The Witcher TV show, season 1, beware, here be Spoilers.

The Witcher TV show, season 1, beware, here be Spoilers.

  So I’ve finally managed to give the show a watch from start to finish. Twice for the purposes of this review. I’ll be clear about a couple of things upfront first off. I’ve not read the books and I’ve only played the second and third games, and loved them both. But I’m not about to compare this show to the games, and even if I had read the books, I wouldn’t be comparing the two either.
  But as a fan of the games, as a fan of the fantasy genre, I was looking forward to this show. I liked Game of Thrones, I wasn’t in love with it like other genre fans weas, or even people who weren’t fans of the genre who seemed to flock to it. And I wasn’t in love with it like fans of the books and short stories they were based on were.
  I liked it. It was good overall, turned some heads with it subversion of the genres typical troopes, kept managing to find some way to surprise viewers and looked truly beautiful, even when things got ugly.
  It had its flaws, and as the series progressed they became more and more apparent, nothing after all is ever perfect, but it did more right then it did wrong at its start, and that is a problem with the Witcher show.

The Good
  We had some really strong performances, Henry Cavil as Geralt has managed to find the right balance to show Gerlat as a truly three dimensional character, you know he’s putting on a show of toughness to hide his emotions, you can see he has a strong sense of right and wrong. He both manages to play tribute to the videogames actor, Doug Cockle’s vocal work, while at the same time making the voice of Geralt, as well as the role, very much his. This was a dream role for him and he campaigned hard to get it, and he’s worked very hard at it.
  Ciri is played to perfection by Freya Allan, showing an innocent and somewhat nieve young girl who is smart enough to know when she should or shouldn’t say anything and manages to survive by a combination of good luck, finding people to help her, and strength she never knew she really had, and gets smarter and more resourceful as her story unfolds with every increasing tragedy.
  Yennefer goes from powerless, hated, despised and bullied for her deformities and unable to cast magic despite having the ability to do so, to becoming one of the last people you’d want to cross. Seemingly brimming with confidence, even if it is just a facade. Anya Chalotra will make you feel sympathy for this troubled woman as she goes on her journey.
  And even the bit part players, whether it's the Queen of Cintra, her husband or court mage, Jaskier the baird (Who I keep wanting to get the nickname Dandelion at some point like in the games) are all played to perfection in their roles, bringing their characters to vivid life before our eyes.
So what are these flaws I hear you say?

The Ugly
  Well, let's get the obvious out of the way. The Nilfguardian armour. What on Earth were they thinking about with this design? It is horrible. It’s ugly, it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen in any historical document of medieval armours, or any previous fantasy series for that matter.
  It doesn’t get too distracting when it’s seen briefly in short cuts in battle sequence where you go from one group of fighters to another, but when you seen an extended shot of these armours in any situation, it just looks odd at best. At best, it’s almost like someone took armour,then added frilly clothing to the outside for some reason. At worst, to be as polite as possible, it looks like dried up wrinkled leather, painted black then left out in the sun far for too long.
  In an interview with IGN, the showrunners have explained the reason behind it’s look is due to the realities of war. If Cintra has 200 soldiers, Nilfguard has 20,000 and they are going to be making armour cheaply while on the move. They also wanted it to look different to the armour of their opponents, and look like they had soldiers coming from different lands. But in that case, shouldn’t the armour just look like that of several different forces thrown together?
  Seriously, couldn’t they have just made some metal armour with a different aesthetic and painted it black? That would be different looking enough to work as intended and not look like some horrible accident had happened to a group of test crash dummies.
  Thankfully we don’t see this armour too often so it’s a minor enough matter to overlook, the main issue the show has is something we’ll get to after another minor bug bear.

The Odd
  The magic system is seemingly self contradictory. Yennifer and her fellow students are taught their first lesson in magic, without being told of any of the dangers of magic. They are asked to make a rock move with the power of their minds and are offered no other instructions at all. None of them admittedly ask about the flowers also on their desk as well, and just go about trying it, with little success.
  That is until one student does manage to move her rock, only to have one of her hands shrivel up into a blackened waste. It’s only then that the teacher tells them about the dangers of what is basically, cause and effect and balance, and uses her flower’s life force to move her own rock.
  The damage thankfully isn’t permanent, or at least was fixed magically later, but the fact that this need for balance when using magic is drilled into them becomes moot as no magic user is seen observing this rule or law of magic later. If this is supposed to be some sort of lesson in itself about control and self preservation some sort of later clarification would have been nice.
  After all, even Yennifer, who's been failing at most of her studies manages to seemingly produce a lighting bolt out of nowhere to attack her abuser, having failed to catch one in a bottle just seconds before.
  It’s possible they have some sort of magical reserve to draw upon, but this is never clarified. But one mage does indeed keep summoning up sword after sword after sword during a prolonged sword fight with no penalty, until he runs out of whatever magical reserves he does have and shows no drawback to this other than exhaustion once he can’t do his party piece anymore.

The Bad
  The timeline is all over the place.  Just to use the first episode as an example, we see the fall of Cintra with Ciri being one of our main leads as we follow her escape from being captured and the journey that takes her on. Meanwhile in the episode Gerlat attempts to protect the people of Blaviken from an attack by bandits, which ultimately ends with Geralt earning his nickname of the Butcher of Blaviken and being run out of town.
  It’s subtle and easy to miss, but there’s a reference one of the characters makes to the Queen of Cintra (Ciris grandmother who dies in this very episode) having had a great recent victory, that if you do catch it, makes it clear the Blavakin scenes are a flashback, but we’ve had no help from the show to know this, no title card to tell us these two scenes are in different time periods.
  By the time Gerlat first meets Jaskier, once Jaskier realises just who Geralt is, he refers to Geralt as “butcher” which suggest the Blaviken fight happened recently.
  And it’s not till Jaskier mentions in a later episode that it’s been ten years since he last saw Geralt that you start to realise all is not what it seems as far as the timeline is concerned. OIr when the duo meet up with characters we’ve already seen die in the first episode.
  It gets even more awkward once Yennifer, now a fully fledged and powerful sorceress with her deformities now fixed thanks to a huge magical sacrifice on her part as part of her graduation, mentions to the queen she is meant to protect that she's been in this work for some ninety years that you end up realising just how disjointed this all is as you try to figure out just which part of which story is supposed to be set when.
  I applaud them for having the story spread out over different time periods, it’s a good idea, just very poorly executed.
  And this all confusion could have been avoided for the want of some cue that it was a different time, a simple card at the start of a scene to tell us what year it was.
  Hopefully in season two there won’t be any need of this, unless they want to have different parts of the story set in different periods again, in which case, please don’t repeat this mistake.
  In fact, if the showrunners went back and edited the episodes to add some title cards to show where and when certain scenes are, that ought to help anyone watching it from this point on. I’m not a fan of revisionist film making, but sometimes there can be a call for it.

The Writing
  There are occasionally story elements that just make little sense. There’s an episode where Jaskier catches up with Geralt whose fishing, seemingly moving from one point in the river to another at random but never catching any fish. Jaskiers inquiries to this eventually get a response from Geralt that he can’t sleep and he’s looking for a Djinn or genie to let him use its power to let him wish for sleep. No mention is ever made of how he knew there was a Djinn in the river or why he might not be able to sleep.
  Now yes we can make assumptions about all of this, and I for one encourage that people think about what seems to be plot holes rather than just dismissing a story away as being badly written without putting any further thought to it. But given the information we have here, it still seems a very odd setup whichever way I try to figure it out.
  Was this something he put there himself for some reason? Did he find a letter somewhere that hinted at its existence? Did he spot and lose sight of it?
  A few minutes of digging around though and it turns out they’ve taken one of the original stories from the books and short stories and modified it, for no real good reason that I can see.
  Originally the story had both men fishing for food and finding the Djinn by accident, which to be honest, sounds a better setup than Gerlat seemingly randomly hunting for it to let him get some sleep. Finding that out makes the changes seem very pointlessly sloppy.

So, overall?
  In short, while there is a very good story in place over the whole season, it’s clumsily put together in places, lumped together without any care in the world if we can follow it. Some better editing to tighten it up some more (not that the editing is bad as each sequence flows well in it’s own right) and even some text on screen telling us we’re in a different time zone would have easily solved this problem, preventing it from ever becoming so in the first place.
  But the fact that it’s not been caught onto that it might confuse people, leaves some stories confusing once you realise much later that it’s not that Ciri has been on the run for several years without aging, it’s just that the other scenes are from ten or even seventy or more years earlier, with no prior warning.
  It just makes the whole thing feel sloppy and ruins the flow of the narrative.
  The performances from all of the cast is solid, the special effects are all pretty decent, the fight scenes show the skill of the Witcher in action quite nicely, dominating anyone who comes across him with ease. The cinematography is very good in most scenes, except maybe some of the wider shoots on the battles. And on occasion you do wish the blocking on some characters had them standing in slightly different positions, just so they aren’t standing by themselves in the middle of the screen and dominating it the space too much.
  The music seems to play quietly for the most part, and while clearly not the same as the music from the games, does seem to be taking similar routes and cues to the games music, creating a nice atmosphere that suits the look of the show.
  This show had some very good potential, as so long as they don’t repeat the mistakes from this first season but learn from them and build on the strengths that the show already has, this could not just be a surefire hit, but it could be a very strong contender for the crown of fantasy TV series.