THE WITCHER: BLOOD ORIGIN — Simply Redundant!

The arrival of the world and story of The Witcher, created by Andrzej Sapkowski, in Netflix’s hands made this saga yet another major brand in the contemporary film and television market, along with all the blessings and curses that come with such a fact. The Witcher: Blood Origin

One of the features of today’s industry is its tendency to expand the base story into various spin-offs, sequels, and prequels in order to build a broader franchise or universe that extends the range of cultural products that can be sold in connection with a popular brand. In this context—of an almost blind drive to build a universe of interconnected stories—the creation of The Witcher: Blood Origin, the second prequel to the classic Witcher saga after the animated The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, should be understood.

A free prequel

While Nightmare of the Wolf took us to a not-so-distant past, showing the fall of the Witcher School of the Wolf, that is, Geralt’s kind of origin story, the series signed by Declan De Barra is a journey into a much more distant past—back to the times when the Continent was ruled unchallenged by elves at the height of their power—showing how the famous Conjunction of the Spheres came to be, an event that brought monsters into the world and created witchers to protect people from them.

From the perspective of storytelling, this meant above all that Blood Origin was freed from the burden of maintaining faithfulness to the literary original—the story the series was meant to tell amounts to just a few mentions in Sapkowski’s saga, so the creators had the freedom to shape the ancient reality of the Continent and build the story from scratch. This journey into the unknown, however, is strongly anchored in the main narrative by means of a framing device established in the opening scene of The Witcher: Blood Origin—the entire story is told to no one other than Jaskier, as a one-of-a-kind tale that sheds new light on the past, present, and future.

This starting point is quite intriguing and refers to the motif of unreliable narration so prominent in Sapkowski’s works. Unfortunately, apart from allowing narration from off-screen, it doesn’t seem to have much significance—the events are not questioned through this frame, we see no trace of complication—there’s simply a cameo of a popular Witcher character and an easy way to introduce the context.

Generic fantasy

All right, but maybe what’s in the story itself can hold up as a cool intrigue set in the world of The Witcher? Not really. The entire Blood Origin boils down to showing, to quote Jaskier, that the first witcher was a badass elf. And that’s it—nothing of substance comes from this. There’s no recontextualization of the witchers’ order or their place in the depicted world, no reflection on interspecies relations, no nuance in the Continent’s history, no meaningful conclusion. Unless we count as such the trite phrases solemnly delivered, like those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, or the heavy-handed remarks about corruption through ambition and power.

The story itself is announced as extraordinary and unprecedented, while in fact it is painfully formulaic—a group of seven brave souls, despite their differences, unite to face the evil empress of an empire and treacherous mages in a battle for the fate of the world and the well-being of its inhabitants. Oh, and along the way, there’s some dimension-hopping and the creation of an uber-warrior (the prototype of a witcher). That’s basically all you need to know, and the ending is exactly what you can predict before the story even properly begins.

Virtually all the elements and characters created in Blood Origin are so generic that they’re negligible. We’re given a few scraps of context in the form of elven clans, rival nations, clumsily outlined class structures of their societies, and magical experiments. Yet all of this is derivative not only of what we already know from The Witcher, but it seems taken straight out of some beginner’s guide to fantasy. What’s more, it lacks Sapkowski’s trademark playfulness with overused conventions and tropes—everything is epic, dramatically serious, and kitschy. This applies as well to the aesthetics of set design and makeup.

While during the fairly well-executed first season of The Witcher it seemed the creators were searching for their own style, balancing on the edge of camp, Blood Origin shows that they simply cannot move beyond a handful of clichés borrowed from the 1980s and 1990s. There’s no sense of a different era, not even much sign that we’re watching elven rather than human culture. The world once again tragically fails to breathe, and what we see is not so much a concept specific to this universe as a bland cliché—a visualization of a stereotypical high-fantasy setting, which The Witcher never truly was.

And if it were meant to be, it should at least be competent within that convention—whereas in Blood Origin, as after two episodes of the main show’s second season, everything falls apart and looks like strange fan fiction made without heart or skill, epitomized by the supposedly central artifacts of interdimensional travel, the nightmarish monoliths—perhaps the worst thing conceived not only in this universe, but in fantasy overall in recent years, including the final season of Game of Thrones.

A lopsided script

While the series based on the source material still held up thanks to strong characters and fairly clear motivations, Blood Origin lacks that support. The only character even minimally interestingly sketched—and somewhat central—is Éile, called the Lark: a former warrior turned bard. In her narrative line lie the seeds of a potentially sound story in which a heroine fleeing her past must face its demons and confront danger on behalf of a greater cause, making compromises with her own prejudices and emotions. But that’s only what could have been, because in Blood Origin we hear far more about what the Lark supposedly feels or is than we actually see.

Beyond her, perhaps only the warrior-mentor played by Michelle Yeoh, the vengeance-driven dwarf, and Fjall, the exiled imperial soldier, remain somewhat memorable. The rest of the fellowship, as well as the characters on the opposing side, are mere figures whose existence you forget the moment they leave the screen. It also doesn’t help that the writers forcibly stitch connections between Blood Origin and the main saga, leaving open threads that foreshadow elements appearing later, without saying anything new or interesting.

Narratively, Blood Origin is paradoxical—nearly three-quarters of its runtime is devoted to exposition and explaining what or why something happens, yet no storyline gains color, none rises above being merely a pretext, none develops enough to require more than three sentences to summarize. The fact that the miniseries was cut in editing from six to four episodes certainly didn’t help, as it must have forced the removal of scenes that would have allowed it to breathe more. However, honestly, I doubt that extending the series by two hours would have changed much.

Because even though there isn’t enough time for meaningful dramatic development—usually condensed into explanatory dialogue—there is room for completely unnecessary (but ticking the boxes of standard generic fantasy) love subplots. The time wasted on banal filler like a romance between two characters or a forbidden courtly affair means that the real action must unfold in haste, without healthy narrative rhythm. That, after all, is the main problem with the script—everything is declared in dialogue, and very little is conveyed through actual storytelling. As a result, despite a few decent fight scenes, the whole thing is strikingly static and dull. And that’s despite the story buckling under the weight of its numerous characters and events.

As a result, Blood Origin is a series in which it’s truly hard to find positives, failing on every front. The aforementioned Nightmare of the Wolf, a feature-length stand-alone, could have signaled an interesting direction for Netflix’s development of The Witcher world—a network of loosely connected, stylistically varied productions surrounding the main course, the series with Henry Cavill as Geralt. Personally, after that film’s release, I was quite optimistic. Then came the disappointing second season of The Witcher, followed by more turmoil ending with Cavill’s departure from the project he headlined. Blood Origin, instead of saving the franchise, giving it new energy, and showing that beyond the main story Netflix could offer something fresh and free from comparisons to the books and games, drove yet another (last?) nail into the coffin of Netflix’s The Witcher.

The miniseries proves that the people behind the project truly do not grasp the strengths (or the mythical spirit) of the material they’re working with, have no compelling vision for this world, and simply cannot craft an interesting, well-executed story. As part of a larger puzzle, the miniseries is simply redundant; it doesn’t hold up as a standalone story either, merely feeding off a popular universe. Even with the bar continually lowered, it remains a major disappointment, because there’s still plenty of fun to be had with The Witcher’s world, even at the level of loose inspiration. But you need a good idea for that.