Netflix has released the first part of season 3 of The Witcher, Henry Cavill’s last season as Geralt before the torch is thrown directly at Liam Hemsworth’s head.
I actually quite liked this season, as it featured a lot of all the core characters together for a change, Geralt, Yen, Ciri and Jaskier, and felt it was overall trending better than the somewhat lacking season 2. Until you get to episode 5, however.
I have to ask, what on earth were they thinking with this one?
Episode 5 has Yen and Geralt attending the Conclave Ball with all the mages, which they are planning to use to gather evidence that Stregobor was the evil mage pulling the strings behind a recent rash of disappearing girls and assassins and kidnappers coming after Ciri. Spoilers follow.
The result is an episode that thinks it’s wildly smarter than it is, attempting to play with timelines in a way that is just a complete and utter tangled mess. It starts with a runthrough of the ball, and various characters intersecting with Geralt and Yen. This is interspersed with a post-ball hookup session between Geralt and Yen as they discuss the events of the evening, everything seemingly having gone off without a hitch.
Then the show decides to run through the events two more times, as the bards belt out “ALL IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS,” taking a sledgehammer to any sort of subtlety of this entire sequence.
The repeated two viewings of the ball expand on conversations that Yen and Geralt had with others when previously the camera had panned away. Eventually, we see that after a staged fight between Geralt and Istredd, Yen does in fact gather the evidence they need against Stregobor, conveniently all located in one spot in his office.
But then the timelines end and we get the next morning after the Yen/Geralt bedroom scenes. When suddenly they realize, aha! Stregobor was not actually the villain, he was just racist, and it was Vilgefortz this entire time. They just…totally missed it for…reasons.
The reveal of Vilgefortz was painfully obvious from the moment he put what I will call a Chekov’s Bracelet on Tissaia’s wrist early on in the season, and Yen went out of her way to mention it again later. It was extremely obvious this was happening for a reason and Vilgefortz was up to something bad. Though it wasn’t to secretly curse her like I imagined, it may be to protect her, or at the very least, revealed a link between Vilgefortz and the mute mage who is also in love with him, and sending the fire guy after Ciri. The episode ends with an assault on the mages by Djikstra, Philippa and who knows who else. A cliffhanger, until the show returns a month from now.
All of this was just…so extremely bad, which was disappointing after four previously good episodes. They really thought they were being immensely clever with the ALL IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS repeated timelines mixed with the post-party flashforward. It was a disaster, and combined with a lackluster, stupidly obvious Vilgefortz turn, was a terrible way to end this first string of episodes, and now it’s even a worse decision for Netflix to be saving other three for later.
Update (7/4): I was a little curious how the overall feeling was about this episode, and I think the only way to actually quantify this was to head to IMDB where fans are able to rate individual episodes.
As expected, season 1 episodes are quite high. Every episode of that season except for one is rated above an 8.0, helping contribute to The Witcher’s overall score of an 8.1/10 on the site, which is quite good.
Season 2, you may not be surprised to learn, is where things start to drop. But still, it’s pretty good, as only three of eight episodes drop below an 8.0 this time.
Season 3…is going less well. While this may be some measure of “protest voting” with Henry Cavill leaving the show after this season, the scores are poor. The highest rated episode is the premiere with a 7.2. The others, 6.4, 6.0, 5.7, 6.2.
That means that season 3, episode 5, the episodes I’m talking about here is the second worst episode of the series, which seems quite bad for something meant to be a blockbuster midseason finale with a huge reveal at the end. I’m not quite sure as to why the preceding episode, The Invitation, is a 5.7, as I didn’t remember anything particularly horrible about it, but here we are.
One thing I’ve noticed about this entire season was something I also noticed about season 2. Online, almost no one is talking about it. This was not true about season 1 as it was heralded as a shockingly good adaptation when it easily could have gone wrong. It was doing huge numbers for Netflix and it seemed like maybe they finally had found something that could at least vaguely emulate the quality and popularity of Game of Thrones.
And then whoosh, it was gone. Even if the scores stay high season 2 came and went in a blink. And I don’t think Netflix’s dirty trick of splitting season 3 in half is going to help it stay in the conversation since part 1 isn’t being talked about in the first place, other than everyone saying how dumb it is that Henry Cavill is being replaced by Liam Hemsworth. Weird times for the show, that’s for sure.
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