Summary
The Witcher Season 4 begins to introduce a bit more connective tissue in “A Sermon of Survival”, but the main characters remain frustratingly separated by circumstance.
“Out of the frying pan, into the fire” comes to mind. To be fair, you could apply this idea to most of what has happened in The Witcher, especially in Season 4, but it feels especially relevant to Episode 4, which finds Geralt and Jaskier, having already witnessed the death of their cute little friend Beata, waking up as captives of Redanian forces sentenced to death for conspiring with Nilfgaard. The irony of that aside, it’s another problem that needs dealing with in “A Sermon of Survival”, which is pretty replete with problems for everyone.
Some of these problems seem to be happening a bit too quickly for my tastes. For instance, we had a couple of compelling subplots bubbling away in Vilgefortz’s camp. The second episode revealed he was impersonating Yennefer to force Istredd into figuring out Ciri’s importance and connection to the monoliths, while the previous episode revealed that Fringilla was working undercover in his fort to feed information back to Yen. In one fell swoop, both of these compelling angles are done away with. Istredd reveals to Vilgefortz about Ciri’s ancestry, which isn’t a big deal since we already knew that anyway (and Francesca laid it out in the previous episode), but it makes Vilgefortz so excited that he gives himself away. When Fringilla tries to intervene, Vilgefortz knocks them both out and captures them, having evidently seen through Fringilla’s deception in the first place. Didn’t even last an episode!
It’s perhaps just as well that Yen and the other mages are still recruiting allies to Montecalvo, because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Vilgefortz isn’t going to be easily outsmarted, and the place is going to need some outside-the-box thinking to defend. Triss comes in clutch in this regard, turning up with Vesemir, Coen, and Lambert, the Witchers from Kaer Morhen who know a thing or two about defending structures for generations and teaching people to fight like Witchers. Many hands make light work.
I really wasn’t joking when I said that The Witcher Season 4, Episode 4 really has a whiff of “out of the frying pan, into the fire” about it. Geralt and Jaskier’s “salvation”, so to speak, turns out to be Dijkstra, of all people, who still has a score to settle with Geralt and decides that torturing him into screaming agony will be a nice way of doing it. In a neat touch of connectivity, especially since this season is sorely lacking it, this scene is juxtaposed with one of Ciri and Mistle fighting a greylock infected by a parasite, both characters clearly able to feel the pain of the other. It’s a bit of action for action’s sake, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Things are getting worse for Ciri and the Rats, too. The greylock — sorry, she said the giant monster cats are usually harmless? — is the least of their problems, since Leo is on their trail, indiscriminately murdering everyone he comes across just for fun. Geralt’s torture only ends when Dijkstra tells him that Ciri is due to be married to Emhyr, which is more painful than anything a blade can cause, and his execution is scheduled for the next day anyway, especially since Jaskier gets too catty with Radovid for him to agree to release them.
But Radovid isn’t as stupid and spineless as Dijkstra thought. Jaskier’s words do resonate — not enough to convince him to let Geralt and Jaskier go, but enough to sack Dijkstra and banish him from Redania. And Geralt and Jaskier get away anyway, thanks to Regis, who performs another enigmatic supernatural feat, which, it turns out, is one too many for Geralt to tolerate, however grateful he might be. As if it wasn’t obvious, all is not as it appears with Regis, who turns out to be a vampire of some considerable power, and Geralt, being a monster hunter, doesn’t generally keep such company. But he does gratefully accept a collection of potions made from his own blood that will help him out in a fight, since you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
As it turns out, Geralt has to use one of those potions immediately, since Nilfgaard once again attacks the Redanian camp, creating all sorts of carnage. Geralt, with help from Milva, Zoltan, Yarpen, and Regis’s potion, is able to cleave a path to safety, but it leads him right into Cahir — who enjoyed a flirty exchange with Milva earlier but remains, at least in Geralt’s eyes, an enemy — and gets Jaskier badly hurt. Still, at least they’re free for the time being, even if they do continue to head inexorably in the entirely wrong direction.
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