It’ll be a while before production on the second season of Netflix’s The Witcher picks up speed again, but that hasn’t stopped the showrunner from teasing us with what’s to come.
To say that the first season of the new live-action adaptation was highly successful would be the understatement of the year. In the weeks following its debut, The Witcher instantly rose to prominence and became the streaming juggernaut’s most-watched original series, which is really something when you consider the popularity of, say, Stranger Things. As such, it’s safe to say that Netflix will stop at nothing to make sure that Henry Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia will remain the talk of every town in the foreseeable future. Alas, filming for the second season came to a halt amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but if the latest reports are anything to go by, the crew are looking forward to continuing production in August.
Despite stealing our hearts, though, Lauren S. Hissrich’s new show wasn’t without its fair share of flaws. The first few episodes, in particular, drew criticism for their convoluted and confusing timelines. Of course, when you consider the fact that the first two books were essentially a collection of disconnected short stories, the decision to separate the timelines becomes as inevitable as it is sensible. This is something the showrunner has repeatedly talked about and now, in a recent interview, she once again assured fans that the upcoming season will be a lot less confusing.
When explaining the controversy of season 1 and how they’ve addressed it in the upcoming season, she said:
“Obviously, it was one of the most controversial parts of Season 1 and I didn’t expect it to be as controversial as it was. But it’s something I still stand behind, in terms of storytelling… What’s great though is [the characters] have intersected now. So what we’ll see in Season 2 is that all of our characters are existing on the same timeline. What that allows us to do storywise though is to play with time in slightly different ways. We get to do flashbacks, we get to do flash-forwards, we get to actually integrate time in a completely different way that we weren’t able to do in Season 1.”
The executive producer also teased the introduction of more Witchers, who include Geralt’s mentor and father-figure, Vesemir.
“Probably my favorite additions for Season 2 are the new witchers,” she continued. “Really, in Season 1, we got to know Geralt and he’s our prime example of a witcher. And then there is one other witcher, Remus, who we meet in Episode 103, who quickly dies. So it was, for us really, about getting Geralt back to his roots and sort of learning where he came from and what his story is and what his sense of family is.”
If you’re a fan of Henry Cavill’s White Wolf, then that’s definitely something to look forward to until the next season of The Witcher arrives sometime in 2021.