I Love The Witcher. I Hate The Witcher. Episode 1

The One Where They Got *So Close*

I Love The Witcher. I Hate The Witcher is

A review of the Netflix series

A reflection on the novels

An attempt at balanced media criticism

This show could be so good.

That’s what I thought the first time I watched this episode, and it’s what I think now, almost five years later. There are some positive signs and some worrying signs, but overall, it’s pretty good. Except that this time I knew what to look for, and the threads of incompetence were interwoven from the beginning.

Our story opens

when a quiet morning in the bog is shattered by a fight between our titular witcher and a ten-foot spider with a giant baby head.

The monster submerges and disarms our hero, but after a few moments of breathless struggle, the witcher emerges victorious. His eyes are black from imbibing potions, and he drips with blood and bog water.

A fawn, seen before the fight, was injured off-camera, and the witcher quips that it’s not the fawn’s lucky day. The audience learns that our hero has a dark sense of humor and is unphased by killing monsters for money or innocents for mercy.

The witcher arrives in Blaviken, a nearby town, where he is greeted at the local inn with quiet unease. When he asks for directions to the alderman, who may pay for the monster he killed, the innkeeper dismisses him and threatens to throw him out.

Some thugs rise for a chance to fight, but a petite woman, Renfri, quells them with a reprimand. She invites the witcher to join her for breakfast. He makes a comment about being full, “venison.” A joke for the audience that would mean nothing to this stranger.

The two chat amid dirty looks from the innkeeper, until they are disrupted by a young girl asking about the price for the witcher’s monster, a kikimora. Once outside, the girl announces the alderman, her father, would have no use for the carcass. Kikimoras apparently serve a valuable ecological function in the area. She offers to lead the witcher to their local sorcerer instead.

Along the way, we learn the girl is Marilka, and our hero is Geralt of Rivia. Marilka unsubtly hints that she would like to join Geralt as a witcher, then complains about their old-fashioned boys-only rule when he declines. She also brags of her adventures killing rats and dogs.

In the sorcerer’s tower, Geralt learns the magician lives in hiding from a princess he once sought to kill. She was born during a complete solar eclipse, marking her as one of sixty women sent by the demon Lilit to destroy the global order. She alone escaped and has chased the sorcerer, Stregobor, to Blaviken.

Stregobor entices Geralt to kill the girl, revealing her to be Renfri from the inn, saying that her death would be the lesser evil. She has killed many times and could bring chaos to the world. Geralt refuses, saying that between greater and lesser evil, he chooses neither. He chooses to do nothing. His words are sharp and forceful, which is how you know they were quoted from the book.

Later Renfri appears at Geralt’s camp in the nearby forest. She mocks him for speaking to his horse, then pitches why he should kill Stregobor in her stead. Renfri tells a tale of rape and betrayal, leading to her current life as a bandit and avenger. Geralt again refuses to participate, and Renfri swears to kill anyone who gets in the way of her revenge.

Renfri spends the night in the witchers camp, and he dreams of her, prophesizing her death. The next morning, the witcher awakes to realize Renfri has left his bed to meet her thugs in the market. A market everyone in town has mentioned, so we know many civilians will be there.

When Geralt arrives, Renfri is already at the tower, and her gang block his path. She has gone to the sorcerer’s tower to kill him. As Geralt steps forward, the thugs attack. Seven nasty deaths later, Renfri arrives, holding Marilka hostage. She accuses the witcher of making a choice after all.

Renfri tosses Marilka aside, saying she will kill every villager unless Stregobor descends. She attacks Geralt, both knowing that their fight will be to the death. Geralt defeats her, and as she dies, Renfri tells him that the girl in the wood is his destiny.

Stregobor arrives and tries to take Renfri’s body to his tower for autopsy. Geralt threatens him, and Stregobor turns the crowd against him, calling him a monster and a butcher. Marilka, unmoved by Geralt saving her life, tells him to leave Blaviken and never return. He stoops to collect Renfri’s distinctive brooch and walks away from the crowd.

That’s the story of…oh, wait. Did you notice I left out half of the episode?

Let’s talk about it

This episode is mostly based on the short story The Lesser Evil, from the first book of witcher tales, The Last Wish. The story is fairly faithfully retold, although I found the reading experience more engrossing, though this is my second or third reread.

The part of the episode I left out of my recap is the introduction to Princess Cirilla, her grandmother Calanthe, the kingdom of Cintra, and the invasion by Nilfgaard. In the episode, the story jumps forward and back across 30 or 40 years, but you’d only know that if you recognized the name Calanthe in one line of dialogue.

The real trouble is that these stories—Geralt meeting Renfri and the Battle of Cintra—have nothing to do with each other. The writers had to shoehorn in connections that felt completely out of place, if you caught them, and were totally useless if you didn’t.

A problem for adapters is that the main protagonist of The Witcher saga isn’t Geralt, it’s Ciri. So, you have to include her early in the series, if you want to focus on the main story, but you can’t focus too much on her because the cool fighting and magic stuff mostly rides with Geralt. And the short stories feature some of the most iconic scenes and vital character introductions, so you can’t just cut them out, either.

And that will likely be my main critique of the entire series: instead of finding creative ways to blend these tales together, the writers brought out their plot duct-tape, bound up unrelated stories, and called it a day.

Some critiques of episode one in particular

What I love about The Last Wish is that most of the witcher’s stories are versions of famous fairytales. You have princesses locked in towers, princes cursed to live as beasts, and true love’s kiss, to name just a few. By going through these tales, the audience grows to understand the witcher’s world through a familiar lens.

Renfri’s story is a tragic version of Snow White. Her stepmother took advantage of a mad wizard’s prophecy to remove Renfri from the line of succession. But instead of being spared by a kind hunter for her beauty, she was raped, robbed, and left to die. But Renfri didn’t die. She became Shrike, a gang leader known for brutality and cunning—which you wouldn’t know from watching the episode because they leave out her murderous moniker entirely.

The show doesn’t give us any of that fairytale flavor. They just tell the story straight, without mentioning magic mirror, the hunter, the seven gnomes, the crystal curse, or the poisoned apple. (All of which, yes, are described in the book.) The story is only about 40 pages long; I believe the writers could have done more.

To my mind, The Witcher is set in a fairytale world where princesses aren’t always saved, monsters aren’t always punished, and humans are as flawed as they are in our reality. But the Netflix adaptation rejects that framing in favor of an odd blend of medieval realism and “girls get it done” spunk.

Marilka’s line, “because I'm a girl, and girls can't be witchers…which is the stupidest thing I ever heard” is nigh on insulting. It’s the 13th century, girly, nobody cares. Don’t try and impress me with your fourth-wall breaking attempts at feminism.

Renfri isn’t a “strong female character” because she can fight and control a gang of thugs. She’s tough because she survived years of abuse, starvation, assassins, and brutal fighting. Renfri refused to die. Good or evil or something in between, she’s not admirable because she’s a girl who gets it done. She’s admirable because she’s a survivor.

And she’s tragic—a trait completely left out of her live-action character. In the short story, Renfri reveals a sadness that she can’t allow herself to soothe, lest she be caught off-guard in the brutal world she inhabits.

The “girls get it done” attitude is insulting to characters like Ciri and Renfri. What makes them special is that they are forced to embrace lives outside of social norms. They didn’t choose to be tough girls. They wanted to live out their lives as princesses, but when the options were to die or to survive at any cost, they chose survival. They don’t look at the camera and say “aren’t gender norms stupid” because they’re too busy fighting for their damn lives.

Thanks for reading! What did you think of the first episode? There’s always more to discuss, so keep the conversation going in the comments!

See you next week for episode two!