As a fan of both the games and books, Netflix’s first season of The Witcher was everything I could have ever hoped for and more. Amazing casting, coupled with equally terrific acting and a faithful adaptation of the short stories and novels created by Andrzej Sapkowski, resulted in must-see TV.
Despite how much I enjoyed it, the show wasn’t without its flaws, though. And while they may not have been detrimental to my enjoyment of things, the mistakes that were made should be rectified in the second season… unless we want another Game of Thrones situation on our hands.
Pacing
I’ll be the first one to admit that while I enjoyed the different timelines, the pacing of the first season of The Witcher was a bit weird.
Even with the foresight of knowing when things occurred (thanks to reading the books), there were plenty of instances where I questioned the show’s chronological order.
For the longest time, I thought that Yennefer and Geralt’s timeline was running parallel. In reality, it was actually three separate periods of time mixed in sporadically.
Non-book readers I know were even more perplexed when the plot reached the later episodes as a result of the order of the scenes, causing a lot of confusion and throwing off the season’s pacing.
For season two, avoiding three different timelines, and flashbacks in general, would definitely help make the pace of things a lot less muddled.
Slipping in the random side story of Geralt’s contracts wouldn’t really deter things all too much if they did decide to go down that route, though focusing on the plot of the main novels would probably work best.
