Good morrow, peasants, and welcome back to our review of Netflix’s fantasy series, The Witcher. This episode we think about confronting past mistakes, we think about Shakespeare, and we think about all the things that should have been in this episode that weren’t. I’ll mention a thing or two from the rest of the show, and also “Hamlet,” but heavy plot spoilers are for episode seven only. So gather the good herbs, and text your ex, here are five thoughts on The Witcher season one, episode seven: “Before a Fall.”
1. Things Left Unsaid
This episode we witness a meeting of the brotherhood… I think. It’s hard to be sure, because we still do not know precisely what the brotherhood is. They are some kind of governing body of mages. They’re discussing whether to defend Cintra against Nilfgaard, which is taking over the Continent one kingdom at a time. We learn that Cintra has defied or ignored the brotherhood… somehow. Stregebor wants to leave Cintra to its fate, and Tissaia thinks Cintra is worth defending because Nilfgaard will come for brotherhood-friendly kingdoms afterwards. I’m usually a sucker for this kind of complicated medieval political quagmire, but I can’t side with Stregebor or Tissaia if I don’t understand the nuances of the relationship between Cintra and the brotherhood. What does it mean for a kingdom to be brotherhood-friendly? What would the brotherhood want from Cintra, ideally? Has it occurred to anyone that they might leverage their assistance for whatever it is they want from Cintra? More importantly, I don’t know how to interpret Yennefer’s decision to side with Tissaia. Is she siding with Tissaia out of love even though she doesn’t care about Cintra? Or is she siding with Tissaia despite her anger towards her because she’s been convinced it’s worth curtailing Nilfgaard’s progress northward? In past episode reviews I’ve praised this show for holding back details, allowing the audience to fill in the gaps and come to our own conclusions, but in this case I’d like a few more details, please. I can’t get invested in a conflict I don’t understand, nor can I understand the meaning of characters’ choices. I know it’s important that Yennefer sides with Tissaia, and I know it says something about their relationship, but I don’t know what that is.
2. Yennefer of Vengerberg Looks Back
A few episodes ago, Tissaia said that Yennefer had become pure chaos, and I disagreed; Yennefer was on a straightforward goal-oriented path to ultimate power. But now that her schemes to get pregnant have been thwarted twice, once by Geralt and once by her own sense of justice, and now that her relationship with Geralt has hit a rocky conclusion, she’s feeling lost, and she’s retracing her steps. Like many of us have done after a break up, she smooches her ex, but it’s too late to get back together with Istredd. Yennefer still wants to pursue power at all costs, and Istredd still wants a quiet life studying ancient magic rocks. Then, like an unhinged twenty-three-year-old, Yennefer visits her alma mater and teaches the kids occupying her old dorm how to do drugs. Yikes, Yen.
I appreciate getting to see Yennefer’s flawed and vulnerable side, but we now run into another wall where lack of world-building details hinder our understanding of her character journey. Yennefer discovers that Aretuza is now accepting a great deal of money to educate wealthy untalented mages, who will definitely be turned into eels when they fail to graduate. Yennefer confronts Tissaia about this, but very quickly the topic turns to Nilfgaard and this conflict is forgotten. There would be so much more to dive into if we knew, how desperate is Aretuza for money? Could Aretuza function without the eels? How much power does the brotherhood have over these policies, and how much wiggle room does Tissaia have to run the school her own way? Without knowing these answers, we can’t make nuanced judgments about Tissaia’s actions, or about Yennefer’s half-hearted and ultimately fruitless confrontation. This whole episode I felt like something very interesting and important was happening to Yennefer’s character… and it’s frustrating we’re not allowed to know what that is. Oh well. Shut up and embrace your destiny.
Continued below3. Nilfgaard: The Bad(er) Guys
They’re definitely the bad guys… or are they? …. Yes they are. That’s the arc of our understanding of Nilfgaard this episode. Nilfgaard is an empire bent on Continental domination, and they are succeeding, one siege at a time. At this point in the show, as our heroes’ timelines have almost met, Nilfgaard has taken Cintra, and they’re hunting for Ciri. We’re invited to assume they don’t want to kill her, but want to use her magic screams, probably for more sieges. Cahir and Fringilla have murdered countless extras in their pursuit, and they’ll murder countless more until they find her. Nilfgaard sounds pretty bad, right? But at the very least, we learn from Istredd, if you’re a peasant who is lucky enough to survive their siege of your home kingdom, Nilfgaard will take care of you. Istredd reminds us that most kings “only care about their cocks and their coffers” and Nilfgaard at least makes the effort to govern in the common interest of all… that is, all who weren’t murdered in the initial siege. Fringilla tries to sell the brotherhood this narrative too, but her speech is cut with scenes of Nilfgaardian soldiers cutting down more and more extras on their way to victory. Queen Calanthe is a bad guy too, far from the good guy she appeared to be when we were introduced to her all those episodes ago. She committed genocide against the Elves, and I will state plainly, I don’t care whom I piss off: genocide is bad. King Foltest seemed too lazy to be a warmonger, but he was content to let a striga murder his constituents with abandon rather than admit he had a sexual relationship with his sister. That’s pretty bad. We’ve yet to meet a benevolent monarch, but when it comes to sheer numbers, no one has a body count higher than the Emperor of Nilfgaard, and that makes him the bad(er) guy, the worse of many evils.
4. Danek, Son of Reynaldo
This American television adaptation of a Polish book series has great deal of Shakespearean influences. The final scene in episode four, “Of Banquets, Bastards, and Burials.” features Mousesack (that’s his name) in front of all the major characters and a throne room full of extras summarizing the entire story. He wraps up the ending in a neat little bow, and then there are two weddings. If you’ve only ever seen or read one comedy by Shakespeare, it is statistically likely that it ended the same way. This episode, as we relive Nilfgaard’s siege of Cintra, I was reminded that the character Danek mirrored Reynaldo from “Hamlet” back in episode one, “The End’s Beginning.”
In “Hamlet,” Reynaldo is a servant to Polonius with very few lines, but unlike most servants with very few lines, his name isn’t Servant; it’s Reynaldo. Similarly, Danek has very few lines, but he gets a name. Reynaldo and Danek both get names because they both reveal important information about the characters they serve and the world they inhabit. Polonius seems like an ineffective bumbling busybody when he speaks to the royal family, but when he instructs Reynaldo to spy on his son Laertes, we see a less cute version of him that is manipulative, controlling, and occasionally effective, to the detriment of his loved ones. Queen Calanthe instructs Danek to distribute poison to the nobles in the castle, that they may die painlessly rather than be tortured and murdered by Nilfgaard. Danek’s long walk down the hallway making this morbid delivery becomes a visualization of death itself marching steadily towards the nobles’ impending doom. We also get to see Queen Calanthe shouldering her queenly responsibilities with brutal calculation until her very last breath. If there isn’t already a crossover fanfic where Danek and Reynaldo do lunch… someone get on that.
5. I Guess This Time the Real Monster is… Our Past Mistakes
In the tried and true tradition of “monster-of-the-week” the fantastical monsters Geralt is hired to slay are nothing compared to the societal ills they represent. This time, the real monster is our past mistakes.
To err is Human, and that goes for Elves and Witchers too. Long after being chastised by both Mousesack (did I mention that is his name?) and Yennefer for failing to take responsibility for his child surprise, Geralt finally returns to Cintra to rescue Ciri before Nilfgaard lays siege to the castle. From Geralt’s own perspective, he’s not righting a past mistake, he’s just doing the right thing at the time that it’s necessary. Up until this point, Ciri had been living a safe and comfortable life with her grandparents. It is only now that her life is in danger, and Geralt can do something to help her. To take care of her before this would have been to take her away from a comfortable happy life into a dangerous life on the road. Mousesack and Yennefer see it differently though. To them, parenthood is a lifelong responsibility, not a task you engage in only when your child’s life is on the line. I’m honestly not sure where I fall on this question; they both make cogent points, and I’m again impressed by this show’s ability to sit in uncomfortable dilemmas with no obviously correct answer.
We’ve already talked about how Yennefer is confronting her past mistakes, in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Ciri gets yet another brutal reminder that there was more to her past than her own experience when her old peasant buddies, who used to play jacks with her, attack her in a field and attempt to sell her to Nilfgaard. She genuinely believed their friendship to be genuine, but how could it be? She was the princess, and they were peasants. She lived in a castle while they lived in poverty, and they were nice to her because there may have been dire consequences if they weren’t. Out of all the characters in this show, Ciri, with the most materially and emotionally comfortable past, has the most difficult job of confronting what that meant. Being born a princess was not a mistake that she made, nor can she be entirely blamed for her own ignorance; we’re all products of the way we were raised. But now that she’s aware of how cruel the world her grandmother built truly is, and now that she’s living in it as a penniless homeless orphan, she is forced to battle the monster that is her past.
The way The Witcher leaves out details is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Never finding out King Foltest’s sister’s true feelings for him or for that other murder-y dweeby knight whose name I will not bother to look up is an interesting choice, in a good way. It allows us, the audience, to experience the difficulties Geralt has as a detective, never able to understand the whole story, but still doing his best to do the right thing. Never finding out what the brotherhood is or does is just frustrating. Taken altogether, flaws and all, it’s nice to watch a show with its own unique voice. In a media landscape full of copycats, The Witcher is uniquely unique.
