Netflix has made only the first six episodes of The Witcher Season 2 available prior to its Dec. 17 launch; below is a spoiler-free review. For episodic reviews and thoughts on the last two episodes, check back in with IGN on Dec. 17.
If any one scene defines the emotional core of The Witcher Season 2, it’s in the fifth episode, when Geralt gently tells Ciri, “You are already enough, Cirilla. You are extraordinary.”
The notion that The Witcher is about “found family” — the idea that the family you choose matters more than the family you’re born into — is a favorite talking point for The Witcher’s showrunners, but most of the show to this point has been about laying the groundwork for future relationships. For me, at least, it was this small exchange where it all began to come into focus.
Geralt and Ciri’s budding father-daughter relationship forms the emotional core of The Witcher’s second season, which is broadly a step forward for the series despite lingering issues with pacing and characterization. Ciri in particular is the star of this season, making her by far the most improved character from the first season. Actress Freya Allen’s portrayal of the Child Surprise is alternately fierce and vulnerable, buoyed by Henry Cavill’s characteristically excellent work as Geralt. She drives almost all of this season’s most interesting developments even as the story steadily expands its scope.
Geralt and Ciri’s relationship is the most prominent of the threads that continue from the first season. Elsewhere, The Witcher Season 2 examines the consequences of the massive battle at Sodden Hill that concluded the first season, builds further on the politics of Nilfgaard, Redania, and the elves, and introduces a multitude of new players. This season also dispenses with the often confusing timeline hopping that characterized The Witcher’s first season, making it both more straightforward and more conventional.
With the world and characters now firmly established, The Witcher is starting to dig into its premise in some compelling ways. It takes a lot of confusing info and mostly does an effective job of boiling it down into something digestible, particularly Ciri’s backstory. It continues to be light and exceedingly watchable, which probably goes a long way toward explaining its popularity.
For background, I generally enjoyed The Witcher’s first season. Inconsistent as it could be at points, I thought it showed a lot of promise, particularly in the episodes that centered on Geralt. It was enough to get me to expand my focus away from CD Projekt Red’s games and get invested in the broader world, even while recognizing some of its flaws (I’ll admit, I wasn’t a big fan of Yennefer’s season-long quest to be a mom). Beneath the sometimes ramshackle worldbuilding and strange pacing, I could see a setting worth investing in.
I feel about the same way about the second season. While it lacks the truly memorable musical numbers and action setpieces that defined Year 1 – if “Toss a Coin To Your Witcher” was the show’s “Still Alive,” then this year’s song is the equivalent of the much less memorable “Want You Gone” – it does feel more confident now. Dispensing with the anthology structure gives it a stronger sense of forward momentum, pushing the season-long arc forward even when less is happening than you actually realize.
Tellingly, the first episode, which happens to be its most self-contained, is also probably its strongest. “A Grain of Truth” encapsulates most of what made The Witcher work in its first season, providing a dark adaptation of a classic fairytale while weaving its world-building elements in the background. The Witcher tends to be at its best when it lets Geralt get to Witchering, and that’s much in evidence in this episode. It feels like a direct response to the feedback from the previous season; an opportunity for the showrunners to say, “See? We know what’s working.”
Equally telling is that it begins to wobble a bit once it shifts its focus to Yennefer, who appropriately is the show’s most unstable element. For better or worse, Yennefer’s story dominated The Witcher’s first season, and while Anya Chalotra’s portrayal made her compelling, her characterization tended to vary wildly depending on who was writing the script that day. Some of that was a function of the timeline literally jumping ahead decades at a time, some of that was due to the writing. Either way, I never knew where Yennefer of Vengerberg was going to leap next, which I guess is fitting for a character who is meant to embody chaos.
This season, Yennefer is mostly dealing with the fallout of Sodden – an attempt to explore the other side of the devil’s bargain she made to become a mage. It sounds like a neat idea on the face of it, but if The Witcher were an anime, then this would be a filler arc. It effectively erases much of the progress that Yennefer made in the show’s first season, retreading old ground in a manner that it tries to pass off as character development. This being almost wholly original material, it feels like a way for the writers to artificially inject some gravitas as the story shuffles her toward her inevitable meeting with Ciri and Geralt.
On that note, while The Witcher is generally entertaining on an episode-to-episode basis, its season-long pacing is all over the place. It’s a show that will try to pack a lot of extraneous story beats into one episode while pausing other plotlines for half a season. A key villain doesn’t even get introduced until the fifth episode, at which point it feels like the series is scrambling to make up for lost time.
Ultimately, Geralt and Ciri are this season’s center of gravity, their scenic training sessions mixed with the central mystery of Ciri’s powers. Kaer Morhen – a beautiful, wintry keep that serves as Witcher HQ – serves as the backdrop for their story through the majority of the season, populated by series newcomers Lambert (Paul Bullion), Coen (Yasen Atour), and Vesemir (a gruff but fatherly Kim Bodnia). Aside from building up Ciri’s relationship to Geralt, the story effectively delves further into some of the mysteries established in Season 1 as the Witchers investigate a mysterious monster outbreak.
The Witcher packs a lot of development for Ciri into its second season as she grows up before our eyes. By the end of the season she’s a tough and even ferocious young woman – a far cry from the somewhat timid figure she cut in the show’s first season. A lot of that is thanks to Allan’s performance, which goes a long way toward selling her steady growth under Geralt’s tutelage. Season 2 sees her become an increasingly central figure, her backstory woven directly into the fabric of the show’s lore.
The rest of the season is a mixed attempt to lay the groundwork for future installments. The persecution of the elves is a more prominent element in this batch of episodes, as is Redania, a rival of Nilfgaard. It’s a compelling world, but that has more to do with the source material than the actual writing in the show, which still relies too much on exposition for its worldbuilding. Its major players scheme in faraway councils, but they rarely have much bearing on the story as a whole, at least this season. If Yennefer, Ciri, and Geralt are the main protagonists, then everything else is background noise.
Nilfgaard in particular remains a sticking point for the series. Its chief representatives, Cahir and Fringilla, continue to be poorly defined antagonists. Who are these people outside of fanatical servants of the White Flame? Season 2’s first six episodes fill in Fringilla ever so slightly, but Cahir continues to be all over the place, his main defining trait being that he’s… well… an antagonist. They tie in heavily with the story of Francesca, an elven sorceress, but it takes quite a while for their plotlines to go anywhere remotely interesting.
As with Yennefer and Ciri, The Witcher’s full potential remains mostly unrealized, observable in brief bursts of excellence. It continues to be at its best as a comic action show, with Geralt leading the way. A friend of mine occasionally refers to Geralt as “Medieval Batman,” and it occurs to me that The Witcher may have actually found its niche as more of a fantasy comic book movie than a Game Of Thrones successor.
But the best comic book movies are actually quite adept at characterization and worldbuilding, and The Witcher is still trying to nail down those first two elements. There are certainly signs of growth, and I’m an especially big fan of Ciri this season, but it seems like this season is still laying the groundwork for a payoff somewhere down the line. For now, only time will tell whether The Witcher can eventually be, as Geralt puts it, something more.
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