The Witcher season 2 is set to continue one of Netflix's biggest shows, but fans who took issue with the separate timelines from the first season should see something different this time around.
In an interview with The Wrap, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich assured fans that the story for season two would be far more linear, after leads Geralt (Henry Cavill) and Ciri (Freya Allan) were brought together in the season one finale – focusing on how both characters now had to learn to coexist in each other's company.
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"What I think is really fun about Geralt and Ciri is they are the most unexpected family you can imagine," said Hissrich. "You have a witcher whose sole job is to kill things for money and you have a little girl who is trying to escape her past and it’s like, how do they come together?
"To me, one of the most fun things we get to explore in Season 2 now is how they get to change and shift each other. Coming out of Season 1, you have a pretty good sense of who Ciri is, you have a pretty good sense of who Geralt is. And now we get to throw that all in a blender and see what happens when two people who are completely different have to be forced together in circumstances.
"I think it’s really fun. It’s not always pretty. They will argue. They will fight. It will be two strangers coming together for the first time and being told, 'Nope, you’re gonna be together forever.' I think that their growth together into being a father and daughter is one of my favorite parts of the series."
Playing with time
The Witcher season one took a bold approach to setting up the pieces for what is clearly a multi-season arc for the show, jumping between origin stories for Geralt, Ciri and the sorcerer Yennefer (Anya Chalotra). It certainly gave an immediately broad overview of the world of The Witcher, and allowed viewers to engage with each character more directly, but may have been confusing at times for those who hadn't engaged with the books or video game adaptations previously.
Hissrich admitted the use of multiple timelines "was one of the most controversial parts of Season 1 and I didn’t expect it to be as controversial as it was – but it’s something I still stand behind, in terms of storytelling.”
Now that those timelines have "intersected", though, Hissrich says that "all of our characters are existing on the same timeline," allowing the show's writers "to play with time in slightly different ways" – citing flashbacks and flashforwards as being far easier to implement in a clear way.
Hissrich ended by assuring fans that "it will be a lot easier for the audience follow and understand, especially a new audience coming in. But there are still going to be some fun challenges with time.”
What's disheartening, though, is that we still don't know when The Witcher season 2 will be released. Shooting began in early 2020, but was halted as lockdown measures came into effect in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the meantime, there are plenty other Netflix shows to watch, though the Netflix library may start looking a little thin as we near the end of 2020, with other big-name shows like Stranger Things season 4 also in limbo for now.
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