The Witcher series (Netflix)

Enjoyed the show overall, having never played the games or read the books. Though I found the sudden time jumps a bit convoluted and unexplained most of the time. Was he imprisoned for long near the end? I wanted to know...it could have been years or half a day for all i know. The show needed more of the actual witcher though I thought, focused too much on the other people.
 
They are important events to show but they could have showed all of Ciri events in 1 whole episode in my opinion and then tie it in the finale.
Saw this on Twitter which I thought might help.
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Mak3R said:
Was he imprisoned for long near the end? I wanted to know...it could have been years or half a day for all i know.
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In that episode, Geralt is suspicious and wanders off and sees the fake Ciri bow to the real Ciri who is playing with friends.
In the first (??) episode, Ciri is playing with her friends and is fetched by a soldier. From this, I would say Geralt is imprisoned for less that 12 hours.
 
We enjoyed it also once we understood the timeline jumps as it was a little confusing for a while. I don’t get why they did not make it more obvious as they changed from one time period to another. Had they done that I think people would have liked it a lot more. They probably lost a lot of audience doing it the way they did.
 
I personally didn't find it that hard to follow, characters mention how much time has passed (Yen talking about how long she had been advising for example) and the Cintra timeline is pretty obvious given whether the city is under siege or not.
 
I would say it was kind of confusing, but not hard to follow - it felt like the uncertain timelines was completely intentional and used to create a bit of mystery/uncertainty... for the first few episodes the storylines were suitably detached that their place in the timeline made no difference but then the key things that made me realise what was going on were:

  • When it focused on that painting of the guy (Foltest? The chicken eating incest king guy) as a child in the abandoned house, then you saw the actual child dressed in the same outfit in the scene where Yennefer turns up "transformed" - showing that she was in a past timeline relative to Geralt
  • When Geralt turns up at the wedding with Jaskier and Ciri's Grandmother is there still alive and interacting with her daughter, showing that Geralt was in a past timeline relative to Ciri
  • Then the scene with Yennefer in the carriage where she simply blurts out the exposition "oh it's been 3 decades and I'm so bored" or whatever it was; so she has caught up towards Geralt
 
There's a number of anchor points, usually where characters are together, that you determine what happened before or after that. Though parts of the story that happen standalone are harder to pin down when they happened. For example, until I saw the above time line, I hadn't realised the law of surprise was prior to Geralt and Yenn meeting for the first time. Maybe there was though and I missed it or forgot it - Either way, it really doesn't matter all that much for the whole story. I don't think it was too difficult to work it out but, in my opinion, it did add unnecessary complexity to the story of trying to remember off hand comments from characters as to the passage of time to work out how they fit together.
 
Greboth said:
it did add unnecessary complexity to the story of trying to remember off hand comments from characters as to the passage of time to work out how they fit together.
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I think that's the key point really... what I was expecting to happen whilst the hints at the differing timelines were a bit less obvious was for something unexpected to play off of it (e.g. two characters shown to be in the exact same place and imminently about to cross paths but then they round that final corner and it's suddenly revealed that they're in the same place but not the same time, or similar)... it did at least provide something for the viewer to wonder about and figure out, it's just a shame it didn't have any more of a payoff than it did
 
Greboth said:
There's a number of anchor points, usually where characters are together, that you determine what happened before or after that. Though parts of the story that happen standalone are harder to pin down when they happened. For example, until I saw the above time line, I hadn't realised the law of surprise was prior to Geralt and Yenn meeting for the first time. Maybe there was though and I missed it or forgot it - Either way, it really doesn't matter all that much for the whole story. I don't think it was too difficult to work it out but, in my opinion, it did add unnecessary complexity to the story of trying to remember off hand comments from characters as to the passage of time to work out how they fit together.
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Henry Cavell explained on one of his interviews that they did that deliberately, because if they followed the books' chronology, you really wouldn't see Yennifer and Ciri until the end of the series. They wanted to bring those backstories forwards so that you met those characters earlier in the series, otherwise it would be just Geralt for the first series.

IIRC, in the first book you only see Yennifer in the Djinn/I can't sleep episode, and Ciri is only mentioned as an aside in the Law of Surprise story concerning her parents.
 
I find this really boring, none of the characters have any personality and the story is non existent.

Iv watched 2 Episodes so far, does it get any better?
 
Bounce said:
I find this really boring, none of the characters have any personality and the story is non existent.

Iv watched 2 Episodes so far, does it get any better?
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TBH the pay off for watching a lot of the episodes is in the final 2 episodes.
 
I enjoyed it.. jumped all over the place and was sometimes confusing to follow, but looking forward to season 2 (eventually).

I can't get that song out of my head....

..."Toass a coin to your witcher.... ooo aaaa"
 
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