Good morrow, peasants, and welcome to our final review of the first season of Netflix’s fantasy series, The Witcher. This episode we return once again to themes of chaos and destiny, and we see the only female-gaze-driven fantasy medieval epic battle I’ve ever seen. If you know of others, link in the comments, I beg you. I’ll mention a thing or two from the rest of the show as well as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt but heavy plot spoilers are for episode eight only. So reserve your Chaos, and then let it explode, here are five thoughts on The Witcher season one, episode eight: “Much More.”
1. Sensational Magical Brutality Through the Female Gaze
No medieval fantasy epic is complete without an epic medieval fantasy war scene, and The Witcher is no exception, but it has its own unique style, which I am here for. Compared to the battles in The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, the battle of Sodden is prettier, and more spectacular, without losing the sense of grit, loss, and horror of war. Most medieval fantasy epic battles feature men, with perhaps a woman or two dressed like men, clashing body-to-body, with plenty of smash-cut close-ups in poor lighting, evoking the confusing claustrophobic frenzy a soldier might feel. The battle of Sodden is completely different. Firstly, the defending army is majority-female, wearing dresses and make-up. They don’t need armor; they have magic. They don’t need to be masculine to be mighty warriors. Secondly, much of the fighting happens from a distance. Magic jars flung into the air are shot with arrows, creating spectacular fireworks of doom over Nilfgaard’s army. Sorceresses grow poisonous mushrooms beneath their enemies feet, choking them to death. It’s violent, brutal, gross, and kind of pleasant to watch all at the same time. It’s nice to be able to see the battle. Instead of evoking horror by hiding it in darkness, we get to see the literal horrors all lit up.
It’s fascinating to me that, while this show has a female showrunner, (hooray!) parts of the show still feel very male-gaze-y. It’s only been one season, how many more times do you think we’ll watch Yennefer naked, writhing in pain? But then we also get some satisfyingly female-gaze-y moments. The iconic Geralt-in-the-bathtub image was originally created by men for men in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but it looks like it was made just for me, a hetero lady. I’ve never thought of war scenes as part of the greater cultural male gaze… until I saw this episode and thought, this is a female-gaze war scene. That’s cool. That’s revolutionary. Does it still sensationalize violence? Does it still glorify war? I guess, but this time women get to do it in a new prettier way! Hooray! Anyway, what did you come here for if you didn’t want to watch a little violence? Oh, so women can’t glorify war too? One cultural milestone at a time. Shut up and embrace your destiny.
2. Chaos
Ciri wakes up in a field, having been attacked by the peasants whom she believed to have been her childhood friends. She discovers, to her horror, that she murdered them all by accident with her magic screams. Ciri has no control over her powers, and is a danger to herself and others. Mostly to others. During the battle, Tissaia instructs Yennefer to reserve her Chaos. It mirrors the advice she’s given Yennefer many times before, that though Yennefer has a great deal of power, she must control it to use it effectively. Then at the end of the battle, when they’ve seemingly lost, Tissaia tells Yennefer to let her Chaos explode. Past insults echo in Yen’s head as she possibly turns the battle tide a final time. She has unleashed a lifetime of hurt feelings on her enemies. There is no single easy takeaway lesson here, which is cool. There are times when you should control yourself, and there are times when you need to let go. Melitele grant you the wisdom to know the difference.
3. Destiny
“People linked by destiny will always find each other” is an oft-repeated phrase in this show, and there’s no better time than the season finale to fulfill this prophecy. We witness spiritual links between our three heroes a few times throughout this episode. In Geralt’s hallucination he sees a miniature Borch the golden dragon who says “It’s magic, it’s not real” which Yennefer had just said to a lady at Fort Sodden. When Geralt and Ciri find each other in the woods, as Renfri foretold in episode one, Ciri asks, “Who’s Yennefer?” Ciri heard Geralt calling out to Yennefer in a dream. All three of them are linked by destiny, and one could argue Jaskier is linked to them too. Jaskier asked Geralt to accompany him to the party where Ciri became Geralt’s child surprise, and Geralt met Yennefer when he needed her to cure Jaskier of the djinn’s curse. Perhaps Jaskier will become a more prominent part of our three heroes’ joint destiny in future seasons.
Continued below4. Chaos and Destiny
The way Geralt and Ciri meet counterintuitively suggests that chaos is as responsible as destiny for bringing them together. Geralt saves a man’s life but is poisoned in the process. The man brings him home and, hilariously, invokes the law of surprise, promising Geralt that which he doesn’t yet know he has. It just so happens that this man’s wife had decided to adopt Ciri that very day, making Ciri Geralt’s child surprise a second time. When the man and Geralt arrive at the house, we the viewers expect Geralt and Ciri to meet here, but something, you might call it destiny, makes Ciri run into the woods just before Geralt arrives, and then I guess destiny causes Geralt to run into the woods. Is there a reason destiny wanted them to meet in the woods instead of in the house? Renfri did specify that Geralt’s destiny would be “the girl in the woods,” but meeting at the house feels more like destiny’s MO. Meeting in the woods despite being destined to meet at the house feels more like the result of a universe that is random and chaotic than a universe that is predestined. I will repeat a point I made in an earlier episode review: a lesser show would have you choose between chaos and destiny, but the world of The Witcher is one where both coexist, immutably true. Take that, Lost! Your ending was lame! Not that I’m still bitter.
5. I Guess This Time the Real Monster is… Your Mother
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 your mother.
I’m half-joking, but it’s a pithy and attention grabbing title, no? The longer and more correct version is that the real monster is the one we’ve created in each other through our own cruelty and/or neglect, and it just so happens that for our three beloved heroes, the monster within themselves was created by their cruel and/or neglecting mothers. We learn this episode through Geralt’s hallucinations that his mother sold him to the witchers when he was a small child. To become a witcher, he had to go through a trial, which only three out of ten little boys survive. To have been abandoned and left to a statistically likely death by his own mother hurt Geralt so deeply that to this day he has a great deal of difficulty allowing himself to feel loved, particularly by his best friend Jaskier.
Yennefer was betrayed by a father and two mothers. Her first mother did nothing but whimper when her father sold her to her second mother, Tissaia, for less than the price of a pig. Though she could be cold, Tissaia was good to Yennefer in many ways, but it’s impossible for Yen, or we the viewers, to forget that if it weren’t for Yen’s unearned well of magic juice, a.k.a. Chaos, Tissaia would have turned her into an eel, like she did to so many other vulnerable girls. Yennefer has since developed a cynical and ego-centric view of the world; since she has learned she cannot trust anyone else to take care of her, she will take care of herself before thinking of others.
Queen Calanthe is Ciri’s grandmother, though she has taken on the role of her mother since Princess Pavetta and Sir Duny died in a shipwreck. Queen Calanthe took care of Ciri both materially and emotionally, but ultimately harmed Ciri in her cruelty towards the Elves. Ciri is an empathetic person; to learn that her beloved grandmother committed genocide will continue to have a profound effect on her as she continues to process this incredible new understanding of the world.
This is not to say that our heroes’ mothers have made them into monsters. As we learned back in episode one from Geralt’s argument with Renfri, we’re all responsible for the choices we make, regardless of what happened to us or how we’re treated. Geralt has difficulty feeling loved, but that doesn’t stop him from loving others, or caring enough to help strangers in need. Yennefer thinks of herself as selfish, but she chose to fight for the northern kingdoms rather than join Fringilla in Nilfgaard and likely wield more political power, which is what she’s always wanted. Ciri hasn’t had the chance yet to make a lot of choices; she has instead spent this season falling into one catastrophe after another. So far we’ve only seen her origin story, but it’s safe to assume she will someday learn to control her magic screams, and then she will decide for herself whether to use her power for good or evil. That decision will be informed by her inner demons, but not controlled by them.
The main takeaway of this show is that humanity is the real the monster. We make monsters of each other, through cruelty and neglect. We all have monsters living in our hearts. We’re all capable of evil. But we always have a choice: we can become the monster within ourselves, or we can fight it. Our beloved heroes are confirmed to continue fighting in a second season, but we don’t know when that will be. Until that time, peasants, fight the monster within, and good luck on the path.
