The Witcher is a maverick, a lone wolf, a loose cannon who won’t play by the rules. “He knows no fear,” gasps an underling as the Witcher looks at a horse and frowns, fearlessly. But the Witcher is preoccupied. The winds of change howl around his thigh boots and perturb the weave of his wig. “Your silence is especially loud today, Witcher,” observes sidekick Milva (Meng’er Zhang), as the Witcher – who, for the purposes of drama/HMRC, is also known as Geralt of Rivia – frowns at another horse. But the Witcher/Geralt doesn’t want to talk about why he doesn’t want to talk. Not because the most recent instalment of the beloved Netflix series with which he shares a name saw his family rent asunder by the forces of darkness (although, to be fair, this probably hasn’t helped). But because the wandering monster-hunter has awoken in season four of The Witcher to find he is no longer being played by Henry Cavill, upon whose mountainous shoulders rested the first three seasons of this unapologetically preposterous fantasy-drama. Instead, Geralt is now Liam “Younger Brother of Chris” Hemsworth, who used to be in Neighbours. In a very real sense: strewth.
The metamorphosis clearly weighs heavily on Geralt, who spends the first episode of the new series flaring his nostrils and peering anxiously into the middle distance, as if concerned Harold Bishop might suddenly appear from behind a shrub and club him with a mace. The maverick’s malaise is understandable: Cavill’s are big thigh boots to fill, the actor’s granite-jawed charisma providing an often deeply confusing show with its near-monosyllabic anchor. But now, with Cavill off to brood in pastures new, the final two series of The Witcher (the oversized rubber axe is poised to fall at the end of season five) must look to Hemsworth’s flaring nostrils for their protagonism. How fares the extraordinarily violent fantasy-drama in the wake of such a seismic regeneration, my liege? Let us clamber aboard a faux-medieval horse and head into the rugged wilds of season four to search for clues.
The last time we saw Geralt, he was trudging off to search for his adopted daughter and witcher-in-training, Ciri (Freya Allan), who had been rescued from her nomadic kidnappers by hey-nonnying brigands the Rats. Meanwhile, Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), Geralt’s sorceress squeeze, had launched her own search for Ciri, largely via a portal system called, with devastating perspicacity, The Portal System.
And now? The plot continues in much the same vein, with screen time divided more or less equally between Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer as they scowl and punch their way through storylines thick with impenetrable geopolitics, dialogue of the “the north quails before us” variety and mud-spattered extras keen to divest themselves of their intestines.
While Ciri finds companionship with sympathetic “Rat”, Mistle (Christelle Elwin), Geralt, Milva and insufferable bard Jaskier (Joey Batey) are joined in their journey east by Zoltan (Danny Woodburn), an amiable dwarf with an explosive beard and wisecracking parrot (sample quip: “asshole”). Elsewhere, there are rumblings of more and worse wars, as dastardly Nilfgaardians point at maps and ferrety mages scheme in candlelit vestibules.
The tone remains wildly uneven, lurching as it does between steeple-fingered Game of Thrones-y glumness and those early-90s Saturday afternoon series in which an uncommunicative hunk wanders between small communities, rescuing imperilled innocents from baddies while learning about the true meaning of friendship. Similarly uneven is Geralt II’s accent. Poor Geralt II’s accent. “He hasn’t been the same since his injuries,” warns Jaskier with no little understatement as his companion’s vowels once again escape their restraints and make for Erinsborough. Our hero does his best to compensate by mumbling incomprehensibly while making his nostrils flap like enraged windsocks. “Grrrnnngh”, he says. “Grrrnnngh destiny rrmmph.” Alas, no amount of wounded grunting can detract from the fact that Hemsworth, bless his pleather britches, is no Henry Cavill.
While his predecessor invested Geralt I with a gruff likability, Geralt II is less “valorous man-mountain grappling with responsibilities beyond our ken” and more “bollard in a wig”. Will fans embrace this lunkish scowler? It’s still early days, of course, but whether The Witcher will survive the replacement of its brooding load-bearer remains to be [unintelligible grunting].
The Witcher season four is on Netflix
