SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains details and spoilers from Netflix's The Witcher Season 1.
I don't know why they did this, but The Witcher has a very bizarre timeline. It initially seems like the storylines between Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri are happening concurrently, but in some cases, these plots are actually taking place years, even decades apart. Yennefer's origin story actually happens thirty years before the attack at Cintra, and toni﷽ght we learn why Geralt a💫nd Ciri's destinies are connected, as Geralt was an uninvited guest at Ciri's parents' wedding.
Interrupting A Wedding Party? That's No Good
Jaskier is back, and he convinces Geralt to accompany him to a fancy banquet because he slept with several wives and is worried some lord may want to gut him. This also gives us൲ a Geralt bath scene, so the showrunners definitely know what fans want to see. This banquet turns out to be a wedding party for Princess Pavetta, thrown by her mother Queen Calanthe from the first episode, who sh🍃ould be very dead.
So this must happen in the past, yet the show does nothing to inform us of that. A simple "several years ago" flashing on the screen would have sufficed, but instead, The Witcher assumes we'll catch what they're doin💙g. It's not that complexও, but seeing previously dead characters like Calanthe, Eist, and Pavetta suddenly alive and well without any explanation of the time frame seems unnecessarily complicated.
As various nobles are standing up and explaining wh♋y they should marry Pavetta, a random knight barges in and declares his love for her. It was around this point that I started yelling "WHAT IS HAPPENING?!" at my TV as a series of non-sensical events transpired.
The knight is a lord named Duny, who's a hedgehog-man that looks like what would have happened if they tried to make a Sonic The Hedgehog movie in the 90s. He says he's invoking the Law Of Surprise without anyone explainiඣng what the hell that means. It turns out that Duny saved Calanthe's dead husband's life and is entitled to the Law Of Surprise, which in this case is Princess Pavetta's hand in marriage. Calanthe isn't down with having hedgehog grandchildren so she goes to stab him. That's when we find out that Ciri's powers are hereditary as P🃏avetta has a freakout that creates an indoor hurricane. After this display, Calanthe consents to both Duny and Pavetta's marriage which lift's Duny's curse, and all is right in the world.
For as much as this show loves its exposition, this felt like we skipped three whole episodes. Information was being screamed out in between swordfights and it felt like a full hour of story had to be condensed into Geralt's section. It also weirdly explains why Ciri needs to find Geralt, as Duny owes him a life-debt for helping him, so Geralt flippantly invokes the Law Of Surprise himself since he doesn't intend to cash in on it. But wouldn't you know it, Pavetta is pregnant, meaning Geralt's surprise is Ciri. I don't quite understand ﷺwhat that means though. Is Ciri now Geralt's property? Is he her new stepfather? I thought their connection would be more magical, but it's more like something out of a legal document.
This was a fun bunch of scenes - even in my confusion, seeingꦇ Geralt and a hedgehog-man in a giant sword battle is always going to be entertaining - but the lack of a cohesive explanation made everything seem chaotic. It's like the show just threw its hands up and cried "a bunch of s𓂃tuff is going to happen now! Enjoy!"
Hey Ciri, Can You Find Me A Better Storyline?
At the end of "Betrayer Moon", we saw Ciri walk into a forest after being put in a trance by strange voices. That leads her to a tribe of forest-folk called "dryads" who offer her and Dara - who gets an arrow yanked out of his shoulder - a chance to drink some magic water so they can forget their past. Dara seems to﷽tally cool with that, but Ciri is apprehensive due to her destiny, a word that once again pops up an awful lot in this episode.
They both drink the water, but it doesn't work on Ciri. So the leader of the dryads leads to her a magic tree so she can drink the magic water from the source. We end on yet another Ciri cliffhanger, as she passes out and wakes up in a dream world where a giant talking tree asks heꦗr who she is.
This Ciri storyline is progressing so slowly. Within four episodes we've learned so much about Geralt and how he operates, and we've seen Yennefer transform from a simple farm girl to a powerful sorcerer. Ciri, on the other hand, has walked through a forest for about a week and just drank some weird water. I'm simply not invested in her as a character, and The Witcher really needs to do something༒ with her be🐭cause during her scenes I just want to go back to the swordfight and magic portions of the show.
Life Sucks And Then You Die
Finally, there's Yennefer's storyline that lets us know that even though she got exactly what she wanted, she's still very unhaဣppy. She's escorting a Queen named Kalis and her newborn daughter back home. While recounting how crappy it's been being a royal sorcerer for thirty years, their guards are all brutally butchered by an assassin and his killer giant cockroach-thing (it probably has a fancier name). She continually opens up portals for herself and Kalis to jump through, but Kalis has her throat cut. Yen tries to save the daughter, but the assassin throws a dagger through her shoulder that unfortunately kills the baby.
This storyline serves two purposes: It shows off Yennefer's power and her disappointment with what should be her dream job. There's not ❀a lot of plot here, but it is a good sequence of special effects as the portals send them to a desert, a random town, a yellow forest, and finally a beach. It shows off an impressive variety of environments, but the point of it all is just so Yen can have a monologue with the dead baby about how it's lucky to have died since it won't have to grow up and deal with the misery of being a woman.
At Least We Finally Got Geralt In The Bathtub
We get a lot from both Geralt and Yennefer's storylines this week about how being a woman in The Witcher's world sucks. These episodes tend to revolve around a core theme, like humans being evil or everyone having to follow their destiny. This one is definitely about how even powerful women are forced to ♚kowtow to male tradition, and I'm hoping this inevitably leads to Ciri and Yen showing that you don't need to listen to men to thrive. Even Geralt isn't hip to the whole tradition or fealty thing, so maybe the overall message is going to end up being "society is t🌄rash, let's rebel", which is a vibe I can get down with.
"Of Bastards, Banquets And Burials" is mostly another learning episode where we get more exposition about the plot and characters, but at least now we know the deal with Geralt and Ciri. I suspect that during their first meeting Geralt will likely refuse to help her, she'll probably invoke her grandmother's name and cry, and by the end of the episode, we'll have another Lone Wolf & Cub-esque scenario to rival The Mandalorian.
As for Yennefer, we know she's dissatisfied witꦍh her career, so that opens up the door for her to leave Aedirn so she can help our light-haired duo. The only question is how she gets wrapped up in their mutual destiny. We'll see how that unfolds, but first, Ciri has a date with a talking tree.