The Witcher is the Sword and Sorcery Epic Nerds Need Right Now

The Witcher. Courtesy of Netflix.

So, The Witcher. This show is weird as fuck. And you know what? Thank God for that.

The Witcher is a Netflix show that leverages the streaming giant’s multi-billion dollar balance sheet to pump obscene amounts of money into adapting a Polish sword and sorcery saga into a delightfully insane mini-series starring Henry Cavill as a mutated super warrior who hunts monsters and communicates mainly in grunts. To give you an idea of the flavor of this show, there are quite a few sex scenes involving a naked hunchback.

I must admit to a slight bias here - I love fantasy epics. Unfortunately, they don’t usually make it to the screen because they require very large budgets and very uncertain leaps of faith. In the past, when they have gotten made it’s often a cut-rate or otherwise poorly produced affair which leaves the impression that sword and sorcery as a genre for TV or film is basically shit. I’m thinking here of things like the movie Eragon, one of the worst films of the 20th century. Thankfully, the success of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones has ably demonstrated the truth of the counterfactual - fantasy epics can be extremely profitable, as long as they aren’t, you know, complete pieces of crap. It also helps, apparently, if they are based on existing and popular source material.

I had never heard of The Witcher before it dropped on Netflix but the books, and the video games based on the books, are apparently very popular. So with Netflix pouring money into the property, I thought this show had a fighting chance. Is it a masterpiece? No. Is it good old fashioned nerdlore brought to life in a way that works well enough? Hell yeah!

Let’s start with Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia. Cavill, since his days as Henry’s sidekick in The Tudors, has simply exuded movie star charisma. That is one of the reasons his limp and lifeless turn as Superman was so discombobulating. The man can just by his very nature command the screen. And that talent is on full display in The Witcher. It’s easy to chew scenery. One of the hardest jobs as an actor is to convey force and presence and charm and charisma with almost no words. Yet, he does it.

The second thing the show has going for it is its world-building. It has long been my belief that fantasy and sci-fi live and die by their world-building. It is everything. The characters are usually cardboard cut-out teenage fever dreams. The narrative should serve as a way to propel us through this intricate, fascinating world but need not do much more. If the world-building is there - that is, if the writer or the director or whoever can succeed at creating a fully immersive alternate reality - everything else will fall into place and you can forgive the stock characters and nonsensical plot. We don’t need complex character arcs or thematic resonance. Just build me a weird fantasy world that I will want to hang around in for a while. If the other stuff falls into place, that’s a bonus.

True to its roots, The Witcher builds a pretty good world. The plot is fairly nonsensical - especially the time jumps, since many of the characters don’t age. And the characters themselves, I couldn’t care less about most of them. Cavill carries the central performance through sheer force of will, and the rest of the show is propped up by the world-building. Why? Because the world of The Witcher is a strange and richly imagined fantasy land. So the fun of the series is exploring it and uncovering new things about this place like how the kingdoms are structured, what the rivalries are, how the magic works, and what kind of monsters there are. If the show can succeed at convincing the viewer they are in this world and exploring it, then it works.

This is a bit of a gamble, because if it doesn’t work you are left with a $200 million dollar piece of garbage where people from a land called Nilfgard run around talking to each other about made up magical creatures with equally weird names like Squornts and Bunlinkers. This is why the world-building really must do the heavy lifting - because if you aren’t willing to buy into that kind of magical fantasy nonsense, you’re never gonna get there. For me, anyway, I was totally sold on spending 8 hours watching a mutant weirdo named Geralt of Rivia wander around this world and I look forward to the second season.