The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich has confirmed that Season 2 will drop the show’s “controversial” multi-timeline format in favour of a linear story, though it will still feature flashbacks and flash-forwards.
In an interview with The Wrap, Hissrich discussed some of the changes that have been made for Season 2 of the hit Netflix show, as she promised that the next chapter would be much more streamlined, especially now that the characters’ individual stories have intersected to exist on the “same timeline.”
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For the majority of Season 1, we watched three separate stories unfold – those of witcher Geralt (Henry Cavill), sorceress Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and princess Ciri (Freya Allan). It wasn’t until Episode 4, “Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials,” however, that we came to realize that those stories were not happening at the same time. Ciri’s was playing out more closely confined, in the “present,” while Geralt and Yennefer’s arcs were happening decades in the past, leading to some confusion for viewers.
“Obviously, it was one of the most controversial parts of Season 1 and I didn’t expect it to be as controversial as it was. But it’s something I still stand behind, in terms of storytelling,” Hissrich said, adding that the “goal was to get to know each of these characters individually, and the only want to do that was to separate their timelines.”
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Despite defending the decision, Hissrich confirmed that Season 2 does not include multiple timelines for its characters, making the story easier for audiences to follow and understand, even though there will still be some fun challenges with time.
“What’s great though is [the characters] have intersected now. So what we’ll see in Season 2 is that all of our characters are existing on the same timeline,” she explained. “What that allows us to do storywise though is to play with time in slightly different ways. We get to do flashbacks, we get to do flash-forwards, we get to actually integrate time in a completely different way that we weren’t able to do in Season 1.”
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Production on season two of The Witcher shut down back in March due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, however, it was recently reported that the show had been given the “green light” to start filming again.
The Witcher season 2 is currently expected to premiere in 2021.
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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.
Source: IGN.com The Witcher Season 2 Will See All Characters Exist on 'Same Timeline'