The Witcher Season 1 is Intriguing Fantasy Marred by Cynicism and Confusing Storytelling

It seems clear that The Witcher is Netflix’s attempt at a Game of Thrones-style adult fantasy drama series. Based on a Polish series of books (written by Andrzej Sapkowski) and their popular video games adaptations, The Witcher is set in a vaguely medieval-European Continent of warring kingdoms, violent knights, powerful magicians, oppressed peasants, and Witchers, an order of mutant-warriors who hunt monsters for pay. While at times Season 1 is pleasurable as a mashup of fantasy conventions, and while it contains some decent characters, the show’s execution often impedes its storytelling, world-building, and generally high-quality production value.

Because it is essential to my assessment, I’ll describe the season’s narrative structure, while avoiding most of the specifics. The series contains eight episodes. After the first few episodes, it appeared that the series was going to be episodic, with the Witcher (Henry Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia) fighting a new monster each week. Episode 4, “Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials,” perhaps the best in the season, contains a big reveal and an important turning point. That episode also confirms something that I had been wondering about over the earlier episodes. The show’s narrative follows multiple timelines simultaneously, and they are intercut without indication that they are chronologically distinct. Thus, much of Season 1 of The Witcher resembles Westworld, in that the show avoids providing the usual markers and redundancies for total clarity indicating the different timelines. Is this storytelling so subtle as to be unnoticed, or just a confusing and messy narrative structure for the show?

Until Episode 4, we’ve been following three different characters. There is the titular antihero, Cavill’s Geralt, who is a spaghetti Western- or knight-errant-type drifter with a heart of gold. Cavill’s attempt at a Clint Eastwood-style low voice is initially off-putting and predictable, but it works well enough overall, and his physical presence in the samurai-inspired armour is impressive. He sells the look of a seemingly impossible-to-stop mutant monster-slayer.

Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra) is a physically disabled farm girl who is taken to a school for young mages. She chooses to use dark magic to make herself physically beautiful in her zealous quest for power at any cost. Yennefer is both intriguing and frustrating. Her ruthless pursuit of power is compelling to observe, but in the later episodes she begins to make those sort of bad and unreasonable choices too many TV show characters do, and I started to lose interest in her.

The third, and least interesting, principal character is the Princess Cirilla, or “Ciri,” of Cintra, played by Freya Allan. Her kingdom is attacked early on, and most of the season she is wandering the Continent in flight from her enemies. Ciri’s destiny is linked to Geralt’s in a way I won’t explain, but I will say that the “Law of Surprise” is one of the fascinating ideas the show contains that, all together, almost overcome the deficiencies.

Nevertheless, too much about The Witcher rubs me the wrong way. The series shares the Games of Thrones TV show’s deep cynicism, in which every knight is a bully and probably a rapist, every king is a tyrant or a sicko or both, and the religious are all zealots, which contributes to the general indictment of the Middle Ages in the modern popular consciousness. Throughout all eight episodes, The Witcher repeats its message that the real monsters are those who wield power wrongly, and that physical monsters are the product of evil actions perpetrated by the powerful. This sounds interesting. But underlying the show’s obsession with power dynamics is an essential nihilism, which perhaps leads to its bizarrely sympathetic portrayal in Episode 3, “Betrayer Moon,” of a king who is reported to terrorize his sister, the object of his incestuous love. Perhaps showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich desires to rival Game of Thrones’s famous brother and sister lovers. 

I suppose this is where the overt thematic rejection of Tolkienian good-vs-evil narrative conflict arrives at. What these revisionist fantasy approaches tend to overlook is that Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, is obsessed with the gradations of good and evil and how tough moral choices lead to unintended consequences. While there are clear forces of evil and good in Tolkien, morally navigating Middle Earth is perilous and difficult and none make only the right choices. In contrast, The Witcher’s moral scepticism and ostensible sophistication cloaks a simplified vision of an ugly, cruel world with only the vagaries of love-feelings as a compass. The show’s overreliance on graphic shock to frame its philosophical concerns confirms their simplicity.  

Other themes don’t come together. For example, the attempt, in The Witcher, to make parallels between the oppressed and nearly decimated elf population of the Continent and Indigenous concerns in the real world is conceptually intriguing and seems fruitful, but it’s not executed or developed in a way that really says anything significant. Perhaps later seasons will actually build on this.

All of the show’s ethical concerns are diminished by the issues I raised earlier: the show does not execute complex storytelling clearly. Episodes lack the usual signals to tell us when we are in different timelines (such as using obvious changes in hair or dress, playing with colour palettes, etc.). On the other hand, if keeping the multiple timelines concealed until Episode 4 was a central concern, more would be made of it later in the series. Instead, we have a half-baked, complicated narrative that achieves neither the satisfactions of episodic storytelling, the significance of a compelling story arc, or the clarity to offer compelling criticism of typical television narrative choices. 

All of this results in a mediocre fantasy world, with fascinating touches that could be brought to the centre to make the show better. The order of mages, for instance, which control Continental politics (akin to the Bene Gesserit in Dune) are fascinating. The show’s conception of magic, as the controlled ordering of chaotic power and potential, is superbly evocative and philosophically compelling. The holy war of Nilfguard is also suggestive, recalling both Dune’s Fremen jihad and darker interpretations of Daenarys’s mission in Game of Thrones, but the religion is too thinly represented to achieve much depth. 

What could The Witcher have been if these half-baked, fairly intriguing elements were gathered together under a careful ordering principle and narrative structure? Perhaps Season 2 works to correct this problem, and imposes some Witcher magic on this inchoate potential.

The Witcher, Season 1 (2019, Netflix)

Created by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich; starring Henry Cavill, Freya Allan, Eamon Farren, Anya Chalotra, Joey Batey, and MyAnna Buring.

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