But she still agreed to give a child to the fucking Baba Yaga, and still very nearly handed Ciri over! This is a very big hurdle for the characters to get over, and it’s narratively delicious that season 3 starts with Geralt, Ciri, and Yen on the run, forced to hide together, the family they didn’t know they wanted turned bitter the moment they realized they wanted it. Granted, Yen was being played - she did not know that it was Ciri that she would be sacrificing to Voleth Meir. This is immediately apparent in The Witcher’s season 3 premiere, which is almost entirely devoted to smoothing over one of the more devastating moments of season 2: Yennefer’s (Anya Chalotra) betrayal of Ciri (Freya Allan) and Geralt, in which she nearly gave Ciri away to Voleth Meir (Ania Marson), the Baba Yaga, in exchange for getting her lost magic back. The Witcher has become a show that demands close reading, but threatens to insult the intelligence of anyone patient enough to do so. These warring impulses are now, in the third season, painfully obvious on screen, as big character beats are quickly ironed over in favor of moving the plot along. This has resulted in prior seasons having convoluted plots, as the show juggled timelines, nations, and prophecies in an effort to do justice to both a fantasy epic and a renowned collection of short stories in one TV series. Yet The Witcher has always felt like its writers have never had enough episodes to tell these stories.

The results have always been messy, but also compelling, as the heart of Witcher stories has always been outcasts finding one another and forming a reluctant family. In these polarized and divisive times, fans of the Witcher books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski generally agree on one thing: Sapkowski’s tales of Geralt of Rivia, legendary monster slayer, are almost always better in his short stories rather than his novels.įrom its very first episode, The Witcher, Netflix’s adaptation of Sapkowski’s books, has tried to do justice by both, interweaving short stories about Geralt (Henry Cavill) fighting monsters with an ongoing plot involving fantasy nations on the brink of war.

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