nilfgaard plot out when we need a bit more meat on the bone.
• Yes, Season 3 is closer to the source material, but it is not “lore accurate” and in any case, they screwed the pooch so badly in Season 2 that even if they wanted to, they couldn’t really recover now. I don’t even care about the source material that much—the games do a lot of great stuff that isn’t source material!—but I do care about staying true to it, and while they edge a bit closer this time around, it’s not enough. For instance, in a scene between Geralt and the mage Vilgefortz that’s taken from the books, they leave out the latter’s best line: “You mistake stars reflected in a pond for the night sky.” This may be because this line was taken from that character and given to another in Season 1. For reasons.
• Taking out all the nudity is silly and lame. How about—and I know this is crazy!—have some nudity but don’t flaunt it around in orgies and whatnot. Just make it natural. Is that so hard? Can we not have either extreme—soft-porn on one end and artificial non-nudity on the other—and just have some natural, human nakedness in this show for grownups?

The Ugly

Aesthetically, the show feels like it’s taken a step backwards. Costumes seem worse than even in Season 2, with many quite cheap-looking.

Season 2 also had great establishing shots—big overhead shots of lots of different cities and places. There’s a bit of that here, but not much. Aretuza gets a few, but it feels meager compared to what we’re used to in fantasy.

I assume we’ll get the big new Jaskier song in Part 2, but if not that’s awfully disappointing. Toss A Coin To Your Witcher was great, but Jaskier is a one-hit wonder in my book. The addition of new bards who play at least one song that feels like nothing you’d ever hear in a Medieval setting was more grating than anything, though I enjoyed a bit of petty artistic rivalry.

The strong start this season quickly tapered off into a series of confusing moments and strange choices and while I still enjoyed myself—the leads do a lot of heavy-lifting here—I can’t help but feel a heavy sense of disappointment. This story needed more time to unfurl and this show in general needs more quality control, from scripts to editing to CGI. It also needs a tighter focus on its main characters. I really wish we’d gotten a show that understood its own fan base and tried harder to create a fantasy world that felt more specific and less generic as well.

Cavill is great and will be missed. I would watch him as Geralt even if it was nothing more than a Monster Of The Week style show, with no over-arching plot whatsoever. Geralt, Yen, Ciri, Jaskier, Yarpen, Eskel, Vizimir, all the grand castles and fortresses, all the forests, fens and bogs of the Continent, all the griffons, harpies and kikimore. There is such a wealth of content to plumb, even if you never told a single story from the books, it’s remarkable that we’ve gotten such a scattered mess of overly-complicated court intrigue that’s transformed Ciri into little more than a MacGuffin and this world into little more than another modern generic fantasy with no sense of its own identity.

More thoughts to come.

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