The Witcher season 2 sets up season 3, says creator

If The WitcherSeason 1 shows a chessboard. Season two is where the actual chess matches begin. Also, Netflix’s new season sets up dominos that will fall across spinoffs like Blood OriginFuture anime and previously approved projects Witcherseason 3. There’s probably a solitaire metaphor to be made somewhere, but The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich doesn’t want you to peg her for a mundane-game-enthusiast-turned-TV-titan. She’s just very excited to bring her Witcher dreams to life.

“The thing that I never counted on when I started the show,” Hissrich tells Polygon, “is the fact that we would start building out a universe. It was not what I had in mind. I did not come into this thinking like, ‘I want the Witcher to take over the world!’ But there are so many stories that we haven’t been able to get to in what we call the ‘mothership’ that feel like they’re best explored either in another format […]This could possibly last for a while, I believe. There are many. Lot of stories to tell.”

The Witcher It was premiered to great reception in December 2019. Game of Thrones’ political machinations (not to mention the HBO series’ polarizing ending). The second season of Season 2 sees stories come together and a wider picture emerges. Geralt (Henry Cavill), Princess of Cintra, has gone off Kaer Morhen, while Ciri (Freya Allen), is training. Yennefer [Anya Chalotra] is now on the run, fleeing from a few factions, as she heeds a greater cause. The power balance in The Continent shifts with the rise of Nilfgaardians.

Hissrich didn’t imagine overseeing several series in the Witcher Netflix Universe. It now features the core show and an anime spinoff. Nightmare of the WolfThe 2022 Prequel Miniseries Blood OriginsYou can also find more obscure projects like a show aimed at the young audience. The second season is a breeding ground for many of the new ideas. It swaps nonlinear storytelling in favor of parallel action. Hissrich believes season 2 is particularly pivotal. Blood OriginsThis is in addition to the pre-planned direction of season 3.

Kevin Baker/Netflix

“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. Therefore, I wanted to ensure that we fully understood their battle and made them feel human. From where are they? Where are they coming from? They will not lose their way. Their backdrop is what? So we’re constantly looking at the Witcher as a whole.”

The WitcherSeason 2 saw an increase in production starting February 2020. Three weeks later, COVID-19 made Netflix stop producing. The momentum to bring back the fantasy properties was lost. Hissrich felt defeated.

“That part was Terrible,” she says, “because we’d got the gang back together, and it’s all working, and then you’re like, ‘Go home.’”

The only thing that made the worst scenario possible was the possibility to revisit the scripts and compile them into the greatest Witcher saga. “I got to revisit all of the scripts,” Hissrich says, “and more importantly, I got to read them as an eight-hour movie and make sure that we were telling the right stories at the right time, make sure that we were taking every opportunity that we could.” So the showrunner revised and added to Geralt’s dialogue, fulfilling Cavill’s request for a little more verbal expression in the season. Yennefer’s storyline, a source of “pure creation and invention” for the staff, was threaded into the plot of Witcher novelist Andrzej Sapkowski’s story with even more care. And smaller characters, like Ciri’s elven refugee pal Dara (Wilson Radjou-Pujalte), was elevated from a more casual background player to a provocative player in the grand scheme of the drama. “It’s not that Dara has a huge story in season 2,” Hissrich says, “it’s just that the handful of scenes he’s in mean that much more now.”

Kevin Baker/Netflix

Hissrich says season 2 “looks so much different” than she could have expected, and, well, that’s a global pandemic for you. However, Witcher was able to adapt in a variety of ways thanks to its flexibility.

“There are stories that we think are going to take a long time and they don’t,” she says. “Or we think that this is a story that we can just dip in and out of. It’s not true. We have to give it more screen time. That’s why we have never just stuck to a single book a season. That’s sort of our goal. However, anyone who has read the books knows that there is a lot of shifting between seasons. Because we want to make sure that we have the space and time to tell the more important stories.”

And perhaps the most important stories this time around aren’t the grand gestures of world-building and lore-spinning. They’re the nooks and crannies a season 2 can offer to a character-obsessed creator like Hissrich, who really just wants to see her faves be human.

“We get to delve deeper into our favorite characters in season 2. And I don’t just mean revealing more about who they are or peeling back layers. That’s really important, but we actually took the time this season to have scenes with people that weren’t necessarily about forwarding plot. They get to sit down with us and have time to get to understand each other. We also get to get to get to learn more about them. That’s the biggest shift in season 2.”

Imagine the scenario where the pawns, bishops and rooks could just hang out and stop knocking each others over. That’s The WitcherSeason 2. Season 2.

“I don’t think that the stories of the mothership, the main Witcher show, should extend beyond Sapkowski’s novels,” Hissirch says. “I just feel like he expected the stories to end in a specific place and I want to honor that.”

But as the showrunner notes, “Andrzej is continually writing new books. So we’re like, OK, let’s readjust. Let’s figure that out again.”