[This contains spoilers for The Witcher season four.]
Within the first minute of The Witcher season four—literally 58 seconds after hitting play—Geralt Of Rivia has already leapt from the fronds of some godforsaken swamp into the roaring maw of a monster. Clearly, he’s keeping busy. Saddled with bad vibes since Henry Cavill left for greener pastures before it could drop season three, Netflix wants us to know that while Geralt suddenly looks different, the machinery of The Witcher is still clanging along. This season is so eager to gloss over Cavill’s departure that it doesn’t even bother with a glimpse of the new guy before chucking him into the fray. What these first frantic seconds show us is not a star, but a brand: the leather, the sword, the vials of potion, and, crucially, that wolf’s head medallion. Geralt, we’re being told, is the core of Netflix’s The Witcher. Who plays him is incidental.
That confidence evaporates almost immediately. The premiere, tellingly dubbed “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger,” reveals just how defensive the show is about who fleshes out Geralt’s story. Recapped by a wide-eyed little girl in the episode’s earliest moments, the major beats we’ve already seen from Geralt’s life—his reunion with surrogate daughter Ciri (Freya Allan), his tempestuous romance with sorceress Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), his battle with the warlock Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu)—have been reshot with a new face under that silver mane: Liam Hemsworth. The Witcher, realizing the perceived messiness of recasting its lead at the latter end of its five-season run, wants to both reassert itself and start fresh, which explains this deliberate, brute-force attempt to erase Cavill from our minds. Nothing has changed! Sure thing.
The Witcher shouldn’t have gone to the trouble; its Geralt has always been more of a vessel than a character. Cavill carved out a hulking space for himself to grunt and smolder on the periphery of the series’ main questline, and only occasionally chopped man and monster alike into mincemeat. Emotions? Ha—The Witcher has rarely dwelled too long on Geralt’s feelings and desires, even if they drive the story. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt-Hissrich’s ensemble approach is much more interested in the world beyond him, like the courtly intrigues of Emperor Emhyr (Bart Edwards) or King Radovid (Hugh Skinner), Yennefer’s shifting hierarchy of sorceresses, or the wars that shape Andrzej Sapkowski’s famously murky Continent. The series doesn’t suddenly shift its focus to Geralt just to accommodate its new (and presumably less fussy) leading man, and it shouldn’t. The core of The Witcher, for better or worse, is its trinity—Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri—and they continue to keep the series from crumbling under its own weight.
It’s when the series zooms out to include kings, warlocks, mages, and other whatnots that the show diffuses to the point of nothingness. Grasping the breadth of a well-established fantasy world is a challenge for any TV show, but harnessing Sapkowski’s sardonic, elliptical scope and endless parade of characters has proven especially onerous for a series that has never quite decided what kind of dark fantasy series it wants to be. Bawdy and violent like HBO’s Game Of Thrones, lore-dense and cryptic like The Rings Of Power, both, or its own freaky thing? An identity has never been adequately realized. This season of The Witcher, however, sets an endgame into motion. Recognizing that the Cavill-Hemsworth switcheroo will dominate every conversation about it from here to the White Frost, it has entered crisis mode, smoothing out plodding story arcs, establishing a clear us-versus-them narrative between Vilgefortz and the rest of the Continent, and beefing up its cast with character actors who can stabilize a show prone to drifting.
Supporting Hemsworth’s debut is Laurence Fishburne’s Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy (Regis for short), a barber-surgeon in the Sweeney Todd mold whose bleak vampiric history is recounted in animation during the season’s most vivid and confidently produced episode, “The Joy Of Cooking.” Fishburne, adopting a vague Euro-English accent, is in Morpheus mode here, offering gravelly wisdom to a hero whose loss of agency (or, rather, his silver sword and a wound he’s incurred along The Path that stymies him) is compounded by the revelation that Emyhr intends to wed (and bed) Ciri. On the subject of Nilfgaard, James Purefoy displays a mix of world-weariness, menace, and charm as Emyhr’s Baelish-coded spy/royal vizier Stefan Skellen, while Sharlto Copley stalks the season’s perimeter as the bounty hunter Leo Bonhart, a killer who’s hungry for blood and has a taste for witchers. Each of them adds spice to a series long since been rendered bland by the fantasy tropes it haphazardly employs. Whenever they’re on screen (especially Copley, who brings a wild, almost alien energy to the show), The Witcher roars to life.
These positives fade quickly. The season takes a dreary turn as Ciri’s youthful revolt lands her with the misfit outlaw gang The Rats, where she shares lusty smooches with Mistle (Christelle Elwin), a thief who shows her what it means to live as they engage in all sorts of performative rebellion. What are they rebelling against? Who knows: The Rats are your typical ragtag fantasy crew, drug-fueled, quippy, and burdened with personal tragic backstories that serve vague narrative purposes. Their scenes are hard to watch, like a streaming Dungeons & Dragons campaign of cool nerds who vape and swear collegiately. Allan and her supporting cast do what they can with the flimsy material—Asse (Connor Crawford) is especially striking with a haunted gaze that hints at sadness the show barely acknowledges. Individually, they serve a crucial function in Ciri’s still-evolving story; collectively, they’re an additional suite of characters in an already overstuffed cast.
Then there’s Vilgefortz, who has finally ascended to the series’ ultimate heavy. Hissrich frames him as a composite of other familiar genre tyrants, like Emperor Palpatine (whom Vilgefortz all but plagiarizes during the Hemsworth-less sixth episode), and, most obviously, Voldemort, not just in his story omnipresence, but in the goth-witchy company he keeps, besieging Yennefer and her Lodge Of Sorceresses with bargain-basement Death Eaters. In effect, the midseason plays out like a theatre camp Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, where the series’ ceaseless preparation for its imminent magic war amounts to a room of LARPers waving their hands at each other while making constipated faces. This represents much of why The Witcher is thin gruel compared to Sapkowski’s work; it wants to conjure awe and can only barely simulate it.
The Witcher’s new lead is just as adrift as the last one. To his credit, Hemsworth isn’t bad at this Geralt business—he’s less marble-sculpted than Cavill, perhaps, but he can swing a sword and brood convincingly enough. That’s what the show requires of him; after all, Netflix’s The Witcher is ostensibly an aura farm, and Cavill yielded quite the harvest. Hemsworth is in the unenviable position of matching, if not exceeding, his predecessor, and the results are harsh. Still, there are brief moments where the transition feels seamless. In one quiet scene, Geralt braids Ciri’s hair, and they discuss emotions and trust—two things that come hard to a witcher. “Trusting people isn’t that bad,” Ciri tells him as he weaves her ashen strands into a mighty braid. “At least there’s glory in the attempt.” Geralt smiles, the music swells, and it’s like Hemsworth’s been there all along. That’s how The Witcher would like us to see it. But while Hemsworth maintains the show’s fleeting pleasures, its attempts at drama and character still leave much to be desired.
