The Witcher: Season 4 begins with a second pilot episode, which is both a blessing and a prime example of the major issues that have plagued the Netflix adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski's books.
As a positive, the first few episodes help the audience to get acquainted with Liam Hemsworth's version of Geralt. He steps in to take over from Henry Cavill, who left the series to pursue the now defunct Superman project.
To his credit, Hemsworth feels like he's always been here, which is no faint praise. He confidently slips into Geralt's mannerisms, bringing the character a tad closer to the books, where the misunderstood monster hunter was always more eloquent than the monosyllabic version in the games and prior seasons would have us believe.
It helps that Joey Batey, returning as Jaskier, could have chemistry with a tea kettle. He helps sell the illusion that none of the casting has changed, and his deep and complex relationship with Geralt is as compelling as ever.
Elsewhere, Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan start the season with enormous baggage from the last one, and much of the first few episodes are spent shedding excess plot lines and characters. Most of that is done with all the grace of a cow in a shopping trolley, and it's a shame to see a lot of Yennefer's potential go to waste even for a moment. Allan, too, has to struggle through some awkward reframing of story and character. But by the third episode, both finally get a chance to remind audiences of how good they are with the right material.
It's around that halfway mark where The Witcher finally finds its own rhythm. Characters start to sound like they should, the plot moves at a steady clip, and there are a couple of fantastic set pieces from the novels that get the attention they deserve. This still isn't a one-to-one adaptation, and it shouldn't be. The series is at its best when it does something unexpected while still keeping the emotional truth of the material in mind.
For example, a fan favorite siege isn't quite as spectacular as it is in the novels, yet it feels as thrilling in a different kind of way. When the dust settles, there's a sense that The Witcher might still find enough solid footing to make the rocky journey worthwhile.
One of the major things that Season 4 gets right is its framing. In the first episode, we're introduced to a young girl, Nimue, who pours over ancient stories of Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri. She's upset her friend, an aging storyteller, has got the tales so wrong. "It was over a hundred years ago," he responds. They've long since become legend.
It's a variation on Sapkowski's telling, where The Witcher eventually blended together with the Arthurian romances, and it works wonderfully to set the stage for the final two seasons. As with Season 1, The Witcher once again returns to the unpredictable nature of folklore and the cruelty of time. By framing the saga with a definitive end seen in retrospect from the far future, it gives the tale a sense of grandeur and scale it was always missing.
Granted, not all of it is perfect. The Witcher still struggles with past missteps, and it's why the first half of the fourth season takes a while to get going. In the past, it always felt like The Witcher was responding to audience demands and fan feedback, leading to major changes in style between seasons. This was always a bad choice, as fans are fickle and temperamental, especially when it comes to material retold over so many formats. To this day, many will attribute characteristics to Geralt as book-accurate when they only appeared in the games.
So, we once again wipe the slate clean. It's a brutally effective, if not graceful or clean way of fixing things. There's a character death early in the season that comes out of nowhere so quickly that I had to go back twice to make sure I saw it right. This kind of back and forth can quickly get tiresome, and it's frankly amazing that even after all of this, The Witcher is still captivating.
Season 4 isn't the finest outing of Netflix's Witcher to date, but it is still a fun and thrilling fantasy that is rarely boring, even when it muddles through some stuff. For most other series, changing the lead actor this far into the story would have been a death sentence. For The Witcher, it feels like a new beginning, and that's probably the most exciting thing of it all.
