These are troubled times for The Witcher. After a wildly overperforming first season anchored by star Henry Cavill, Netflix decided to double down, building out the Witcher universe with a (pretty good!) animated prequel movie and ordering a live-action miniseries set more than a millennium before Geralt of Rivia picked up his swords.
That miniseries is now here. But in the lag time between the announcement of The Witcher: Blood Origin and the show’s premiere this week, very little in Netflix’s nascent Witcher-verse has gone according to plan. The second season of The Witcher divided fans by diverging from Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels. Blood Origin went through its own extremely troubled-sounding development process, losing original star Jodie Turner-Smith and having six episodes slashed down to four. And then there’s the recent news that Henry Cavill, star of the flagship The Witcher, is departing the series after its upcoming third season — under potentially troubling circumstances — to be replaced by Liam Hemsworth for season four.
As a result, Blood Origin arrives at a particularly pivotal time. If this spinoff works, it’s proof that the Witcher-verse can sustain any number of stories, cementing itself as Netflix’s answer to Game of Thrones and its progeny. If it fails, it’s exactly what Netflix doesn’t need right now, burning off more goodwill for The Witcher just when it’s needed most.
So as someone who hopes to spend a lot more time on the Continent in the coming years, I am sorry to report that the premiere episode of Blood Origin does, in fact, feel like exactly what The Witcher doesn’t need right now.
The whiff of desperation is there from the very beginning, as Jaskier emerges in the middle of a confusing, fiery massacre. (“Jaskier!!! You love him, right?!†the series seems to plead.) But just when a soldier is about to cleave his head straight down the middle, time freezes. Jaskier, alone in being unfrozen, has been chosen by a mysterious spell-caster who looks exactly like him. (Jaskier!!! Two of him is even better, right?!†the series seems to plead.)
Before long, this mysterious figure unveils itself as a time-and-worlds-traveling storyteller called Seanchaà and transforms itself into an elf Minnie Driver. She has a story to tell — a story set some 1,200 years earlier, in the golden age of the elves, when seven warriors rise up to fight an empire, bring humans and monsters into the world, and create the prototype for the first witcher.
Jaskier, who previously wisecracked about this story seeming clichéd, is somehow impressed by this summary of the story we’re about to see. But honestly, it still sounds pretty clichéd. And it doesn’t help when Seanchaà turns out to be the kind of storyteller who specializes in info dumps, dropping the names of all seven warriors without explaining who they are or why we should find their names or clans interesting.
After this needlessly convoluted framing device, we’re into the story proper, which has the benefit of being straightforward. Our hero is Éile, though she calls herself the Lark — a former warrior for the Raven Clan and now a traveling bard who’s still pretty good at throwing knives at people.
We’ve barely met Éile before we rush off to Xin’trea to meet Fjall of the Dog Clan, who ends up in the doghouse for having sex with Merwyn, the princess he’s supposed to be protecting. Banished by his own father, Fjall ends up as a mercenary with a penchant for mumbly quips and brothels, because, come on, you’re going to need somebody vaguely Geralt-like in a Witcher story.
Both Éile and Fjall were prominently introduced in Minnie Driver’s appendix-like list of names at the top of the episode, so it’s safe to assume they’ll be the important ones by the time we’ve reached the finale. But almost everything interesting in Blood Origin’s premiere happens after Fjall is banished, when Merwyn moves to the center of the narrative.
With her lover out of the kingdom, Merwyn’s brother, the young King Alvidir, sees an opportunity to marry her off to the ruler of a rival kingdom and stop a war. This sounds gross, but Alvidir’s goal is basically noble: making any pact or concession he can to end centuries of war between elves and unite the realm under a single, bloodless empire. It might even have worked if not for the scheming of Balor, his Chief Sage, who uses the peace meeting between Alvidir and the other rulers to summon a monster and kill all the heads of state in one shot. (Haven’t these guys ever heard of a designated survivor?)
When the dust settles, the ruler of the newly united realm is none other than Empress Merwyn, who has been set up as a puppet by Balor to keep the people complacent while he does whatever he wants behind the scenes. But now that she has the power, Merwyn has no intentions of being a mere figurehead, and it’s clear she has her own scheme. Given how things are going for the elves in The Witcher, it’s safe to guess that this new front in the elven civil war doesn’t turn out too well for anybody.
But for now, it’s back to Éile and Fjall, whose clans make them natural enemies until they learn the political framework that spawned those clans doesn’t even exist anymore. Their dynamic is bog-standard enemies-to-allies stuff, full of little tiffs both physical and verbal, but by the end of the episode, they’ve already developed a begrudging respect. To avenge their own loved ones and make their way in this new world, they’ve realized they’ll need to work together and draw others to their cause.
And at least the episode ends promisingly because their first recruit is Scian, played by none other than Michelle Yeoh, who is having one hell of a year. Like much of Blood Origin so far, this meeting is somehow both convoluted and undercooked — there’s a lot of talk about a poisoned king and a sacred sword born out of black sands — but it does promise more Michelle Yeoh, so who could argue? As the episode ends, these three are “the first drops in a torrent that would change the world forever,†Minnie Driver says. For Blood Origin’s sake, I hope she’s right about this trio changing everything, and soon.
Stray Arrows
• If you want the full behind-the-scenes story on Blood Origin, check out Redanian Intelligence, a well-sourced Witcher fan site with some intriguing info on the extent of the show’s reshoots.
• Blood Origin includes a few marginal characters that might be familiar to fans of the franchises. Ithlinne, the young girl prone to seizure-like fits, is still remembered 1,200 years later for her eponymous prophecy, which heralds the end of the world (and which you might have heard Ciri recite on the main series: “The era of the sword and the axe is nigh,†etc., etc.). And anyone who played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt should at least recall the name of Eredin, the elf in Merwyn’s royal guard (more info here if you’re interested, but be warned — future spoilers).
• For the record: Xin’trea will eventually become Cintra, the kingdom Ciri hails from in The Witcher.
• Intentionally or not, Jaskier’s series-opening quote — “fucking fucking fuckety fuckety fuck†— is a close cousin of Hugh Grant’s opening tirade from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
• If nothing else, Jaskier’s goofy hat should please fans who prefer Dandelion, the version of the character who shows up in the Witcher video games.
• I’m not sure what the budget differential is between The Witcher and Blood Origin, but the CGI monster summoned by Balor looked way schlockier than any of the monsters in the original series.
• Balor is at least wise enough to know the danger of a good story: “That’s a heroic folktale waiting to happen,†he muses when he learns a warrior from the Raven Clan and a warrior from the Dog Clan have been traveling together.