Two years after its debut season, The Witcher is back. Audiences and critics are loving it: the new episodes are sitting at an impressive 93% on the Tomatometer and most agree that it’s an improvement on the (very good) first season. Our reviewer described this run of episodes as “fantastic” and “a barnstorming expansion … with Henry Cavill and company on blistering form.”
Plans are already afoot for the third season, with Netflix reportedly interested in up to six seasons of the fantasy epic. Showrunner Lauren Hissrich seems to have a very firm idea of how it’s going to end – when they run out of Andrzej Sapkowski’s books. Speaking with The Wrap, she said:
“I have always said that I want to end our stories at the same place that Andrzej Sapkowski ended his. I just don’t feel the need for us to keep creating stories after his intentional end. … The funny thing is, of course, since we have been working on the series, he’s actually released two new books.”
It’s not too difficult to read this as a subtle jab at HBO’s Game of Thrones. That show ran into a problem when its events overtook George R. R. Martin’s books, with the famously slow writer still to release The Winds of Winter. It’s widely accepted that the downturn in the show’s quality began when the writers deviated from Martin’s work, so it’s promising that The Witcher won’t face the same trouble.
Hopefully, we don’t suffer so long a wait for season 3, though the prequel show, The Witcher: Blood Origin, will fill the gap with an explanation of how The Witcher‘s world ended up in such a state. More on that as we hear it, but for now I’m going to settle in and enjoy watching the last few episodes of the fantasy favorite’s sophomore season.
The Witcher‘s second season is now available on Netflix.
