While some TV shows go with the flow, others have a clear plan in place. It would seem that The Witcher will be one of the latter as showrunner Lauren Hissrich told Collider that she knows precisely how the Netflix series will end.
“It has been my goal with my executives at Netflix to always have an endpoint in mind, because, to me, when you start just writing stories without knowing where they’re going, you can get lost,” Lauren Hissrich said. “And what I think is so interesting about what we have figured out, to answer your question in two ways, yes, I absolutely know where the series is going to end. I know what season it’s going to end, I know how it’s going to end, which is very, very exciting.” The Witcher has jumped around a bit when it comes to adapting the novels in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher saga, but Hissrich teased that the fifth novel, The Lady of the Lake, will be the last book covered in the series.
Lauren Hisserch added that just because you’ve read the novels, you don’t necessarily know where the story is headed.
I think a lot of people believe that you sort of go into a season of television saying it’s going to be this book, but clearly that’s something that we have not been able to do because there are some books that are like Blood of Elves, which Season 2 sort of loosely was based around. It didn’t have enough action to keep us going, so we ended up having to bring parts of Baptism of Fire into it. Parts of the earlier short stories, I mean Declan’s episode, “A Grain of Truth,” was what kicked off Season 2. So immediately we know that we have to be flexible with how the books are split up versus how the seasons are split up and Declan’s right. I’ve been sort of turning that in my head since the very beginning.
It was announced in October that Henry Cavill would also be stepping down from The Witcher, with Liam Hemsworth replacing him in the role of Geralt. But we still have one more season with Cavill in the lead role, and Lauren Hissrich has said that season 3 will serve as “the most heroic sendoff” for Henry Cavill’s Geralt. “Henry has given so much to the show and so we want to honor that appropriately,” Hissrich said. “Geralt’s big turn is about giving up neutrality and doing anything that he has to do to get to Ciri. And to me, it’s the most heroic sendoff that we could have, even though it wasn’t written to be that. Geralt has a new mission in mind when we come back to him in season 4. He’s a slightly different Geralt than we expected. Now, by the way, that’s an understatement.”
The Witcher season 3 won’t debut on Netflix until next summer, but the prequel series, The Witcher: Blood Origin, is now streaming. You can check out a review from our own Alex Maidy right here. How do you think The Witcher will end on Netflix?