This review contains full spoilers for The Witcher Season 1, episode 1, titled “The End’s Beginning”.
Anyone who has read Polish fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski’s plethora of novels, or played through the gargantuan trilogy of CD Projekt Red video games, will know that the world of The Witcher is a sprawling, knotty landscape. It’s a place of conflicting kingdoms, tragic families, and murky politics. To describe the saga’s plot to a newcomer without getting caught up in its many overlapping strands is a difficult task. Smartly circumnavigating this issue, Netflix’s The Witcher show starts small, and exactly where it needs to: with Geralt.
While the first episode of The Witcher – “The End’s Beginning” – has one eye on the larger picture, it is predominantly a small-scale introduction to Henry Cavill’s slayer of beasts, Geralt of Rivia. Stripping the story back to essentials is a sensible choice, and by the episode’s conclusion we have a pretty solid understanding of who he is, what drives him, and where he stands in the greater narrative. His destiny to meet Ciri helps anchor him in the episode’s ‘B plot’, and it’s clear where the character needs to go both in narrative and personal development.
Source: IGN.com The Witcher: Season 1, Episode 1 – 'The End's Beginning' Review