Blink And You’ll Miss First Look At “The Witcher” Season 2

The last big news out of Netflix’s Geeked Week event was the unveiling of another upcoming online fandom event, specifically directed at fans of The Witcher franchise – WitcherCon, which will take place just around the corner on July 9th, and will finally give viewers of Netflix’s wildly successful The Witcher series and players of CD Projekt Red’s bestselling Witcher video games a shared space in which to interact and enjoy news related to both. I’ll let people with a more comprehensive knowledge of the games guide the conversation surrounding that specific topic, but as a fan of Netflix’s series I believe the first full-length trailer for The Witcher‘s second season is probably being reserved to debut during WitcherCon, and I’m beyond excited to see it.

The Witcher
The Witcher | editorial.rottentomatoes.com

Today, however, to appease the ravenous fans baying like wolves in their comments (no, not me…well, not just me), Netflix gave us a brief taste of what to expect from season two (which you can watch at the 41:30 mark in the video above), in a twelve-second teaser video focused on the show’s central character, Princess Cirilla of Cintra, better known to fans as Ciri. After fleeing from the burning wreckage of the privileged life in Cintra she had enjoyed as a child, Ciri’s journey in season one ended with her finally meeting Geralt of Rivia, the Witcher with whose destiny hers had been intertwined before her birth. Season two will follow Ciri’s own path to becoming a Witcher, as Geralt brings her back to the ancient citadel of Kaer Morhen, where his mentor/father figure Vesemir will begin training Ciri in the ways of the Witchers, making her the first woman to be inducted into the mysterious order.

The teaser gives us a few split-second glimpses of that training, as Ciri discards the heavy, richly embroidered, Cintran robes she wore for most of season one, and shifts into lightweight, practical, armor for her fight scenes. But when she’s not running obstacle courses or hunting monsters in the woods at night, it seems she’ll be diving deeper into the magical origins of her mysterious powers, including the catastrophic events that happen whenever she unleashes her literally earth-shattering wail. She’ll probably be assisted in this search by the mage Yennefer of Vengerburg, the trendsetting icon whom I choose to believe is also responsible for picking out the luxurious white fur gown Ciri can be seen wearing in the teaser in a couple different shots.

The Witcher
Ciri | comingsoon.net

Unfortunately, we don’t get to see either Yennefer or Geralt in this teaser, which is mostly filled with brief flashes of significant (or in any case, haunting) imagery, like a ceremonial dagger resting on a plinth, dancing shadow-puppets, runes etched in stone, a skeletal corpse placed on an altar, and my personal favorite: a mural depicting a man having his leg eaten by a large bird or perhaps a dragon. Fantastical and horrifying monsters are a big reason for the franchise’s popularity, and season two is expected to introduce some particularly iconic beasts from The Witcher books and games into the series, including the forest-dwelling leshy, depicted in the games as a towering humanoid creature with a head modeled after a deer’s skull, and a majestic crown of black antlers. I haven’t ever played the games, but the images alone are unforgettable.

As I said, I think we’ll see much more during WitcherCon, including a full-length trailer, but this little teaser is a nice way to end Geeked Week, which also gave us the Shadow And Bone season two renewal we craved alongside some more miscellaneous reports and reveals. I think Geeked Week’s biggest problem in hindsight was a lack of footage from the shows and films being covered during the event, although I’m actually willing to give The Witcher a pass since it will be getting its very own Comic-Con type extravaganza just a month from now.

The Witcher
The Leshy | redanianintelligence.com

But what about you? Was this sampling of season two enough to appease you, or were you left disappointed by the lack of content? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

“The Witcher” Is Getting A Prequel! Yes, Already!

Dust off your old suit of armor (I hope you still have yours, and it hasn’t been worn down by your muscles, like Henry Cavill’s), sharpen your ancient broadsword, and toss a coin to your Witcher, because it’s time to return to The Continent. Netflix has just announced today that, while they’ve been waiting for filming to resume on season two of The Witcher series, early work has begun on a prequel spinoff series, titled Blood Origin, which will explore the life and times of the very first Witcher, over a thousand years before Geralt of Rivia. You may think it’s a bit early for spinoffs (and particularly prequels) when the franchise is still so young, but technically this won’t be the first – an animated film was also announced several months ago, which will follow the Witcher Vesemir and be titled Nightmare Of The Wolf (who else is loving these ridiculously over-the-top names?).

The Witcher
imdb.com

Blood Origin will be six episodes long, a short amount of time to pack in so much worldbuilding and deep lore from the Witcher books. Thankfully, writers Lauren Hissrich and Declan de Barra will be joined by the author of the original Witcher books, Andrzej Sapkowski, who will serve as a creative consultant on the series. Together, they will tackle the story of how the Witchers came into being, and how humans and monsters first clashed during the aftermath of the Conjunction of the Spheres.

Let’s go over the basics real quick, because even I didn’t know much about this period of Witcher history before researching for this post. In Sapkowski’s universe, there are several dimensions, or Spheres – each inhabited by different types of people: the Continent, the world in which The Witcher takes place, was originally only home to Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes. During the event known as the Conjunction of the Spheres, dimensions collided violently, scattering people across the universe and in worlds where they were afterwards trapped when the gateways between dimensions closed. The first humans, and a number of gruesome monsters, were left behind on the Continent – and with them came the magical force known as “chaos”, which Witcher fans will recognize as the power that fuels mages like Yennefer.

The Witcher
imdb.com

Blood Origin is supposed to take place a few hundred years after this event: monsters have overrun the Continent and are busy ripping people to shreds on a daily basis; the Elves are caught up in the middle of all the bloodshed; and the Mages, those few gifted individuals able to channel the power of chaos, are working on a solution to the problem – a solution which will manifest itself in the very first Witchers: a unique breed of superhuman killing machines designed to hunt monsters into extinction and liberate humankind. We don’t actually know the identity of the first person to survive the grueling process one has to undergo in order to become a Witcher, so the show will be working with a blank slate. In fact, we know startlingly little about this entire chapter in the chronology: the names of the two Mages who designed the Witchers, Cosimo Malaspina and Alzur, are some of the only details available from the books and video games.

The Witcher
digitalspy.com

But in the long run, that might be for the best. With so much uncharted territory to explore, there will be plenty of room to build new storylines and invent new characters – some of this material could then be brought over into the main series (yes, they’re separated by a thousand years, but it’s fantasy: immortality and indestructibility are always valid excuses), tying the two together, perhaps even allowing us to draw parallels between the first Witcher and one of the last. Either that, or it will just be a really interesting and expensive bit of backstory for the world, and I love some backstory. I also really enjoyed The Witcher, so I’m excited that there’s even more content on its way. We don’t have a release date for Blood Origin yet, but it’s probably going to hit Netflix sometime around late 2022 or early 2023.

So what do you think? Are you excited for Blood Origin? Share your own thoughts, theories and opinions in the comments below!