Review's Resort: Talkie Tuesday: The Witcher

"Changing destiny is a weighty business."

Hello everyone!

You knew this was coming.

If you've been paying attention to my blog, you'll know that, apart from the books - and I swear, at some point I'll either continue and/or finish the series or give up on it completely so it isn't in limbo anymore - I've reviewed everything that Netflix has thrown at us so far.

Which of course meant that the third season would ALSO be making its way on here.

And as I have no particular desire nor plan to watch from the ending of that onward (despite the fact the political stuff is turning fascinating enough), I suppose we're nearing the beginning of the end with this swan song.

So let's buckle up then.

The first volume dropped last week, and we have a month before we see the aftermath of all the scheming and manipulations.

The Witcher is back in business, baby.

Links to previous related posts can be found at the bottom of the page, as per usual.

And again, if you've been paying attention, you'll know that Geralt (Henry Cavill) has gone from reluctant to accepting his child surprise to fiercely protective paternal figure over the course of the previous seasons. Ciri (Freya Allan) has a comfortable rapport with him that doesn't exist with anyone else.

Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), on the other hand, has some grovelling to do, which is what we witness in the first half of the premiere, as our little pseudo-family keeps moving places to continue Ciri's magical training yet remain just out of reach of everyone and their mother that's hunting the girl for the bounty on her head (placed there by Tissaia) or for what she can do for them.

I mean, if you're the White Flame, you're hugging a portrait of her and moonwalking around being weird about swords, but that's honestly a complete exception to the rules.

Eventually, Geralt and the girls settle literally so far off the map it's like they've never existed, and things WOULD have been perfectly fine if they didn't attend a Belletyne celebration looking like themselves - and not masking up.

Then again, given that a magical sniffer hound monster was offered some of Ciri's blood to track her down, I suppose they would have been found sooner or later.

After defeating the monster, they realize they need to stop running and draw Rience (the fire magic dude who Yennefer burned half a face off of last season) into the open, so they call upon the help of Jaskier (Joey Batey) so he can be bait with Ciri while mom and dad wait things out.

The trap works, is sprung, and then Elves pop up to take Ciri, because naturally Geralt can't have peace whatsoever while the girl's alive, though having followed Rience through a portal (which Yennefer later mentions was corrupted by dark magic) he now has an inkling as to where to go at least. So that's good, because the Elves REALLY want Ciri and aren't afraid to die for that.

Until, that is, Gallatin (Robbie Amell) has enough and pulls them back.

See he's had issues with Francesca for a while now. Remember Francesca? She's the one who initially worked with Nilfgaard, then her baby died, and now she's back scavenging and foraging and starving while looking for Ciri. But she doesn't actually tell her best fighters what they're doing, until she sends their joint forces after our trio STILL not giving all the details, which is how Gallatin ends up at the Nilfgaardian palace telling Emhyr all about what's happening.

So Emhyr has Cahir prove his loyalty by killing Gallatin, because a, he can't have a mutiny among the Elves, and b, Francesca's goal aligns with his, which means Gallatin is useless. He sends Cahir to negotiate with Francesca and bring her back into the fold, which is funny, as little does Francesca know just WHO had her baby killed (spoiler alert: his name has a lot to do with the colour white and fire).

Anyway, back to our group, which splits up so that Geralt can go track Rience down, while Yennefer and Ciri make for the only safe haven Yen can think of: Aretuza, the school for mages (or at least, the female part of them), which I will admit, I'm not a fan of.

Neither is Ciri, not even after Yen shows her the past she went through before becoming a powerful mage, but she goes along with it and gets into trouble more often than not when her visions start becoming more frequent and erratic, portending doom to come. Yennefer knows that her magic seems to have been drawn out further and is now basically out of control, so they HAVE to reach Aretuza, but well, things are tense.

They're tenser still after Ciri loses all their money to a pickpocket and fights a wyvern because she can't keep her mouth shut, though that's nothing compared to being slapped and treated like dirt by the adult sorceresses that join them, Tissaia included.

Interestingly, however, while in the meeting between Tissaia and Yennefer, Yen was the one who cried blood afterwards, this time, with Ciri and Tissaia, it's Tissaia who does so. My guess is the weaker one, magic-wise, is the one who cries.

Anyway, Ciri argues with Yennefer that nothing, not even her magic or supposed safety, is worth seeing the debauched and aloof version her mother figure becomes around these people, who don't treat their novices like humans but like objects at the best of times, a stark contrast to both her royal status as well as how the witchers treated her at Kaer Morhen.

The witchers might have trained her and given her grief, yes; but there, it was very clear she belonged to Geralt, and as such, anyone who harmed a hair on her head was going to lose whatever they used to harm her with. Here, with the mages, there's no such cushion to soften the blows coming, because Yennefer, instead of protecting Ciri, throws her to the wolves in a misguided belief that she owes Tissaia everything.

So Ciri runs off, gets followed by the Wild Hunt, and is reunited with Geralt who comes riding in to save her after his disaster of a mission hunting Rience.

What happened?

He found a gruesome experiment, is what happened, wherein girls who had been taken against their will were literally mashed together into a mass of bodies, their heads stuck to the wall, and after rescuing one of them and taking her to his aunt (or, well, friend of his mother - by the way, his mom is unfortunately gone, too), they realize someone's trying to make these girls believe they're Ciri. They're using some elaborate spellwork, Elven work and druid casting for this to make sense, and it turns out that, since the girls have all been taken from Aretuza, the place isn't as safe as everyone thinks.

Nevertheless, that's where Geralt goes to meet Yennefer, though they at least leave Ciri on the outskirts, heavily warded, and with Jaskier for company while they try and figure out what's what.

Because everyone who's anyone has been invited to the mages' conclave now, initiated by Yennefer who, while grovelling, has tried to drive in the point that for the Northern kingdoms to stand united against Nilfgaard, the mages need to first be united, too. So their best answer - they'll throw a party!

Listen, it might have even worked lol, everybody loves a good party. But given the fact that the two best information providers Geralt always uses have been burned to a crisp by Rience (their cat, at least, survived, so the man has SOME morals), that Redania has been struggling to keep a grip on the king and Dijkstra doesn't believe the king's brother Radomir is of any use (which I think is a mistake) and had the queen killed so that he could sway favour back to himself ... well, things are going to shit, slowly but surely.

And as the aphrodisiac-imbued wine flows, Geralt and Yennefer make their rounds, with the help of Triss and Istredd, who've teamed up over the issue of the missing girls (all with Elven blood) AND a missing book on monoliths which could allow a person to travel time and space.

Given what we know about what's happening to the girls, it's safe to say that someone wants Ciri for her powers over said monoliths, which would be a disaster of epic proportions, so as it's deduced Stregobor is the one behind it all, the group confronts him and has him arrested - although he's as surprised as anyone else about the experiment, Ciri and the book.

See, he's only a racist who wants to rid the school of Elven mutants, as he calls them, because they're a diseases plaguing the Continent, and doesn't care about Ciri.

When (after a night spent going at it like rabbits, as you do) Geralt and Yennefer finally have clear heads to think with, they realize the bracelet Tissaia received from Vilgeforz (Mahesh Jadu) is the same as a pair of earrings on a witch who can only speak through telepathy (with a 'funny voice', like the fake Ciri said, and we coincidentally know she's in league with Rience), and that another sorceress has warned that the witch would do anything for her lover ... well.

You can probably see how royally they botched up.

Now whether it was the spiked wine or just them being too hyper focused on Stregobor, no one can really say, but even as Yennefer tries to magically track Tissaia, Geralt hears sounds of fighting beginning in the tower, and finds himself held at sword-point by none other than Graham McTavish, I mean Dougal MacKenzie, ahem, I mean Dijkstra.

And with Radomir seducing Jaskier, it's safe to say things are about to hit the fan in a VERY bad way.

In fact, book readers have warned show watchers that this is our group's Empire Strikes Back moment, when they don't exactly win but get scattered to the winds, in an event called the Thanedd Coup, when tensions between Nilfgaard and the North finally explode in full and even the mages choose sides.

But we have to wait until the end of July to witness how this plays out in the final three episodes of the season, unfortunately.

Until then, allow me to say that the politics have at last picked up, but the writing is occasionally wobbling on weak legs, particularly as there's a need now to establish Yennefer and Ciri's loving relationship which was royally botched in season two when Yen wanted to sacrifice the girl to get her magic back.

Unlike with Geralt, where we had time to watch the bond form, this one feels hasty and incomplete, but honestly, the main detractor for me this season is the CGI and bad wigs.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, because none of this was present to this extent in the previous seasons, but the CGI backgrounds are ... oh man. It's painful to watch, really.

At least the contacts are better, allowing for actual expressions to filter through, unlike in season two if I remember right. But as much as the main vein of the show seems to be plodding onwards and clinging to the string which will drag it out of the convoluted labyrinth which the showrunners have created out of the already-boggled up writing by Andrzej Sapkowski, there's really too many weakness starting to show.

I wonder if this is deliberate in any way, shape or form. Most will stick this season out because it's Henry's last as Geralt - but if Netflix is deliberately sabotaging this and believes that's fine, everyone WILL be back for Liam Hemsworth ... I don't know what kind of Kool-Aid they're drinking.

No offense to Liam, but he's not nearly the calibre to draw the masses, which is what Henry's presence did for this show to begin with, and trying to apparently sabotage it as much now only to have money to spend on season four (if that's the case) is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

People are already jumping ship after season three. You're not going to keep them around by making it bad - and from what I can tell, except for the Tudum event, Henry hasn't been involved in the promotionals for the season, either.

Really, the back side of this is a gigantic mess, and it shows in the quality of what's been delivered.