Summary
The Witcher Season 4 turns a typically bad trait into an advantage in Episode 2, folding its side quests into the main plot, but it’s still lacking some urgency in key areas.
Witchers are labourers, essentially. The labour is just hunting and killing monsters. They’re fantastical pest controllers, really, itinerant exterminators who will do the dirty jobs that others won’t. This idea of a Witcher’s work is pretty central to the texture of Andrzej Sapkowski’s oddly working-class world, and in the novels — a series that began with two collections of short stories — and particularly the video game adaptations, those odd jobs contributed to the narrative’s peculiar rhythm. Hasn’t ever worked all that well in live-action, though. Season 4 of The Witcher isn’t immune to it. Episode 2, “Dream of a Wish Fulfilled”, opens with Geralt taking on a wraith in a haunted cemetery called Fen Carn for basically no reason at all.
It’s a fun enough sequence, but it speaks to a larger issue of a lot of this show’s conflict happening at random, often just because. The main plot in a TV show can’t be held in stasis while the protagonist occupies himself with something else, and early on, there is a feeling that only Yennefer seems to be acting with the degree of urgency that Geralt claims to be feeling.
There’s some of this in the gang randomly meeting Emiel Regis, a barber-surgeon who invites everyone to his humble cabin to indulge in some moonshine. It’s obvious there’s something up with Regis, in part because he’s pretty keen on getting everyone drunk, but also because nobody in this universe is even keel, especially not when they live alone in a cemetery. Regis’s mandrake elixir loosens everyone’s tongues, but it also brings their deepest dreams to the surface, and Geralt’s is an idyllic life of domesticity with Yennefer and Ciri. True to form, though, it culminates with him and Yen dying of old age and Ciri burying them, which is quite hilariously morbid for a fantasy.
“Dream of a Wish Fulfilled” does flip the script a little bit, though, because Regis volunteers to accompany Geralt as a companion, turning what seems like a random side quest into a proper plot point. Regis is full of wise counsel and medical knowledge; he treats Geralt’s manky leg wound and gives him advice about following the joy in his dreams, but he also keeps a little bloody rag with him that he sniffs like a creepy weirdo, so something’s still amiss.
It’s similar for Ciri in The Witcher Season 4, Episode 2, whose time with the Rats seems to be coming as a result of her lacking anything better to do. She’s supposed to be sitting in on a job to steal a bunch of coin from a tax collector, but when she sees every step of the plan being sloppily handled, she’s forced to intervene. It’s a bit of a showpiece set-piece for how physically capable Ciri has become at this point, but it causes most of the Rats to turn on her because she has to use their haul as a distraction to facilitate an escape.
Through sheer good fortune and not any kind of plan, the locals are wildly keen on the Rats for giving the tax collector a taste of his own medicine, and help them escape unharmed. This is apparently enough for the Rats to initiate Ciri as one of their own, something that it’s a little weird she’s okay with, given how flighty they’ve been thus far. I’m much more inclined to think that this is going to end in tears, especially with Kayleigh fondling the wanted poster that promises a hefty reward for Ciri’s apprehension.
Yen gets it, at least. She spends “Dream of a Wish Fulfilled” on her own recruitment drive in an effort to counter Vilgefortz’s, visiting Philippa and then Fringilla with a pitch. Results are mixed, though. Fringilla takes Yen’s dimeritium blade straight to Vilgefortz, who is busy impersonating Yennefer to make Istredd look into the connection between portals and the monoliths. But Philippa comes in clutch for Yennefer when she’s jumped by three of Vilgefortz’s mages. Their teaming up to fold the bad guys up like pretzels is a pretty nasty sequence in an episode otherwise light on violence, at least by its usual standards.
I do feel like we’re getting somewhere, though. Now that Emhyr has figured out that Teryn is an imposter — it’s not like she was doing an especially good job of hiding it — his forces will be doubling down on finding the real Ciri, which may well bring them into conflict with the Rats, while whatever Regis is up to will at least be accomplished while on the road to Nilfgaard. And Cahir is following along.
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