Netflix releases gorgeous interactive map to help you keep track of all of The Witcher's moving parts
[Note: This article contains spoilers for The Witcher.]
Although it drops hints as early as the first episode—in which Geralt’s new bandit princess buddy Renfri speaks of one of the show’s other characters as though she were a far younger woman that the one we see on the screen—Netflix’s The Witcher series takes a while to reveal how convoluted its timeline actually is. With the show’s setting sometimes quietly jumping decades in between scenes—and a number of characters aging far slower than normal, the better to trip continuity hawks up—the show doesn’t make it explicit until three or four episodes in that lead characters Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri are separated by more than just vast expanses of fantasy monster-infested space.
Perhaps anticipating a sense of confusion on this time-shifted score, Netflix has now released a handy—and lovely—little tool to help viewers of the series keep track of, say, what Stregobor has been up to across various eras. (That Stregobor! Always getting mixed up in shenanigans.) Said help comes in the form of an interactive map of the show’s world (known as The Continent) that also comes with a series of linked timelines, helping you to not just figure out where Geralt was at the various points of Yen and Ciri’s journeys, but also to keep your Nilfgaards and your Temerias from getting all jumbled up. It’s also just a beautiful piece of work in its own right, scratching that “gorgeous maps of fantasy lands” itch instilled in so many young readers by fictional cartographers like Tolkien and his ilk.
That being said, the map is, by its nature, absolutely jam-packed with spoilers, so you might not want to dive deep on it until you’ve watched all eight currently extant episodes of the Netflix show—especially since scrolling to the very end of the timeline reveals a reminder that, for as much time as the series spent getting its pieces into place, the real game has just now finally begun.