The first season of Netflix’s smash hit fantasy series “The Witcher” was famed for sticking mostly to its core three characters – Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer.
The move was understandably out of necessity due to the first season’s complicated structure involving multiple timelines crossing at different points before ultimately intersecting and bringing the characters all together.
In a recent interview with The Wrap, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich confirms that the new season won’t indulge in such a narrative puzzle this time around though you can expect flashbacks and flashforwards:
“Obviously, it 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.
What’s great though is they have intersected now. So what we’ll see in Season 2 is that all of our characters are existing on the same timeline.
What that allows us to do storywise though is to play with time in slightly different ways. We get to do flashbacks, we get to do flash-forwards, we get to actually integrate time in a completely different way that we weren’t able to do in Season 1.”
The first season also emphasised the lone-wolf aspect of Henry Cavill’s central character of monster hunter Geralt of Rivia. That changes with the second season will include other witchers from his brotherhood:
“When I talk about ‘The Witcher,’ I always talk about how these three characters come together – Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer – they come together as a family. It’s the most important part of the series for me. And when you start to imagine someone’s family, you also need to understand their family of origin. Sometimes that’s a mother and father, sometimes that’s blood relatives.
For Geralt, it’s his brothers, it’s the brotherhood of the witchers. So I’m really excited to get back in and meet Vesemir, his father figure, for the first time and all of these men that he was raised with since he was seven years old.”
One of the things Hissrich is most looking forward to is exploring the relationship between Geralt and refugee princess Ciri more, the pair’s father-daughter like bond really getting to flourish:
“What I think is really fun about Geralt and Ciri is they are the most unexpected family you can imagine. 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? And 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. And 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.”
The series is expected to resume production later this Summer ahead of a premiere probably around mid-late 2021. Kim Bodnia (“Killing Eve”) and Kristofer Hivju (“Game of Thrones”) join the cast for the new episodes.
