The Witcher Recap: Swamp Things
Geralt and his companions are at a literal crossroads. One path promises the same difficult terrain they’ve been treading all season: the razed villages and refugee camps left behind by Nilfgaard in a conflict that remains very volatile. The other poses its own dangers: a trek through the mysterious Ysgith swamp, which contains no human threats but plenty of monsters. After a brief debate, the group settles on the swamp. This is why you keep a witcher around, right?
As The Witcher barrels toward its season finale, an episode like this feels a bit like busywork, built less around satisfying storytelling than ensuring every character is where they need to be before the curtain call. Fortunately, this episode’s thematic centerpiece (and the thing that redeems an otherwise by-the-numbers installment) is also my favorite kind of Witcher story: a dark, fairy-tale–esque monster hunt with a nice twist at the end.
When Geralt & Co. enter the swamp, they unwittingly become the playthings of a mystery creature who picks them off one by one while taunting them in a giggle only Geralt can hear. From there, it escalates to hallucinations: a vision of Yennefer and Ciri doing their best to comfort each other that Geralt is coming even as they die in the swamp.
When the monster finally reveals itself, it turns out to be two monsters — a pair of rusalka, which are spirits who haunt the waterways where they originally died. The child has been taunting Geralt the whole time; the mother, who emerges from the swamp, is desperate for love and warmth and begs for Geralt’s embrace.
Being a witcher, Geralt knows the true way to put a rusalka to rest: asking for a riddle, then solving it. The rusalka dutifully issues this challenge: “What I love I do not carry. What I nurture, I do not feed. What I live and die for is not mine alone. What am I?”
I’ll pause while you guess.
Do you have it yet? The answer, conveniently enough, dovetails perfectly with Geralt’s own character arc: a father. As it turns out, the vision Geralt saw of Yennefer and Ciri was just an echo of the real-life incident that led to the deaths of a mother and child, waiting fruitlessly for the father to arrive, in the swamp. With that bit of unfinished business resolved, they can rest, and Geralt and his friends can move along unhindered.
On the other side of the swamp, Yarpen and Percival decide they’ve endured enough violence and horror and decide to depart from the group — inspired, in part, by Geralt’s devotion to Yennefer and Ciri, which makes Yarpen want to go back and devote himself to the same kind of love with a woman he left behind in Mahakam. Milva, who reveals that she’s pregnant with the baby of the Scoia’tael soldier she slept with the night before he died, decides to back away from the front lines of the fight ahead as well — but not before revealing that merely “Milva” is a name and persona she adopted to survive. Maybe, she concludes, the baby will consume “Milva” from the inside and turn her back into Maria again.
If it’s all a little conservative, that’s in keeping with The Witcher’s devotion to the ideal of a family. Having discovered that the girl in the tower isn’t actually Ciri, Yennefer portals to Geralt, and the two share a night of passion before reiterating their mutual commitment to bringing their found family back together again. Fortunately, Regis has a deus ex machina of a plan for that: a never-before-mentioned band of nearby druids who, due to the calendar’s proximity to the equinox, might be able to cast a spell that pinpoints her location.
However they do it, they’d better find Ciri soon. When we check back in with the Rats, it’s via a conversation with their middleman, Hotspurn, who reveals to Ciri that they kidnapped the rich kid at the behest of Emhyr var Emreis. Understandably incensed that she’s unknowingly been working for the man whose army toppled her kingdom, Ciri confronts Hotspurn alone and draws out a confession: His next lead for them was a trap — a way to drive the Rats squarely into the path of Leo Bonhart, whom he’ll torture for as long as it takes to learn Ciri’s whereabouts. As the episode concludes, she’s racing back to her friends; we’ll see, soon enough, if she’s already too late.
Stray Arrows
• Congrats to Liam Hemsworth for passing another true test required of any actor playing Geralt of Rivia: sitting around in a big wooden bathtub.
• That said, this is the first episode since the premiere where I’ve really felt the difference between what Liam Hemsworth brings to Geralt and how Henry Cavill played him. In particular, I miss Cavill’s voice, which approximated fan-favorite Doug Cockle’s gravelly intensity — Hemsworth’s more casual style suits a campfire conversation but fails to sell the desperation of Geralt losing his friends before having a nightmarish vision of Yennefer and Ciri dying right before him.
• And while we’re on the subject: I mostly don’t mind Netflix’s deviations from the Witcher source material, but I’m not a fan of this take on Emhyr. In the novels and the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the Nilfgaardian emperor cuts a singularly imposing presence — appearing only sparingly, but always the most calculating, powerful, and uncompromising person in the room. The show’s version — younger, weaker, more emotional, and much more easily swayed by Skellen, an obvious schemer — isn’t nearly as compelling.
• Regis turns into a bat at the end of this episode, so I guess not every vampire stereotype is a myth.
• If you’re curious to experience the Ysgith swamp for yourself, pick up the video game Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, which takes the player right through it.
• “You’ve certainly changed,” Yennefer says after her night with Geralt — another moment, intentional or not, where The Witcher is making it very hard not to be distracted by the change in its lead actor.
• “Fucking destiny.” “Fucking destiny.”