The Witcher: Season 4

The third season of Netflix's The Witcher was abominable. An incomparably rotten mess of TV "entertainment" that not only threw out everything that was good about the games but also redirected much of the content of the books, for the worse. Personally, I had genuine problems getting through season three, after season two had bored me somewhat brutally. That the leading man Henry Cavill in the role of the mumbling witch hunter left the building after season three, was not the least bit surprising. It was all the more unexpected, then, that Netflix, with showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich at the helm, chose to continue.

2025, fresh start - new lead actor. Henry Cavill's version of Geralt of Rivia has been replaced by Liam Hemsworth's Geralt, and without either over-dramatising or sounding unreasonable/rude, it's a 100% downgrade, in every conceivable way. I personally would never call Cavill any kind of a great character actor, but his Geralt is infinitely better than Hemsworth's, and this is obvious in the first episode of season four (which premiered this morning). Where Cavill had empathy, presence, charisma and poise in his dark, stoic, dirty and, above all, rock-hard interpretation of the character, Hemsworth feels much more like the soapy understudy who tries to pretend to be a certain character, but never even comes close. Liam never feels tough, cool, dark, or together in the same way, which means he never feels like he belongs in the world, or among the other characters. It feels like bad theatre, throughout all the episodes, and this despite the fact that the action parts have become both more numerous, bloodier and more lavish.

Netflix has realised to some (small) extent that audiences watching a series about The Witcher want to see action. Sword-swinging, fighting, spell-casting wizards, blood, guts, skull-crushing axes and everything in between, and season four contains twice as much of it as seasons two and three, combined. There's some very tightly-knit fight choreography here in a larger setting with more advanced camerawork and effects than we're used to seeing in the previous three seasons, and it's clear that Lauren Schmidt Hissrich intended to give Geralt more acrobatic qualities with the change of actors, which for me really works. Liam does no good here (he does no good at all, sadly) but his stunt double does great work with the way he moves, flips, jumps, throws himself and wields his iconic sword in a way that should have been standard from season one. It's not enough to save this otherwise weak season, but it should be applauded regardless.

Season four is based on Andrzej Sapkowski's book Baptism of Fire, which is the fifth in the series, and although Netflix takes far too many liberties, once again, in how they interpret it and exclude any kind of nudity and that unbridled rawness that Sapkowski is so good at, the framework is the same. The story is divided into three and all three stories are told in non-chronological order. Geralt has teamed up (after being dominated by the wizard Vilgefortz) with an angry dwarf, his terrible Bard, and Laurence Fishburne's whimsical take on the character Regis. They traipse around various forests, encountering swamp monsters and ghouls while Hemsworth tries to talk like Henry and Fishburne does an exaggerated meta-interpretation of his own Matrix character. Meanwhile, Ciri has teamed up with a group of highwaymen called "The Rats" and this part of the season is supposed to work as a coming of age thing with the various personalities of the "colourful" pickpockets as some kind of tween thing, but it's so badly written and so horribly acted that there's not much you can do but sigh. Yennefer's story is darker in tone, of course, but takes up so much space that there's not much left over for Geralt, and that's just one of the many structural and narrative problems that plague this fourth instalment.

The tone is really super fragmented and inconsistent, which in many ways makes The Witcher in this guise feel parodic. One second it's dark, harsh, gritty and a little creepy while the next we're thrown into something that feels like the hot rod mops from the Book of Boba Fett, or like a bad Monty Python sketch with all the homemade clothes and terrible wigs. It often feels as if the whole gang is now playing the Witcher, and as if the casting as well as the basic dramaturgy is at a primary school level. Season four avoids the truly low ratings thanks to a number of really well-crafted, epic, chaotic-looking action scenes that were completely missing from season three. Aside from those, however, this is still substandard fantasy in TV form by people who neither understand the source material nor have any sort of idea how to cater to the needs of fans.