While the video game series based on the source material has always proven to be a big hit after selling over 50 million copies worldwide, few people could have predicted how insanely popular Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher would turn out to be.
For what seemed like an eternity, it reigned supreme as the most-watched TV show on the planet, with over 70 million people tuning in to Geralt of Rivia’s adventures in the first four weeks alone. Even folks that had never heard of The Witcher before were instantly taken by the epic fantasy series’ eight-episode run, and for many, the second season can’t come soon enough.
Of course, like the overwhelming majority of film and television projects, production was placed on hold due to effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, but shooting is tentatively scheduled to resume at some point in August, with Netflix still hoping to have The Witcher’s sophomore run completed in time to meet the intended 2021 release date.
One of the aspects of the first season that people found confusing was the revelation that we had been watching multiple timelines all along, something that wasn’t revealed until viewers were already several episodes into the story. Showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich recently admitted that the upcoming batch of episodes won’t be quite as hard to follow, and in a new interview, she revealed how the narrative will play out without having numerous time periods to rely on as a storytelling device.
“So what we’ll see in season two is that all of our characters are existing on the same timeline. What that allows us to do story-wise though, is to play with time in slightly different ways. We get to do to flashbacks, we get to do flash-forwards, we get to actually integrate time in a completely different way that we weren’t able to do in season one. Because, if you can imagine, if we were in three different timelines and then flashed forward or flashed back, we would have been in four or five or six timelines, even I know that’s too much. So I think it will be a lot easier for the audience to follow and understand, especially a new audience coming in. But there are still going to be some fun challenges with time.”
It basically sounds like The Witcher will be replacing multiple timelines with flashbacks and flash-forwards, which could potentially still create the same problems if the switches aren’t signposted clearly enough, which was the issue that a lot of fans had with the first season. That being said, the success of the show must even have taken the creative team by surprise, so they’ll probably be going out of their way this time around to make sure that things are much easier to follow.
