The Witcher is a maverick, a lone wolf, a loose cannon who won’t play by the rules. “He knows no fear,” gasps an underling as the Witcher looks at a horse and frowns, fearlessly. But the Witcher is preoccupied. The winds of change howl around his thigh boots and perturb the weave of his wig. “Your silence is especially loud today, Witcher,” observes sidekick Milva (Meng’er Zhang), as the Witcher – who, for the purposes of drama/HMRC, is also known as Geralt of Rivia – frowns at another horse. But the Witcher/Geralt doesn’t want to talk about why he doesn’t want to talk. Not because the most recent instalment of the beloved Netflix series with which he shares a name saw his family rent asunder by the forces of darkness (although, to be fair, this probably hasn’t helped). But because the wandering monster-hunter has awoken in season four of The Witcher to find he is no longer being played by Henry Cavill, upon whose mountainous shoulders rested the first three seasons of this unapologetically preposterous fantasy-drama. Instead, Geralt is now Liam “Younger Brother of Chris” Hemsworth, who used to be in Neighbours. In a very real sense: strewth.
The metamorphosis clearly weighs heavily on Geralt, who spends the first episode of the new series flaring his nostrils and peering anxiously into the middle distance, as if concerned Harold Bishop might suddenly appear from behind a shrub and club him with a mace. The maverick’s malaise is understandable: Cavill’s are big thigh boots to fill, the actor’s granite-jawed charisma providing an often deeply confusing show with its near-monosyllabic anchor. But now, with Cavill off to brood in pastures new, the final two series of The Witcher (the oversized rubber axe is poised to fall at the end of season five) must look to Hemsworth’s flaring nostrils for their protagonism. How fares the extraordinarily violent fantasy-drama in the wake of such a seismic regeneration, my liege? Let us clamber aboard a faux-medieval horse and head into the rugged wilds of season four to search for clues.
