by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
Few franchises could use a win right now more than Netflix’s The Witcher.
Which is odd, if you consider the previous entries.
Both seasons of the show on the streamer and the prequel animated film, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, have been generally well-received. However, the recent news that Liam Hemsworth will be taking over as Geralt from fan-favorite Henry Cavill after Season Three had the internet up in arms. Hence, the awkward situation they find themselves in: in desperate need of a win as the prequel miniseries, The Witcher: Blood Origin,dropped on Christmas, despite arguably three entries on the positive side of the ledger.
Unfortunately, this ain’t it.
The series, travels back in time more than a millennium before the events of the show — we follow a misfit band of seven outcasts who band together in the time before humans arrived on the world and elves reigned to stop a deadly threat, resulting in the creation of the monster-hunting witchers.
The major flaw here is pretty simple: To quote Remember the Titans, both in tone and words, “I do not care.” The show tries to give us an in by using Jaskier (Joey Batey) being told the tale as a framing device for the narrative, but that doesn’t solve the problem that I don’t really care about these protagonists. Not even Michelle Yeoh can save this mess. It’s not just our heroes. I found the villains here to be cartoonish caricatures. As someone whose main exposure to the franchise is the Netflix offerings, I found I could buy in to Nightmare of the Wolf, but found myself scrambling for a foothold here.
The show tries to make a joke about the fact that it’s another Seven Samurai ripoff, which I’m usually unbothered about (I mean, Star Wars basically does one in every television series they produce), but here, trying to poke fun at it just draws attention to the relatively stale structure. Even at just longer than three hours, short for a miniseries by Netflix standards, the four-episode arc seems to drag. Perhaps that is because I knew I was done with it before the premiere episode’s credits ran.
Lack of buy-in isn’t the miniseries’ only flaw, however. What was perhaps most shocking to me was what a step backwards this was on a technical level. As I said with my review of Season Two of the main show, I felt that the visual effects for the second season were an improvement over the first season. Blood Origin, however, reminded me less of the previous seasons of The Witcher,and more of the Merlin series from the late 2000s and early 2010s. While those effects worked for what they were at the time, and given the network TV budget, we’ve come to expect more from our modern streaming television. Here, the visuals come off as laughable at times. Even the fight choreography, which always supplies creative and “wow” moments in the main series, is bland and unoriginal — and need I remind you once again THEY HAD MICHELLE YEOH. Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm can be partially laid at the feet of the fact I wasn’t invested in the characters, but I tried to search for some semblance of the creativity that’s become part of the franchise’s calling card and came away empty.
If Netflix execs were hoping that they could count on this bingeable morsel to get them back in the good graces of the fervent fanbase, of which I don’t even count myself among, the fact that this is flat should raise alarms.
Given the toxic nature of online fandom anytime you have a person of color leading your cast, and the recent controversy over the recasting of Geralt, it would be easy for execs to blame that toxicity for this spinoff failing; but to do so would be a mistake. There are real, tangible issues here. It feels as though the streamer thought they could coast by on name recognition, and in doing so, they forgot that they actually needed to put something quality on screen.
If you were looking for a bloody good time over your holiday break, you’d be better off spending your time elsewhere and leaving this pale, lifeless corpse of a show to rot.
Score: 4/10
The Witcher: Blood Origin is currently streaming on Netflix
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