I’ve been a fantasy fan for a long time, but I haven’t played video games since the days of Atari. When the Netflix series “The Witcher” was announced I had no idea what was headed to the screen. While a long time fan of fantasy I’ve drifted away recently and read in many other genres. I still love it, but missed anything related to this series. I started watching the show with a blank slate, just really hoping for some excellent, accessible fantasy.

Before I get to the spoilers I will say that I did in fact like the series. I can’t say that I loved it, but it is swords and sorcery and that usually works out well for me. If you’re a fan of swords and sorcery it’s worth watching. There is a book series. I thought I would go and grab up the books, then I read this review. Perhaps I’ll hold off. Maybe it’s better to let the show stand on its own.

SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT

Yes, it’s swords and sorcery. It’s got a ton of standard fantasy tropes in there. Eleves, dwarves, wizards, and even dragons. There are castles and wizard battles and swamp monsters and ghouls and…

and all those things are rammed in and around the plot in just 8 episodes.

The problem with epic fantasy is rarely the fantasy part. The problem is the epic part. There is SO much world building and background that it’s almost impossible to cram it all in to anything less than a massive series. The writers tend to do exactly what I said ~ they cram. The push and mash and squeeze as many of the eye catching ‘cool’ fantasy things into as short a span as they can in a desperate grab for eyeball time. The Witcher suffers from this. There is so much there and very, very little of it is actually the main character doing his job. Geralt is a magically created warrior designed to hunt and destroy monsters. The series opens with him battling a swamp dwelling giant spider with human features, then shows his fighting powers against people, then that fades away in order to start stacking in story.

As I wrote that I had to stop and really think about it. How could I complain about building in story? It’s exactly what I always say that I want. That is the part about cramming in the ‘epic’ part. The story is named for Geralt’s job, but then we spend huge amounts of time on Ciri, Yennifer, Jasker the bard, The Brotherhood (that is mostly women?) and a jumble of other bits. We see Geralt’s part in things, but only just.

Witchers are supposed to be constructed to have no human emotions. I suspect this is not the truth and much like the manner in which Spock is portrayed in the modern updates of the Star Trek series the character is deeply emotional, simply repressed to the point of psychological damage. I believe the emotions will burst forth in the form of rage at some point. A truly emotionless character would be far less interesting. What this emotionless warrior does is drift through the story. I want to like Geralt, but he’s flat. On purpose? Maybe.

So a flat character and a jumble of story. At least the whole thing will make sense when it’s fully rendered on screen, right? Wrong.

The time line jumps all over the place. I could never tell when in the story we were supposed to be. Were we in the past, the distant past, the present? It was almost impossible to tell for sure. Flashbacks to dead characters that have been replaced by magic shape shifters only made this worse. Apparently both the sorceress Yennifer and Geralt are supposed to be significantly older? Sorcerers are supposed to have greatly expanded life spans, but we’re only getting vague references to that? It was very frustrating.

The other part I found frustrating was the indecision of what the nature of the show wanted to be. Getting past organizational aspects of how the story was made, what were they trying to portray? There were tons of gratuitous nudity scenes. Generally speaking I am in favor of that sort of thing – if it advances the story in some way. These scenes all gave me the feeling that what they were aiming for was trying to take over the space vacated by Game of Thrones. The show wanted to be dark, and mysterious, violent and sexy… and then they added in Jasker the bard. Jasker should have been Joxer from Xena: Warrior Princess. They could have gone for a much lighter, entertaining version of the entire series. There were still monsters and fighting and love stories just with added camp.

I don’t know if I would stay on board for campy epic fantasy and that’s the show’s biggest issue. It can’t decide what it wants to be or where it wants to go. It’s a retro feel stuffed in a modern package that doesn’t quite fit.

There are other issues associated with the show as well. Yennifer as hunchback and deformed never sat quite right with me. Something was off about that portrayal. When she was transformed it confirmed my fear. This was actually a gorgeous Hollyweird actress that they’d made up to look that particular way, then magically transformed. I do not fall into any category other than ‘able’ so it’s not for me to discuss the depth of this, but despite truly excellent make-up and special effects it just didn’t sit right.

For more depth on this you should check out this article.

I’ve spent quite a few words picking this show apart. These issues are what distract me from flat out loving a successful fantasy series. There are really excellent parts to this show and good stories within the larger story. The series has been announced as having a second season already. My hope is that the story lines get sorted in better order, the actual power of Geralt comes forward (there was a lot of hype around the black eyes in the promo stuff and we almost never see that in the series) and the writers decide to make this story it’s own, not just a GOT replacement.

I do recommend watching the series. As always, supporting something new is vital to showing that we, the consumer, are actually interested in new and exciting shows and that we want something more than another remake.