The Witcher is the latest big budget endeavour from Netflix, and it is of course based upon Andrzej Sapkowski's reasonably popular book series. Many other people will be familiar with the series due to the games rather than the novels though, so if they are expecting this series to reflect the games they may come away a little bit disappointed. Really it's best to treat this series as its own separate interpretation of the stories rather than something that's trying to 100% recreate them. I think that if you approach The Witcher on Netflix from this mindset, you will end up enjoying it a lot more.
Before I get into what's different and what's not, however, I want to touch upon Henry Cavill's performance as Geralt of Rivia, the eponymous Witcher himself. I think that Cavill was the perfect choice for the role - it's obvious from his performance and from things that he has said in interviews that he was already a huge fan of the games when the opportunity came along to audition for the role, and he also read the books as research. His gruff demeanour is very close to Geralt from the games, but not identical. While there were some concerns that he was too young for the role when the news broke that he was cast, it really isn't an issue for me.
This first season of The Witcher is mostly setup for what's to come, and each episode is based upon a short story from one of the first two books, The Last Wish, and Sword of Destiny. There are three parallel stories being told through the episodes, focusing on Geralt, the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg, and Cirilla, the Lion Cub of Cintra. What the show doesn't really explain is that their tales are all spread apart by quite number of years - the early events of Yennefer's life take place decades before Geralt is around, and then most of what we see Geralt doing takes place years before what we see Ciri getting up to. The show doesn't go out of its way to explain all this, so newcomers may end up getting terribly confused - hopefully they will have figured out what's happening by episode three though.
As for those differences, well - Yeneffer's back story as a hunchbacked farm girl is never really described in detail in the books, it's just mentioned in passing, so the episodes that show this and her early life being brutally trained by the brotherhood of sorcerers has been created for this show. It works, though, at least for me. Also, Ciri isn't really a part of the first two books at all, so the show runners had to come up with a way to have her in season one. This is the bit that didn't work so well in my opinion. The Ciri I know from the games is a very strong willed, driven woman. The one portrayed here is quite a naive and weak child. The other thing it took me a while to get used to is how different Triss Merigold is in the series compared to the game version. I understand that CD Project Red changed her dramatically from the books in order to promote her to the main love interest of the first two games though, so I wont hold it against them.
There are other things that feel just right though - though he goes by his original name from the books, Jaskier strongly resembles the Dandelion that I know from the games. The episode that depicts the story of the Striga (just called The Witcher in the book) was very well done and extremely accurate to both the book version and the cut scene that opens the first Witcher game. There are a few details that have been changed - the curse is very much a deliberate thing in the show, whereas in the short story Geralt thinks that Ostritt may have caused it to happen by accident due to his hatred for Foltest.
Ultimately. season one of The Witcher ends up feeling mostly like setup for season two, which is already in the works. But then, in fairness the first two volumes of short stories were mostly set up for the novels to come afterwards anyway. I ended up being quite pleased with what Netflix achieved here - there is plenty of room for improvement, but it's a pretty good start!
Before I get into what's different and what's not, however, I want to touch upon Henry Cavill's performance as Geralt of Rivia, the eponymous Witcher himself. I think that Cavill was the perfect choice for the role - it's obvious from his performance and from things that he has said in interviews that he was already a huge fan of the games when the opportunity came along to audition for the role, and he also read the books as research. His gruff demeanour is very close to Geralt from the games, but not identical. While there were some concerns that he was too young for the role when the news broke that he was cast, it really isn't an issue for me.
This first season of The Witcher is mostly setup for what's to come, and each episode is based upon a short story from one of the first two books, The Last Wish, and Sword of Destiny. There are three parallel stories being told through the episodes, focusing on Geralt, the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg, and Cirilla, the Lion Cub of Cintra. What the show doesn't really explain is that their tales are all spread apart by quite number of years - the early events of Yennefer's life take place decades before Geralt is around, and then most of what we see Geralt doing takes place years before what we see Ciri getting up to. The show doesn't go out of its way to explain all this, so newcomers may end up getting terribly confused - hopefully they will have figured out what's happening by episode three though.
As for those differences, well - Yeneffer's back story as a hunchbacked farm girl is never really described in detail in the books, it's just mentioned in passing, so the episodes that show this and her early life being brutally trained by the brotherhood of sorcerers has been created for this show. It works, though, at least for me. Also, Ciri isn't really a part of the first two books at all, so the show runners had to come up with a way to have her in season one. This is the bit that didn't work so well in my opinion. The Ciri I know from the games is a very strong willed, driven woman. The one portrayed here is quite a naive and weak child. The other thing it took me a while to get used to is how different Triss Merigold is in the series compared to the game version. I understand that CD Project Red changed her dramatically from the books in order to promote her to the main love interest of the first two games though, so I wont hold it against them.
There are other things that feel just right though - though he goes by his original name from the books, Jaskier strongly resembles the Dandelion that I know from the games. The episode that depicts the story of the Striga (just called The Witcher in the book) was very well done and extremely accurate to both the book version and the cut scene that opens the first Witcher game. There are a few details that have been changed - the curse is very much a deliberate thing in the show, whereas in the short story Geralt thinks that Ostritt may have caused it to happen by accident due to his hatred for Foltest.
Ultimately. season one of The Witcher ends up feeling mostly like setup for season two, which is already in the works. But then, in fairness the first two volumes of short stories were mostly set up for the novels to come afterwards anyway. I ended up being quite pleased with what Netflix achieved here - there is plenty of room for improvement, but it's a pretty good start!
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