The Season 4 of Netflix’s The Witcher has released and it is terrible by all accounts. Viewers had low expectations after the departure of Henry Cavill but the show failed to meet even these standards by a country mile. It’s not surprising in the least. And the comments from showrunner Lauren Schmidt-Hissrich explain perfectly everything that went wrong with the show.
When the main attraction of the show decides to quit because of the direction the show is going in, you know as a viewer that the final product is going to be pretty terrible. Only Henry Cavill made watching the first season of The Witcher worthwhile. Midway through the second season, even his charisma could not rescue the wretched potion Lauren Schmidt-Hissrich had concocted.
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Henry Cavill was the driving force behind The Witcher series. He is a huge fan of the novels and the video game the show is based on. His co-stars have often said that he was the most knowledgable person on the world of Witcher in the entire team. He would regularly offer his insights as a fan. The show-makers, however, were not impressed.
Fans had complained from Season 1 itself that the show was basically unrecognisable from the Andrzej Sapkowski novels. They had given up on it a couple of episodes into Season 2. By Season 3, it was clear to everyone that the show is a disaster. And before long, Henry Cavill decided it was not worth his time.
Interestingly, Cavill had signed up for the project on the sole condition that it will be a faithful adaptation. Well, he should have known better. 21st Century Politics makes it impossible for a faithful adaptation of any Epic Fantasy series. Notably, The Witcher is not the only Epic Fantasy that has failed monumentally recently.
Amazon Prime and The Wheel of Time Catastrophy
Amazon cancelled the The Wheel of Time adaptation earlier this year after its third season received a lukewarm reaction from fans. Fans agreed that Season 3 was the best show had to offer. But the first two seasons were so off the mark it was impossible to turn its fortunes around.
More than any other show this decade, The Wheel of Time was the greatest victim of 21st Century Politics. The show-runners were simply not interested in making a faithful adaptation. Robert Jordan’s world is one of the most loved in the genre. However, it is the very antithesis of prevailing political dogma.
The Wheel of Time, at its core, is Rand al-Thor’s story. There are others great characters who are fan favourites. But in the end, it his story. He is the protagonist. The main story revolves entirely around him. Other characters play crucial roles, many of them women, but he overshadows all of them as the protagonist.
Rand al-Thor is perhaps the most complicated protagonist ever written in Epic Fantasy. He embodies the ‘Chosen One’ tropes but subverts them in other major ways. He is the most powerful ‘channeller’ (magician) in the world. However, he is teetering on the verge of madness for the overwhelming majority of the series.
The show-runners decided to make the entire show about the women in the series. The women in Robert Jordan’s world hold great power and play a very important role. Indeed, only women could perform magic publicly before Rand burst on to the scene. The women magicians imprisoned and, most often, killed their male counterparts because the latter were too dangerous.
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The show-runners could have definitely adapted the novels faithfully if politics did not cloud their vision. They could have avoided some bits, like the fact that Rand married 3 women later on. It would not have altered the overall story. However, they decided to make the entire series about the woman. It is crazy but true, Rand became a side character in his own story.
The show went so far that they literally handed over Rand’s victories to the female characters. Rand’s demonstration of power which established his strength within the first three books of the 14-novel series, which were extremely important for his character development, all of them were given over to the female leads on the show.
Viewers who have not read the novels have no idea how strong Rand really is even after 3 seasons of the show. Because the makers rob him of everything in the first 3 or 4 books that demonstrate the massive power differential between him and the rest.
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Imagine an attempt to adapt the Harry Potter novels. But instead of Harry Potter, it’s Hermione Granger and Ginny Weasley who score all the wins against the Death Eaters. Imagine The Philosopher’s Stone movie where Harry Potter is off on a side quest with Ron while Hermione and Professor McGonnagall thwart Quirrell and Voldemort. Imagine The Chamber of Secrets where Harry is unconscious after the Basilisk attacks him and Hermione rescues him and defeats Tom Riddle.
The Goblet of Fire? Voldemort has imprisoned Harry. Hermione along with Cho Chang go the graveyard and saves Harry Potter. That is what the show-runners did to Rand al-Thor. Even in the posters, the makers give more prominence to Moiraine than Rand.
The Witcher is a victim of Politics, like The Wheel of Time
I have to admit that I gave up on The Witcher Season 4 after the first episode. And I don’t plan on watching it any further. It was difficult to get through the episodes after the first season itself. But Henry Cavill’s portrayal of Geralt made it endurable. Season 4 does not even have that.
Season 3 of The Witcher made me realise that it suffers from the same plague as The Wheel of Time. It never felt like this was Geralt’s Story. The books and even the show are literally titled ‘The Witcher’. So you cannot blame me for assuming that this is Geralt’s story.
The show-runners, again, decided to make the show almost all about Ciri and Yennefer, relegating Geralt to the status of a side character. But the worst part was that Ciri and Yennefer are not even unique characters. They were again the same garden-variety ‘Girl bosses’ that we see in almost every fantasy and sci-fi movies and show at this point.
Yennefer is one of the most bland female leads I have come across in recent times. The actress does a decent job but she can only do so much. The show-makers made everything convoluted without any good reason at all. Even after 3 seasons of The Witcher, I could not tell you much about the show other than that Ciri is the fulfilment of some prophecy.
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The books were originally written in the Polish language. Andrzej Sapkowski imbues the books with Polish folklore and culture. That is one of the USPs of the world The show-runners decided to remove all of that. Instead, what we get is the same old mishmash of diversity for the sake of it.
The Witcher makes it clear that film-makers and studios these days simply do not want to make adaptations with an out-and-out male lead. The humiliation of Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, the gender changes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, although not Epic Fantasy, they point towards a larger trend.
Of course, who could forget what the $1 billion garbage Rings of Power? This is the most expensive show ever. And there’s no other way to way describe it. It fails for the same reasons that The Witcher and The Wheel of Time failed.
Game of Thrones: The Greatest Victim of them all
Liberal Politics destroyed one of the greatest shows ever made. No one could conjure a worse ending for Game of Thrones than Season 8. It is hard to imagine even Doctor Strange finding an ending worse than that across the multiverses. Seriously, it was just terrible. Even the actors in the show know how bad it was.
While one can argue that more than liberal politics, the show failed because the makers lost interest. However, the writers deliberately invented insane plot lines to make ‘girl bosses’ the central characters at the cost of others. Again, how on earth could Arya ever kill the Night King? What happened to the Azor Ahai prophecy? Why is saying ‘She is my queen’ the only real role Jon have in Season 8?
Daenerys, Cersei, Arya and Sansa dominated Season 8. And they did so at the cost of the male leads. It is a recurring theme that it is not enough for the show-makers to boost the female leads. They must humiliate, castrate and marginalise the male leads.
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House of the Dragon had a very promising start in its first season. The second season was not as good but still a lot better than anything else in the genre. But that is not surprising since the book itself has a woman as the main character. In many ways, it is a women-centric story.
My only words for people in the industry is that representation and the rest is well and good. But if you want to make women-centric shows, then write new women-centric stories. You don’t have to bastardise what already exists for that. And write diverse personalities for women characters.
Women protagonists in these new age shows all feel the same. They are essentially the same people with context-specific characteristics. It just makes them boring. If studios and producers do not learn lessons from these big budget failures, then they never will.
