Bottled Appetites

The Witcher succumbs to the spell of a lustful witch, but not for long

I liked the Geralt part, it's pretty similiar to the book, Jaskier it's perfect and Cavill is always very good as Geralt. It's a decent episode that start to bring things together. What i didn't like it's the Ciri part: it contain a very big discrepancy from the source material, and create a random new bad guy, just to avoid using certain characters as the moral grey area obstacle in the future for Geralt (on the contrary, here are used as a source of wisdom). This show continue to be goodish, but bittersweet, because with a little more effort it could have been better.

It was not a bad episode, but we've passed half of the season and things stiil aren't clear to me. The antagonist, that is clearly the Black Knight, is not intimidating, not for me, and we seen so much little of him, I wonder if he'll be developed or will be just the bad guy. Two timelines crossed finally, it was a good moment with Geralt and Yennefer, and Ciri's arc is really uninteresting. If there's one thing that is constatly great in this series, is the photography, and watching it in Ultra HD is a good experience. I expect more from the writing and I hope the last three episodes does some justice.

I am still somewhat confused and there are so many plot holes. I was thinking I would read the book, so it could fill in the gaps, but that does not even interest me now. I am going to rough it out because of all the hype, but I am having a hard time finding any interest in the story or the characters. I suspect all the RAVE reviews are from book readers. They will love the show no matter what. As for going in cold turkey, enter at your own peril . Haha! ;-P

From the score I can see that a lot of people seemed to like this episode, but for me this felt like the first slip in an otherwise solid season. The plots of previous episodes have had events unfold in a way that felt very organic given the rules of the world and the personalities of the characters. So things may have been fantastical, but it was easy to suspend disbelief and imagine that it could have happened the way they portrayed it.

But in this episode felt like the writers needed everyone to get from A to B so they just kind of had people do stuff to make it happen, even if it wasn't consistent with previous behavior. Geralt, who was in previous episodes an extremely practical person, has a rather straight forward problem. But instead of trying to solve it in a straight forward way, he suddenly decides to try an absurdly over-the-top solution. It makes so little sense that they even felt the need to have one of the other characters comment on it, pointing out that Geralt's actions didn't seem in line with someone trying to solve his problem.

The other issue I had was with Yennefer, who started out as a sympathetic character earlier in the season but really becomes borderline unlikable here with her constant self-pity and cynicism and an overall "me first" attitude. Her character doesn't feel in the right place for establishing the beginning of the epic story her and Geralt are creating in the lore of the world. But despite that other characters like the bard just do a complete 180 and immediately get on board with lofty proclamations by the end that seem disjointed and unearned.

Needless to say, this is just all my opinion, and I'm still loving the first season, but for me I wasn't crazy about the flow of this episode.