The Witcher Recap: Witch Hunt

Over the course of its lengthy story, The Witcher’s scope grows considerably narrower. Andrzej Sapkowski’s first two Witcher books, both short story collections, are marvelously varied in tone and content, presenting a smorgasbord of standalone Geralt adventures that alternate between the comic and tragic.

The novels that follow — like the past few seasons of the TV show, which adapted Sapkowski’s Blood of Elves and Time of Contempt — considerably narrow the path to focus on Ciri, whose life is so overwhelmingly tragic that The Witcher has largely lost its comedic edge. Your mileage may vary, but I still miss the era in which The Witcher’s stakes were lower than, you know, the end of the world as we know it. It’s hard to have much fun when every action is fraught with overwhelming existential dread.

So I’ll say this for The Witcher’s fourth season: This is, at least, still a TV show where someone can say, “You did not put the Queen of Elves in your cleavage” and have it make perfect sense in the context of the plot.

That line belongs to Triss Merigold, who is shocked when Yennefer pulls a small jade statue out of her decolletage and transforms it back into Francesca Findabair, the elven queen still grieving the loss of both her husband and her infant heir. When Yennefer finds Francesca, she’s slumming it in a brothel — adversity makes strange bedfellows, after all — but when she resists joining Yennefer’s resistance, Yennefer just transforms her into a pocket-sized statue and brings her along anyway.

Yes: The Vilgefortz problem has grown big enough that Yennefer will resort to a little magic-assisted kidnapping if it might help resolve it. And while the odds of toppling Vilgefortz and saving Ciri might seem long, she is making progress. In addition to winning Francesca to her cause, the episode also reveals that Fringilla Vigo is also acting as Yennefer’s mole, insinuating herself with Vilgefortz while passing information back to the sorceresses.

If Yennefer and her cohort are playing the long game, Geralt’s story in “Trial by Ordeal” is both refreshingly self-contained and disappointingly half-baked. After stumbling into a massive camp full of refugees from Nilfgaard’s ongoing campaign, Geralt winds up witness to a witch trial. Its subject is Talver Vermillion, the sister of Geralt’s young companion Beata. The charges, on their face, are laughable: a “potion” that turns out to be a pot of chicken broth and a “missing” cat who turns out to be just fine. Still, the priest leading the witch hunt insists that Talver must burn for her crimes, prompting Geralt and his cohort to intervene.

It would have been a very Witcher-esque twist if Talver and Beata had, in fact, turned out to be witches (and rained magical revenge on their crowd of attackers). But the episode ultimately goes for the bleaker option: Using the girls as a thematic parallel for Geralt’s fear that he won’t be able to save Ciri. Though Geralt’s hansa succeeds in besting the priest’s deliberately unfair trial — with Regis demonstrating the (unexplained) power to hold a red-hot horseshoe without being burned — the whole thing turns out to be a farce. The girls are put to the fire anyway, and when the sudden appearance of a crusading Nilfgaardian army seems to offer a chance of escape, Beata is simply killed by a random soldier’s sword.

This moment might have more impact if The Witcher had bothered to make Beata a real character and not a thinly sketched archetype, but it’s not like the show doesn’t have enough characters to juggle. Still, the point sticks: As Geralt keeps learning and relearning, this war-torn world will not be kind to the innocent and the weak.

Fortunately, Geralt also put in the work back in season two to give Ciri some serious swordfighting skills, which she (somewhat unnervingly) puts to use. Now that she’s officially a Rat, she joins the rest of the crew robbing the carriage of the Baron of Casadei, a minor Nilfgaardian noble. Ciri is especially incensed at the baron’s stuck-up young daughter, Lady Gilda, who is living with the kind of blithe privilege Ciri would have enjoyed if Cintra hadn’t been sacked. She steals a brooch from Gilda, then decides to give her a hard-won lesson in cruelty: “Life is shit and blood and death,” she snarls while slicing off the girl’s long blonde braid.

As a Continent-wide war wages, this is a relatively minor attack, but an unnecessary one, and one that Ciri and her friends seem likely to pay for. When a trio of goons hired by the Baron of Casadei confront Ciri, she draws a sword and kills them all without a second thought. It’s a startlingly casual act of violence from a girl who hadn’t even killed someone until the season-three finale, and a sign of the darkness settling into Ciri after enduring so much trauma. As Yennefer tells her fellow sorceresses, Ciri possesses both the lineage and the power to do pretty much anything: Save the elves, rule the Continent, or spin her seemingly limitless magical power to any goal she might have. For the sake of the Continent, let’s hope her ultimate goals turn out to be noble ones.

Stray Arrows

• The episode concludes by introducing Leo Bonhart, a major new villain played by District 9’s Sharlto Copley, who (surprise, surprise) also wants to find Ciri. Those medallions around his neck are from the various animal-themed witcher schools scattered around the Continent — trophies from other witchers he has killed.

• Though our three heroes are splintered into their own solo storylines, The Witcher continues to keep Geralt and Ciri emotionally close (and ease the transition between scenes) by having them wake up whenever something bad is happening to the other — a lingering, almost psychic connection threaded through their dreams.

• If you liked Francesca’s story about the Conjunction of Spheres and the downfall of the elves, you can always go back and watch The Witcher: Blood Origin. It’s not great, but it does feature a pretty good Michelle Yeoh performance and a deeply weird Minnie Driver performance.

• And while we’re on the subject: The episode features a quick reference to Avallac’h, who plays a key role in both The Witcher: Blood Origin and the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

• Kudos to the brothel owner who came up with both “Geralt of Raw-via” and “Yennefer of Bangerberg” and knew enough about their actual sexual exploits to put a stuffed unicorn on the stage.

• Nice to see that some witches still wear pointy black hats.

• Shoutout to Zoltan’s scene-stealing parrot for correctly identifying a pile of corpses as “dead motherfuckers.”