The Witcher debuted on Netflix in 2019 to effusive praise from fans. They loved the fantasy action, they loved seeing a popular series of books and video games come to life onscreen, and they loved Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia, a taciturn monster hunter more vulnerable than he lets on.
Then, in 2022, it was announced that Henry Cavill would be leaving the show after season 3, to be replaced by Hunger Games veteran Liam Hemsworth. The tide soon turned. As of this writing, the recently released trailer for season 4 has 16k likes to 65k dislikes, a staggering ratio. If the show is watched at all, it feels like it’s going to be hate-watched.
And yet I’m more interested in watching The Witcher than I have been in years.
The show itself is improving
Season 3 stuck much closer to the books than the first two, and I’m hoping that continues
I enjoyed the first two seasons of The Witcher, but I was a little irritated by how much they strayed from The Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski. In the books, Geralt is fairly talkative and even given to monologues, but Cavill’s version was more curt. The first season also played with timelines in a way that felt grating. In the second season, the show added lots of big plotlines that had no basis in the books, like the sorceress Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) losing her magical abilities or a big climactic fight at Kaer Morhen, the witchers’ keep.
So I was pleased when I watched season three and saw that it stuck very close to the text of Sapkowski’s book Time of Contempt, especially when it came to everything surrounding the Thanedd coup, where the wizard Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu) leads an attack against mages who oppose the expansionist Nilfgaardian empire. The whole season leads up to this, and it’s one of the most exciting sequences in the show so far, with all of our major players gathered in one place and at each other’s throats. In the episode after, a lost Princess Ciri (Freya Allan) wanders the desert after surviving the coup in one of the most book-accurate episodes in the series.
I expect the show to ride this momentum into season four, which will find Geralt trying to bounce back from his defeat at Vilgefortz’s hands and setting out to find Ciri. Season five, which is already filmed, will wrap up the show. With fantasy shows like The Wheel of Time getting canceled in the middle of their runs, it’s nice to know that this story will be given a proper ending onscreen.
However much I liked it, season three is easily the show’s lowest-rated season among fans, with Ciri’s desert adventure being the lowest-rated episode. I think that has less to do with quality and more to do with Henry Cavill’s departure being announced before the season dropped.
Fans are mad that Henry Cavill is being replaced, but that’s not fair
Cavill’s gone, but he’s at the center of everything
If you check the comments under the new trailer, or the comments under most articles about The Witcher these days, there are a lot of complaints about Henry Cavill exiting the series, and many of them blame the show for driving him away. There’s a popular online narrative suggesting that Cavill left because the series wasn’t staying true to the source material. Polygon reported that on examples like Cavill rewriting a scene from the second season in which Geralt’s horse dies. The final scene is solid; he did a good job, but he did it with the encouragement of showrunner Lauren Hissrich and her team. So what some see as Cavill bravely standing up for artistic integrity under difficult circumstances, I see as a successful creative collaboration.
The truth is that no one knows why Cavill left the show. Aside from a very gracious Instagram statement where he talks up “the fantastic Mr Liam Hemsworth,” Cavill himself has said nothing on the matter. Hissrich has been more forthcoming, recently telling Entertainment Weekly that his exit had been in the works “for a while.”
He had plans for other roles that he really wanted to commit himself to. And for us, you don’t want to hold someone and force them to be doing something that they don’t want to do. I think that’s why it felt like a really symbiotic decision.
Cavill did indeed find lots of new roles after The Witcher, returning briefly as Superman in Black Adam, fronting a new Highlander movie, and planning a Warhammer 40k show for Amazon. Hissrich’s explanation seems at least as plausible as the one about Cavill exiting because he didn’t like the show, and actually comes from someone on the inside. Yet the former narrative is driving a lot of hate towards the series, which I don’t think is fair to the cast and crew, to Liam Hemsworth, or to Cavill.
I thoroughly enjoyed Henry Cavill’s work as Geralt—I thought he was the best thing about the show—but I’m willing to give Hemsworth a shot. He’s turned in solid performances throughout his career, and he certainly looks the part with his scar, full set of armor, and long white hair.
I know a lot of fans will object to Hemsworth taking on this role, but that has me even more intrigued.
The discourse is going to be epic
Calling all contrarians
Remember that shocking like-dislike ratio on the newest trailer: this show is entering the world with an army of people ready to loathe it. I expect scathing fan reviews on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. I expect video essays dissecting exactly how and in what ways every scene is terrible. I expect tweet after tweet of venomous bile, and I expect it all to be extremely entertaining, maybe more than the show itself.
I’ll admit that there’s a contrarian part of me that wants The Witcher season 4 to do well simply because so many people are prepared to hate it. And wouldn’t that be an underdog story for the ages? Imagine that The Witcher drops new episodes, and they’re so compelling that even hardened haters are forced to change their tunes. It would be the reversal of the millennium.
Basically, however people react to this new season, we’re going to get a show. Maybe that will tide us over until Stranger Things returns to Netflix after an interminably long wait.
Brace yourself for The Witcher
Maybe season 4 will be terrible and justify all the horrible opinions people already have about it. Maybe it will join the ranks of shows with disappointing endings, but I’d rather hope for the best. Did I mention that Oscar nominee and Matrix legend Laurence Fishburne will play Geralt’s vampire companion Regis? That’s gotta be worth at least sampling the premiere.
All eight episodes of The Witcher season 4 will drop on Netflix on October 30. And if it’s really as bad as people expect, there are plenty more good shows on Netflix to binge.
