The Witcher Recap: Campfire Stories

After four straight episodes on the road — and a slew of injuries that include Geralt’s festering leg wound and Jaskier’s busted forehead — it’s time for the hansa to take a rest. Geralt, of course, resists, but when Milva warns him that the conditions of the river they need to cross are too dangerous, what choice do they have but to make a campfire and swap stories for the night?

This episode — which consists almost entirely of characters sharing formative incidents from their pasts — is an unusually blunt device for delivering backstory. But it’s also part of a rich tradition that stretches back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it gives The Witcher a chance to be more formally inventive than usual, delivering both an animated segment and a cheeky musical within the episode’s hour-long runtime.

Though the pacing and breadth of the episode ensure that things never get boring, not all the stories are equally compelling. Zoltan Chivay’s flashback, which reveals he was wrongly and tragically framed as a traitor to the dwarves, plays out so quickly that it feels more like reading a Wikipedia entry on his background. (It also makes no sense that he and Yarpen didn’t settle this the moment they crossed paths.) Milva’s story is similarly tragic and similarly rushed: After murdering her abusive stepfather, she found one night of passion with an elf while working as a coyote for the Scoia’Tael, then returned to the group the following morning to find everyone dead.

But things really pick up when it’s Jaskier’s turn to share the story of his undying hatred for fellow bard Valdo Marx. “Will the whole thing be in song?” asks Zoltan. “Yes, bitch,” he replies. The subsequent sequence is something that largely disappeared in the last couple of seasons of The Witcher: playfulness. In an elaborate musical number anchored by Jaskier (with Geralt occasionally popping in to grunt a word instead of singing), we learn how Jaskier took Valdo under his wing, only for the young bard to steal his songbook and make a fortune performing Jaskier’s greatest hits.

Things get more serious when Regis takes his turn. Popping into a camp full of allies newly wary of the 428-year-old vampire in their midst, Regis begins by clearing up the misconception that he can be repelled by garlic, then drops a line about Jaskier’s blood smelling good. (“Let me rephrase: No infection,” he clarifies.)

It’s a solid round of Halloween-friendly vampire humor, but things get darker when Regis explains his own past. In voiceover that plays over a bloody animated short, Regis describes being a young, Lost Boys-style vampire — binge-draining humans of their blood, then going on hedonistic sex-and-more-blood benders — until he met Bethané, a human who taught him to enjoy the more peaceful pleasures of cooking and herbs. He gave up drinking blood for good, but when his former coven accused him of “playing with his food” and kidnapped Bethané, he attacked. His lover died in shock and horror that Regis was capable of such violence, and a vampire hunter did the rest of the work by staking, decapitating, and burying him next to Bethané’s corpse. “It takes more than that to properly kill a vampire,” he says, drily.

Regis’s story has an implicit moral: To quote another Netflix series, people can change. Once he recovered and returned to the mortal world, he gave up badness for good — an arc to which the two remaining storytellers can relate.

The first is Cahir, who explains how he fell under Emyhr’s thrall. As the unloved surviving son of a cruel father, he was approached by a wizard who offered him gold to secretly feed a mysterious hedgehog-faced monster in a cave. (That monster, we know, is “Duny,” Ciri’s father, who shed the enchantment and was reborn as future Nilfgaardian emperor Emhyr var Emreis — but that’s news to Geralt, who is just realizing how elaborate the plot to control Ciri’s life really is.) Emyhr became a mentor and surrogate father to Cahir, and eventually tasked him with finding Ciri. It was only through hard experience — and both Yennefer and Ciri sparing his life — that Cahir realized he’d been manipulated by the wrong side all along.

This revelation — along with the realization that Cahir shares his prophetic dreams about Ciri — is enough to move even Geralt’s icy heart, which is no small thing, since witchers are put through an ordeal specifically designed to suppress their emotions. But Geralt, like Regis, is living proof that the common wisdom about his kind might not actually be true: First by falling in love with Yennefer, and then by becoming a surrogate father to Ciri. His own flashback is a simple, tender one: A conversation with Ciri at Kaer Morhen in season two, back when they hardly knew each other, when Ciri challenged him to spend more time acting on his heart.

Her counsel clearly resonated with him: The following morning, Geralt warmly thanks and praises his allies — even Regis and Cahir — before suggesting they get back on the road. It’ll be easier than he expected: As a parting twist, Milva confesses that the river was passable the entire time, but that she decided everyone needed rest. After the night of honesty they’ve just had, even Geralt can’t object. After all, what’s the point of having friends if you don’t trust them to know what’s best for you?

Stray Arrows

• In a stinger that washes away all the good feelings from the campfire, we see Vilgefortz brutally torture Fringilla until she gives up the location of Yennefer and her small army. Looks like the season’s big battle is coming sooner rather than later.

• The episode also sneaks in two more unexpected, very brief, and hilarious campfire flashbacks. One comes from Percival Shuttenbach, the gnome in Zoltan Chivay’s company, who has a quick, incongruous memory of standing atop a pile of skulls, cackling in the rain, before shrugging that he wasn’t really doing much before joining the gang. The other comes from the foul-mouthed parrot, who shrieks “Noooooooo!” when he’s purchased.

• Congrats to Liam Hemsworth for passing the true test of any actor playing Geralt of Rivia: Grimly muttering “fuck” at the start of an episode.

• Jaskier concludes his story by singing, “This is what I’m meant to give/these words and stories, they’ll outlive,” and revealing (with a little help from Regis) that he intends to publish a book titled Half a Century of Poetry. Thanks to the flash-forward framing device that opened season four, we also know he pulls it off.

• “A baptism of fire, if you’ll permit the phrase,” says Regis. Are they just going to find a way to shoehorn the title of every single Witcher novel into Laurence Fishburne’s mouth?

• It’s very funny that Rience’s derisive nickname, “fire fucker,” seems to have made its way around the Continent.

• Regis’s full name is Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy. Geralt’s fictional name, which he invented before settling on Geralt of Rivia, is Sir Geralt Roger Eric du Haute-Bellegarde.

• In case you’re hungry, the recipe for fish soup à la Geralt’s hansa: water, tubers, pike, basil, pimento, bay leaves, and sage.