‘The Witcher’ Season 4, Episode 7 Recap – Well, That Was Convenient

The structure of The Witcher Season 4 is weird, isn’t it? That’s the only way I can think to describe it. Episode 7, “What I love I do not carry”, opens where the previous episode left off, with Yennefer discovering that Emhyr is due to be wed to an imposter named Teryn and not, as everyone thinks, his own daughter, Ciri, but the bulk of this penultimate episode is about Geralt still trying to make his way to that very location to make that same discovery for himself. There’s surprisingly little tension and intrigue in that, in a macro sense, even if the micro monster-hunting drama is pretty good.

The monster stuff is on account of Geralt and the gang — including Milva, who reveals she’s pregnant after her time with the Scoia’tael — have to take a shortcut to get to Nilfgaard, which takes them through the Ysgil Swamp, which is infested with rusalka, spirits who lost their lives in the waterways and now spend their time giving everyone who passes terrifying visions and demanding they solve riddles (the title of the episode is the one that Geralt is presented with). Some of the best visual effects of the season are here, but the sequence is short and not especially illuminating since it’s hardly a secret what Geralt most pines for.

These traumatic experiences do prompt Yarpen and Percy to part ways with the group, though, both heading back to Mahakam in search of something beautiful instead of more death, which is probably fair enough. But I should probably point out that — this in a bit of whisper — I barely noticed either of them when they were present anyway.

I mentioned in the previous episode that the portals being repaired opened up a lot of storytelling options, but I didn’t quite account for how much it might undermine certain other aspects of the narrative, which is kind of what happens in The Witcher Season 4, Episode 7, since on the other side of the swamp Yennefer just teleports in out of nowhere and tells Geralt that Ciri wasn’t with Emhyr after all. So what was the point of the entire trek?! Sure, Geralt made some friends along the way, but did he really make it right to the cusp of his original destination only to be forced to go somewhere else entirely?

Yup! After making time for a long bath and a tender sex scene with Yennefer, Geralt sits down with the team to theorize about how they might find Ciri where all the most powerful mages on the Continent have thus far failed. Regis, predictably, has an idea — a druid circle in Caed Dhu. With the equinox drawing near — how convenient! — their combined power might be able to locate her. It’s as good a lead as any, so Yen parts ways with Geralt once again to return to the ruins of Montecalvo, albeit with a promise to find him again and live out his fantasy of them dying of old age together.

The real question now is whether they’ll be able to find Ciri before she gets herself killed, which is becoming more likely than ever. Through Hotspurn, Ciri learns that the assignment to kidnap the rich kid came from the Nilfgaardian Empire, a revelation she finds incredibly difficult to square with her conscience, given her own relationship with the White Flame. She also visibly recoils at the idea that he’s due to marry Ciri since… well, she is Ciri, something that it seems Mistle had already figured out for herself.

With a warning about Leo being on the hunt for their bounty and being located at a nearby tavern, Hotspurn departs. Ciri catches up with him later to free the boy before he’s delivered to Emhyr, and to enact some kind of vengeance now that she has a taste for it, but Hotspurn has bad news. The information that he fed the Rats about Leo was really a trap to lure them to their deaths. Now Ciri has to race back to kill them before it’s too late.

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