The Witcher Season-Premiere Recap: The Witcher Has Two Faces

“And just when it seemed all was lost, Geralt rose again,” says Stribog the storyteller in the frame device, set 100 years after the events of The Witcher, that opens the show’s fourth season. It’s a line that makes sense in the context of the series, but even more outside of it — a way to reassure viewers that even losing lead actor Henry Cavill was not enough to end Geralt of Rivia’s journey before its rightful conclusion.

There’s been a lot of drama surrounding the departure of Cavill from The Witcher and a lot of nervous speculation about whether his chosen successor, Liam Hemsworth, will be a capable replacement. Having finally seen Hemsworth’s big debut, I’m ready to deliver my initial verdict: He is … totally fine.

Which isn’t to say Hemsworth is an improvement, or even an equal, to Cavill’s widely praised performance. It’s probably not fair to judge 24 episodes of Cavill against one episode of Hemsworth, but in general, I’d say I prefer the grim intensity of Cavill to Hemsworth’s looser, somewhat wryer take on Geralt.

Still: Hemsworth (and his stunt doubles) are fully capable of doing most of what Geralt requires: looking good in a white wig, muttering badass one-liners, and chopping up monsters and men alike with a big sword. Hemsworth gets one big monologue, describing a nightmare in which Ciri is happily dancing with Death, and does a fine job with it. The Witcher must go on — Netflix has, after all, spent a reported $720 million and counting on this show and its various spinoffs — and it seems like this good-enough Geralt will be a good enough replacement to keep the cameras rolling.

But even as “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger” seeks to make viewers comfortable with its new lead actor, it offers constant reminders that The Witcher has grown much, much bigger than any character, including its title character. Season four picks up right where season three left off, as Geralt, Jaskier, and new ally Milva trek toward Nilfgaard, hoping to save Ciri from the clutches of the crusading emperor Emhyr var Emreis.

Ciri isn’t there, of course. With the impostor Teryn assuming the role of “Ciri” at the emperor’s right hand in the season-three finale, Ciri is sneaking around the countryside under the pseudonym Falka (a name that has some unnerving implications in the Witcher universe). It was also at the end of season three that we met Ciri’s new allies: the Rats, a misfit group of petty thieves who fall somewhere between Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and an Ocean’s Eleven crew.

Though Ciri (and the audience) is given a brief reintroduction to the Rats via an exposition-laden monologue, we’d probably know them better if Netflix had stuck to its original plan: releasing a miniseries spinoff about the exploits of the Rats prior to Ciri’s joining. That series ran into creative trouble and remains unreleased, which might explain why this part of the story feels so underbaked — an especially big problem when The Witcher is also introducing such heavy subject matter. The audience has hardly met Kayleigh before he attempts to sexually assault Ciri. We’re scarcely better acquainted with Mistle, who warns off Kayleigh, then comes on to Ciri herself. Their encounter plays out without violence, but it still feels like the traumatized Ciri is being coerced.

Whatever you make of Ciri’s new chosen family — and her decision to stick with them despite the fraught events of the previous night — it’s safe to say her old chosen family seems more reliable. Though Yennefer can no longer sense Ciri, she refuses to give up on her, leaping from portal to portal in an effort to track her down.

Vilgefortz, the wizard who emerged as The Witcher’s big villain-in-waiting last season, has other ideas. After he taunts Yennefer with a series of Criss Angel Mindfreak–like illusions, she’s goaded into using dark magic to dig into the brain of one of his own followers — at which point Vilgefortz magically pops the woman’s eyeballs, leaving Yennefer covered in viscera. It’s here that she concludes she’ll probably need to build her own army to take on Vilgefortz and rescue Ciri, and, yeah, that seems like a pretty good idea.

And that leads us back to Geralt, whose own small army — known to Witcher fans as his hanza — is growing even as he insists on the single-mindedness of his quest. After a chance encounter on the road, the cheerful dwarf Zoltan Chivay (Danny Woodburn) combines his crew with Geralt’s. Even enemies are becoming allies: The episode is bookended by Geralt’s meet-cutes with Cahir, who is saved from Nilfgaardian troops by Geralt, then comes back to assist him at the tail end of a bloody fight. Geralt may want to go it alone, but it seems fate — and his injuries — might require a compromise.

Stray Arrows

• Though the frame device is used to ease the transition from Cavill to Hemsworth in the title role, it serves another function that’s just as important: setting the stage for The Witcher’s ending. Season five, which will presumably arrive sometime next year, will be The Witcher’s last, and fans of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books will remember Nimue from The Lady of the Lake, the final novel chronologically.

• As far as the Cavill-to-Hemsworth transition goes, it probably helps that Hemsworth hasn’t yet had any major scenes with Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan. It’ll be interesting to see if he can sell the intimate bonds with Yennefer and Ciri that Cavill’s performance built.

• One of the Rats talks about using fisstech recreationally, and, yes, Ciri, you might want to get away from this gang.

• Also returning from season three: King Radovid, still grieving the loss of his relationship with Jaskier, and spymaster Dijkstra, who’s quietly scheming to manipulate the newly crowned Redanian king.

• That’s James Purefoy, star of HBO’s Rome (and frequent also-ran in “Who should play James Bond?” conversations), as high-ranking Nilfgaardian adviser Skellen.

• But the best new character? It’s clearly the parrot that Zoltan has trained to exclusively say things like “asshole” and “fuckin’ hell.”

• The Witcher doesn’t do a great job of explaining its world, but if you’re curious how all these similar-sounding fantasy kingdoms fit together, check out this map, which shows how much land Nilfgaard has already raided and how dangerous it is for the Continent that they’re moving into territories like Lyria.

• “The stories say death dogged his footsteps,” says Stribog the storyteller at the start of the episode — referring, obliquely, to Geralt’s encounter with Death in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Sword of Destiny.

• Jaskier’s Half a Century of Poetry, the book Nimue obsesses over, can be read about in more detail in the tie-in reference book The World of the Witcher.