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It is fairly common knowledge at this point that Henry Cavill will be hanging up his silver sword and white wig to pass the torch to Liam Hemsworth in Netflix's The Witcher following the show's current season. How, exactly, that happens is unclear, but it increasingly looks like the show is going to lean on the most boring narrative crutch possible instead of simply accepting it's a soap opera.
Basically, while it is not yet definitive, all signs point to Season 4 of Netflix's The Witcher pulling some kind of multiversal shenanigans in order to narratively justify the swap of its leading actor. That's not just me speculating; folks involved with the show have essentially said as much.
"This is a very little thing that I will tease - people who know the books really deeply also know that this is not a typical fantasy book. It's not just one world. It's not just one story happening in those books, in those stories," The Witcher executive producer Tomek Bagiński recently told RadioTimes.com. "It's a huge, huge world which is very, very complex... I will stop here!"
While Bagiński has likely forgotten more about the books from Andrzej Sapkowski than I will ever learn, this does seem like a bit of a stretch. It's true that the books absolutely feature a number of different realities or planes of existence – this is part of what made the Conjunction of the Spheres so devastating – but it's certainly not indicated that these are Marvel-style alternate realities with different versions of characters we know and love running around.
But the real problem with this is that it is effectively replicating a problem from the show's first season. The timeline shenanigans of season one were all in service to the show bending to a certain narrative, one that weaved in stories from the various characters at the heart of the adaptation. Explaining away a new Geralt as a variant from a different reality certainly seems neat and tidy, but it opens up an entirely different can of worms from a story perspective when there is already an even tidier precedent: soap operas.
Nobody expects an actor to stay in a given role forever, especially when a show can be a massive time commitment over many, many years, and there are few shows that can match the longevity of soap operas like The Bold and the Beautiful or The Young and the Restless. Countless actors have been replaced in these shows over their lengthy runs without jettisoning the character or otherwise justifying the swap. Commonly, the only acknowledgement would be a voiceover noting something like, "The part of Edgwin will now be played by Gregor McName."
And that's it! That's all of it. All of the characters accept the new actor as the same character without missing a beat, and we move on. Given the high profile nature of Cavill's exit from The Witcher, it really seems like the best possible solution would be not to linger. Making Hemsworth's taking over of the role any kind of mysterious plot point only serves to make viewers constantly poke and prod at it instead, constantly reminding them of Cavill's absence.
Perhaps this is all just an assumption on my part, though. Maybe this isn't the way the cookie crumbles. And even if it is, perhaps it's possible the folks behind the show consider this a plus or a bonus of some sort. Making the best of a bad situation, it's possible they believe this will have created a complicated ball of narrative threads for fans to untangle. But for my money, it seems destined to be an open sore that will aggravate whenever they're forced to reckon with it instead.
The Witcher Season 3, Volume 2 is set to release on Netflix on July 27, and you can read all about that and everything else we know about Netflix's The Witcher.
