While the third season of The Witcher on Netflix would be in no shortage of absurd and badly-written scenes, one moment from Ciri’s episode is now being hailed as the ultimate low point for the series. A scene that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the writers really don’t know what they’re doing with this story and its setting.
After that eventful day at Aretuza, Ciri teleports away to a desert in the middle of nowhere, and spends the rest of episode six trying to find her way back to civilization. During those atrocious few days — atrocious mostly for the fact that we had to sit through it — the heroine is visited by hallucinatory nightmares, the ghost of another princess long dead, and a watchful unicorn, of all things. And when a monster attacks her and impales the unicorn, we bear witness to one of the most ingenious cinematic moments in television history.
Ciri sits down by the unicorn’s side, and uses a small napkin to cover the gaping, bleeding wound. She doesn’t even press down on it, mind you, just slowly puts it on the hide and leaves it there.
In a hilariously accidental way, this pretty much sums up the adaptation’s current state, having lost both its main lead (Henry Cavill) and the majority of the audience base. One might even go so far as to suggest bringing Liam Hemsworth on board to replace Cavill is like trying to use Band-Aids on a bullet hole.
Now, I don’t mean to take the analogy too far, but thinking about some of these scenes really makes you wonder if the whole process wasn’t just a random string of half-baked ideas and poor executions. Some people actually came up with this scene and thought it added something to the character, hundreds of people read it, and the director and their whole crew prepared the set and shot it.
At this point, are we even really surprised that Cavill called it quits?