After a nearly two-year-long wait, Henry Cavill’s ‘The Witcher’ season returned for its sophomore run this weekend on Netflix. The popular season one — albiet an exhausting one — saw intermingling timelines, convoluted concepts and a magic system that could leave the best of us scratching our heads. Season two takes a more relaxed and assured trajectory to telling a story, originally told as novels written by Andrej Sapkowski and later made famous again by a popular video game franchise.
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“This season, we’re really starting to think about how does magic impact us as humans?” showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told Syfy Wire in an interview earlier this year. “What decisions do we make for power? What do we sacrifice? More importantly, how does it hurt the people around us? This is the type of storytelling I’m really excited for because it becomes less about the mystical, magical world, and more about what happens when you start caring about other people.” Here’s everything you need to know about the show before you dig into season two:
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The Geralt-Ciri story: The sophomore season picks up with Geralt and Princess “Ciri” Cirilla (Freya Allan) travelling to the former’s childhood home of Kaer Morhen — an old keep where Witchers get trained. Assuming that Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) perished at the Battle of Sodden, Geralt turns his attention to protecting Ciri “from something far more dangerous: the mysterious power she possesses inside,” according to the official synopsis. Having claimed her before she was even born through ‘Law of Surprise’, we saw Geralt and Ciri unite at the end of season one. Season two sees their journey to trusting and learning to be around each other, as the Witcher starts to train the young princess of Cintra, with mysterious powers of her own.
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“There’s definitely some resistance to accepting the Witcher man into her life because [of] everything she’s gone through in season one,” Allan revealed in an interview with TV Guide. “She’s sort of holding that as a huge weight on her. I think her trust in people has plummeted because she’s seen how humans can be.”
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As for Cavill, he sees Geralt finally making some real growth in season two. “I didn’t want to show him as struggling with this concept of ‘I now need to protect someone.’ I think it’s something he wants to do and he’s good at,” Cavill told TV Guide. “It’s just about adjusting to the communication required between him and Cirilla. One thing I campaigned for was a more intellectual Geralt this season, a more book-accurate Geralt. So when we see him having this relationship, he’s not antagonistic. He’s not forcing her to answer questions. He’s recognising that she’s been through trauma. And he’s been through trauma himself, but rather than stealing her moment, he’s saying, ‘Look, I have nightmares too and things are tough. If you want to talk, I’m here to talk,’ without actually saying those words. It gives her an open space to move into.”
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Father figures abound: While Cavill’s Geralt is busy coming to terms with his role as Ciri’s adoptive parent, audiences will also be introduced to the Witcher’s own father figure — Vesemir (played by Kim Bodnia). “[Vesemir] lives in nature. He is a nature guy, so that was very important for me to have that grounding from nature. When you are together with Vesemir, you need to have peacefulness, so you can look inside yourself and get some answers out of it. That was the ground element. Together with Henry [Cavill], we are just trying to create that kind of emotional stuff, so he can feel free to show emotional stuff when he is together with his father figure. That was the ground base into everything,” said Bodnia about his character in an interview with Screen Rant.
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With Geralt and Ciri travelling to Kaer Morhen in season two, expect to find yourselves spending a lot of time with other Witchers and Vesemir. And for those who’d like a deep dive into Vesemir’s origin story, don’t miss out on the fantastic anime film, ‘The Nightmare of the Wolf’, now streaming on Netflix.
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Jaskier goes to a dark place: Actor Joey Batey’s joyful bard Jaskier will see some of his joy diminished but also gaining new responsibility in season two, the actor has said. “He feels more emotionally vulnerable, open, engaged, he’s also braver,” said Batey in an interview with Metro UK. “For the first time he’s risking his life to do something that is morally good, which is perhaps the first time he’s done this in his life, so that was really rewarding.” “We get to see Jaskier in his element, and then we get to see him very suddenly not in his element, and that wrong footing and that sort of feeling of being out of place and out of time in some points ends him in some real trouble,” he added.
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Yennefer strikes out on her own: Anya Chalotra’s Yennfer of Vengerberg was a fan favourite character by the end of season one. In season two, we meet the powerful sorceress after the Battle of Sodden Hill, where the Northern Kingdoms barely won the fight, thanks to Yennefer’s fiery sacrifice. “She’s the same Yennefer. She doesn’t take no for an answer. Where there’s a will there’s a way, that will never change. But there are a lot of things this season — or, people this season — that really change her perspective on things. So, you get deeper into Yennefer,” says Chalotra about her character in an interview with Digital Spy.
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Henry Cavill helped design his character’s armour for season two: Fans can expect to see Geralt don brand new armour in episode three of season two — ‘What is Lost’. “It’s a new look, and the redesign has made it a lot easier for me to move and fight,” Cavill told Netflix in an interview. “I helped to design [it] with our wonderful costume designer, Lucinda Wright, and we put a lot of work into it in quite a short space of time.” Explaining the new look, Cavill said, “Geralt had to find new armour, but he hadn’t had the opportunity to stop anywhere to buy armour or make it, so he delved into the dungeons of Kaer Morhen and found something very old and from a different era, but still serviceable,” Cavill continued.
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Production faced several setbacks: Shot at various locations in the UK, ‘The Witcher’ production faced several delays, including a full shutdown due to COVID-19. However, the shoot also suffered due to an injury sustained by lead star Cavill. The accident occurred when the actor was filming a scene that required him to be “20ft high in trees and on a safety harness at Arborfield Studios, Berks, where the show was filmed.” “The filming has been hit because of what happened to Henry. He was on an assault course and injured his leg,” an anonymous source told The Sun at the time. “He just suddenly pulled up and was clearly in a lot of pain. It wasn’t clear if an object had hit his leg or it was some sort of hamstring or muscle injury. It wasn’t bad enough to need an ambulance, but it’s messed up the filming schedule as he can’t walk properly. He has to wear heavy armour in the scenes and he just wouldn’t be able to do it with his leg injury.’”
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Season two sets up season three: In an interview with Polygon, Hissrich says season two is especially pivotal for ‘Blood Origins’, a prequel series set in the world of ‘The Witcher’, along with the direction for season three. “Viewers will notice we concentrate a lot on the elven storyline in season 2, which is not as prominent in [the main novel being adapted], ‘Blood of Elves’. And yet, I know that in season 3, we’re introducing the Scoia’tael, this army of elves that’s fighting on behalf of Nilfgaard. And they don’t come off so great. It’s a pretty sort of harsh, dark storyline. So I want to make sure that we understood and humanised their part of the battle. Where are they coming from? What are they fighting for? Even if they lose their way along the way. what is sort of their backdrop? So we’re constantly looking at the ‘Witcher’ as a whole.”
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Look out for ‘The Witcher: Blood Origins’ trailer: ‘The Witcher: Blood Origins’, a prequel series, will arrive in 2022 — and Netflix has dropped a first look at the series as a post-credits scene in season two’s final episode. The series is set in an elven world 1,200 years before the timeline of ‘The Witcher’. The series “will tell a story lost to time — the creation of the first prototype Witcher, and the events that lead to the pivotal ‘Conjunction of the Spheres,’ when the worlds of monsters, men, and elves merged to become one.” The cast is led by Sophia Brown (‘Giri/Haji’), Michelle Yeoh (‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’) and Laurence O’Fuarain (‘Vikings’), all playing elves.
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Did you know? Cavill famously fought to land the role of Geralt before ‘The Witcher’ even had a showrunner. In an interview with Netflix, he recalled, “I called my team and said, ‘Let’s get on top of this before anyone else jumps at the opportunity.’ ” However, he didn’t initially get the part. “They went through a full casting process, then came back to me, and it ended up working out in my favour. So I went from feeling heart-broken to feeling quite good about it. Now I try to do everything I can to represent Geralt in the best way possible.”
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