Which, er?

Over twenty years, beginning in the mid-eighties, Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a dozen or so short stories and seven novels set in a Slavic Middle-Earth, starring a monster-hunting character called Geralt of Rivia, also known as the Witcher. Sapkowski’s work has been translated and adapted into a series of comics, a film, and three video games.

Each adaptation claimed fidelity with Sapkowski’s originals; none agree on what that means. Four years ago, Netflix decided to jump in…

Last Sunday, Meursault and I sat down to watch Season Four of the Witcher. This was my first exposure to the series: Meursault has played one of the games and read the books; I have done neither. Meursault is a Witcher fan; I am not. This is not a disadvantage. It is a diagnostic lens. If the Netflix series cannot enchant the uninitiated, it has failed the first test of storytelling.

Adaptation is not mimicry. It is a translation across media. A novel paints on the canvas of the reader’s imagination; a game allows for agency and immersion; cinema and television are a medley of performance, imagery, and dialogue. To adapt from one medium to another is to transmute—not to replicate. The question, then, is not whether the adaptation is accurate (how can it be?), but whether it is faithful. I asked Meursault about adaptation in the context of the Witcher. This is what he said:

Fidelity is not found in plot points or character names. It is found in mood, in moral architecture, in thematic resonance, and in the texture of the world. A faithful adaptation feels familiar, yet curiously different; it does not copy—it remembers. Geralt, the hero, is a pariah outsider, a contract killer hired to kill monsters. The books and games explore what it means to live on the margins of society, to be useful but unloved, feted but feared.

The philosophical acorn from which the books draw inspiration is simple and universal: good and evil are merely shades of a monochrome morality. Sometimes a darker white, sometimes a noontime black. Sapkowski’s world resists moral clarity: kings are corrupt, mages are manipulative, and monsters are often more honest than men. The books ask: What does it mean to be a judge, jury, and executioner in an amoral world?

The games—at least the one I played—have an open world where choices have consequences that are not immediately apparent. At times one doesn’t know at all what the consequences are; sometimes one doesn’t realise that one has made a game-altering decision. In a sense the games, like Sapkowski’s books, treat destiny with irony. Characters speak of fate, but the narrative often undermines it, e.g, Geralt’s bond with Ciri is framed as destiny, but it’s forged through painful choices. This is what the adaptation must remember. Not the plot—but the pulse.

Meursault loved the first season, tolerated the second, and abandoned the third, midway. Henry Cavill, who played Geralt, walked away from the role at the end of Season Three… Not a good sign. Also, I understand Meursault’s love for Sapkowski’s world because it allows him to explore existentialism and ethics in a fantastic world with some sword and sorcery action thrown in. Clearly, he was upset that Netflix was trying to make the Witcher a coming-of-age tale about Ciri. “There are plenty of those. The Witcher ought to be about Geralt,” he said, gruffly.

Nevertheless, there we were, watching one of the Hemsworth brothers (I can’t tell them apart) pick up the sword that Cavill had reverentially placed on the ground. (Cavill is a fan of the books! I’m not surprised—Superman is supposed to be a nerd.) For me, this series must enchant the uninitiated. It must welcome the viewer with a love for the fantasy genre who has not read the books, who has not played the games, and yet sits down in front of the telly with popcorn and a pint or two of Vitamin B. I am that viewer. I do not ask for lore. I ask for mood, for stakes, for texture. I ask to be drawn in.

Season Four does not fail outright. It performs the ritual; the props are all present and plugged-in. There are swords, monsters, mages, and muttering. But the spell is thin. Hemsworth’s dialogue doesn’t sound quite right: he plays the role like a generic Hollywood G.I. Joe air-dropped into the role with script in hand and wig on head. It reminded me of Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Robin Hood: “I’m Rah-bin. Hoo-aah.” Having said that, Hemsworth’s swordplay is quite snappy.

Ciri’s action sequences (protected, as she is, by invulnerable Plot Armour) are not believable. Also, Yennefer engaging in melee combat is neither believable nor lore-appropriate. Clearly, her character is a mage; she’s shown casting powerful AOE spells, which suggests that she’s a high-level mage; and she wouldn’t have the strength to lift a battle-axe, let alone swing it around one-handed. Do the games have a Battle Mage class? Is Yennefer supposed to be the angry mage-disillusioned-with-magic who pivots mid-game and starts putting skill points into strength and heavy weapons? Meursault snorted loudly when I asked him these questions. Anya Chalotra puts in an earnest attempt to rise above the awful dialogue they’ve written for Yennefer. Full marks for effort.

Lawrence Fishburne’s vampire-Morpheus character—Regis—was a rare moment of tonal clarity in an otherwise terrible script. Articulate, wise, and unhurried, he offered a counterpoint to Geralt’s exterior—gruff, terse, and emotionally armoured. In their scenes together, something remarkable happened: we heard Geralt’s mind in Regis’s voice—the kind of scene that lets a character unfold rather than perform. Had the writers leaned into this dynamic, they might have found a way to externalize Geralt’s internal world without breaking his stoicism. Instead, the character was sidelined because the writers were obsessed with Ciri.

“I do not feel the mud. I do not smell the fear. I do not believe the danger. I’m not intrigued. I am not entertained by Discount Thor cosplaying Geralt. I hate to say that Apple’s Siri has more complexity than Netflix’s Ciri. I could watch this series while hand-soldering QFPs under a microscope and not miss the plot: because there isn’t any,” said Meursault. He saw the first two episodes, then left to have a drink at the local watering hole.

Ciri spends half the season in the company of a gang of thieves called “The Rats”. This narrative detour does not take the plot forward unless it was meant to be a holding pattern while Ciri learnt melee combat. The Rats satisfy Hollywood’s desire to stuff their stories with generic, one-dimensional characters whose only reason for existence is their distance—physical, racial, or sexual—from the median demographic of the world they inhabit, e.g., casting a black Nigerian-British actor with dreadlocks as Mikhail Mindich in a story set in Tsarist Russia. Why not? Did it detract from the brilliant performance of McGregor and others in A Gentleman in Moscow? It did, unless one regards the oddity as a deliberately ironic statement by the screenwriters who adapted the novel by Amor Towles. Perhaps the Rats are to be viewed ironically, but I was wearying by then and began to understand why Meursault had abandoned the Witcher after the second season. He saw what had been lost; I see what has not been found.

Consider Apple’s retelling of Foundation. It is loosely based on Asimov’s books. The plot is recognisable, but only if one squints hard. The lore was modified and characters are reshaped, colour-corrected, and re-gendered to satisfy Hollywood’s cravings for diversity. Indeed, Apple’s version of Foundation does not even try to pretend to be canonical.

And yet, it remembers Asimov’s themes. One feels the weight of inevitability in the adapted plot; the idea that individual lives are noise, but collective behaviour is signal; the loneliness of thankless visionaries, and the arrogance of empire.

The gender- and race-swapping of almost all characters (including the robot, Demerzel) didn’t matter to Meursault when he saw Foundation, because the adaptation was faithful to Asimov’s ideas about the Foundation. Diversity isn’t the issue—distraction is. If a character’s identity feels like a checkbox or a shield against critique, rather than a meaningful part of the world’s texture, the viewer feels the seams scrape against the skin.

Meursault loved the new Dune movies; he liked Cumberbatch’s Holmes; he loved Capaldi’s Doctor. However, he insists that “Jeremy Brett will always be the Holmes, just as Tom Baker will always be the Doctor.” I understand the sentiment. But perhaps each generation deserves its own Holmes, its own Geralt, and its own Doctor Who?

The question, then, is not who played the role best, but what thread binds these portrayals across time. The portrayals of iconic characters across eras—Holmes, the Doctor, Bond and, now, Geralt—are not bound by fidelity to plot or costume, nor by the actor’s resemblance to some canonical ideal. Perhaps the definitive portrayal is not a fixed point, but a constellation—each star a different actor, each orbit a different viewer. What binds them is a shared invocation of an archetype.

Each actor, in their time, channels the archetype through the lens of that era’s zeitgeist. Jeremy Brett’s Holmes is a Victorian empiricist, fascinated by the scientific method; Cumberbatch’s is a postmodern savant, alienated and ironic. Tom Baker’s Doctor is a wise, whimsical, chaos incarnate; Tennant’s is a wounded romantic. Could a Time Lord fall in love with a barely literate Earthling? I don’t know. It depends on the script and acting.

Cavill chose to portray Geralt as stoic and mythic… These portrayals endure not because they were accurate, but because they were allowed to breathe, and the actors could, so to speak, take the temperature of their characters and compare it to their own.

When the portrayal works, it evokes the same questions, casts the same shadows, stirs the same dilemmas, and unsettles familiar certainties in unfamiliar ways. I suspect that we feel it in the marrow. Hemsworth’s Geralt, by contrast, stumbles about awkwardly with a thermometer up his arse while desperately trying to channel the spirit of Henry Cavill’s Geralt. It cannot end well. We shall see.

Editor’s Notes

• Albert, as regular readers are aware, is a sentient cauliflower and cannot play computer games. He has seen me play Morrowind, and assumed that all RPGs have the same skill-tree. As far as I know, Yennefer is not a playable character in any of the Witcher games, so a player cannot pivot mid-game and transform her abilities to those of a different base class.

• A battle mage is subtype of mage trained not just in spellcraft but also in physical combat—often armoured, often angry, and usually found charging into combat with fireballs and a sword. Unlike the “vanilla mage” who prefers robes, riddles, and remote incineration, the battle mage believes in getting their hands dirty. Yennefer’s sudden enthusiasm for close-quarters combat feels… genre-confused.

• QFP is a Quad Flat Package microchip. It is square and has dozens of tiny electrical pins on each side. These are typically soldered to circuit boards using solder paste on a hot plate, or under a hot-air gun. The ability to solder (and desolder) a QFP using a soldering iron is considered an elite-level skill among electronics geeks. Read more about them here.. Meursault told me that QFNs are harder to hand solder, but I’ve forgotten why. Those of you who agree can send us a letter telling me why you do; to those of you who don’t care, but care enough to have read all of this: Thank you.

• Images 2 and 3 are screenshots from The Witcher by Netflix; Image 4 is a screenshot from Foundation by Apple TV. We believe our usage of this material constitutes a ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act.

• Since Pi’s already drawn the Doctor, I suspect Meursault is working on a “Who’s your Doctor?” piece. Interested? Do let us know if you’d like to see it.