The Witcher

It's a good thing I got most of the way through this before we started watching season 4 of The Expanse, which is likely to be my next post's subject.

My familiarity with The Witcher is primarily from playing the third game - about half of it (I really enjoyed the game but I got Bloodborne and that kind of took over my PS4 for a long time.)

Of course, while a casual observer might think Netflix poured a bunch of money into a video game adaptation, the new show is, in fact, the adaptation of the 1990s Polish fantasy novels upon which the games are based. It's not actually the first adaptation, as there were movies and I believe a TV show about 20 years ago in Poland.

But the games presumably gave the series enough name recognition for Netflix to make this show.

To cut to the chase:

I am enjoying the show quite a bit. I have only one episode left in its first season. Naturally, as a gritty, dark, and morally ambiguous fantasy show, The Witcher is going to draw comparisons to Game of Thrones, and I don't think that's even unfair. I'm sure that the success of GoT, not to mention its end leaving a big vacuum behind, were factors in the creation of this show.

But The Witcher is a different subgenre of fantasy - while GoT is Epic Fantasy, concerned with the broader politics and fate of kingdoms, that stuff mostly sits in the background for The Witcher, in which we follow the eponymous Geralt of Rivia, as well as the sorceress Yennefer of Vengeberg, through their personal journeys and trials. The show's third protagonist, Princess Cirilla, is the one whose story hints at a grander, epic narrative, but most of the season sees her simply fleeing after the horrific destruction of her home.

The plot is thus more capable of being episodic, even as the larger narrative develops over time. Geralt's story in particular is built to be episodic - based on short stories, but also built into his profession.

In this world, Witchers are monster-hunters. They travel from town to town and accept bounties to destroy otherworldly beasts. To do so, they've undergone mutations that have enhanced their strength and reflexes, as well as allowed them to drink performance-enhancing potions that would poison a normal person. On top of that, they have a bit of magic as well.

And that's one thing that's refreshing after eight seasons of Game of Thrones - this is a magic-saturated world. It's just as gritty and dark as Westeros (but minus any Stark-like family with a really strong moral code) but you do get to see sorcerers and monsters and such. I think the showrunners of GoT tried to dial down the magic of an already magic-sparse series, and it's nice to see a show that embraces the fact that, yes, this is undeniably fantasy.

Is it is clever as A Song of Ice and Fire?

That's, perhaps, a more difficult question to answer. I suspect no, but don't take that as a damning critique.

Another point of comparison: The Witcher revels in its license to show off nasty blood and gore as well as tons of naked ladies. GoT did this a ton, particularly in its early seasons, when it seemed that there was an anxiety that audiences might be bored by the fantasy exposition, and they distracted from this with tits. I don't know if a similar anxiety filled the producers of the Witcher, but to be fair, both series' gritty setting also strike back against, for example, the chaste sexlessness of Lord of the Rings.

There's a deep cynicism toward institutions throughout the show. Geralt was put through a torturous upbringing to turn him into a cold killing machine, Yennefer saw her friends sacrificed to empower the magic school that then wound up essentially pimping her out to various kings, and Ciri, who seems to have grown up thinking of her grandmother's kingdom as your classical "good fairytale kingdom," is forced to confront a far darker world that was, in part, made dark by her own beloved grandmother.

At the same time, the gifts that make Geralt and Yennefer such powerful players in this world, despite their fierce desire for independence, also leave them cold and lonely. This is a show about people who need to make a family for themselves, but the classical institutions that ought to provide that are failing utterly.

More obscure is the grander, supernatural plot at foot. We know that Ciri is more important than just being the only surviving heir to the throne of Cintra - the show portrays Cintra as pretty much no more important than any of the other northern kingdoms. But Ciri has some deep and mysterious magical power in her, suggesting the world's fate is at stake depending on what happens to her.

One thing that a viewer might not get at first is that the show is most definitely not in linear order. Geralt and Yennefer's stories may or may not be happening at the same time (I suspect Yennefer's starts at the earliest, though Geralt's well past his origins story when we first meet him) but it's only in the penultimate episode that we see Geralt's story catch up with the beginning of Ciri's - the fact that Geralt is actually there for what happens in the first episode colors those events in a rather exciting way, though given that Ciri has spent a season of the show on the run, things are unlikely to truly sync up until maybe even the end of the finale - which might be a little later than I'd have chosen to delay things. Given how important Geralt and Ciri's surrogate father-daughter bond is to the story, I wonder if maybe this could have happened earlier (though a second season makes me feel less worried about this.)

As a fix for gritty, dark fantasy, this is a really great thing to get into. The monsters are mostly pretty cool-looking (though one cursed knight with a hedgehog-like appearance feels a bit like a low-tier Buffy monster, which is unfortunate given the important part he plays in the narrative) and the characters are complex and interesting.

But fair warning: the song Geralt's bard friend Jaskier writes for him in an early episode is kind of dumb but will definitely get stuck in your head, which, to be fair, is rather appropriate for something written by Jaskier.