The Witcher season 4 review: Liam Hemsworth isn’t the problem

Let’s just get this out of the way: Liam Hemsworth actually makes for a pretty solid Geralt of Rivia. Hemsworth assumes the mantle in the fourth season of Netflix’s The Witcher, picking up from Henry Cavill. And while it can be distracting at first, especially since Cavill inhabited the role so well, it only took a few episodes before I was mostly on board with the new face under the blonde wig. He still knows how to wield a sword, and he still answers most questions with a cranky “fuck.” The problem isn’t that the show has a new lead actor; it’s that it continues to be a bloated mess, and season 4 doesn’t do anything to fix that.

In case you’ve forgotten — I certainly had — despite getting off to a promising start, in season 3 Cavill’s Geralt literally limped across the finish line as the show set about once again separating its three main characters. At the outset of the new season, a bruised and bloodied Geralt is leading a ragtag group, including his old friend Jaskier (Joey Batey), on a quest to find and rescue his surrogate daughter Ciri (Freya Allan). Ciri, meanwhile, was magically whisked away to a far-off desert, and she’s now living in secret with a band of fun-loving thieves, while a false version of her sits on a throne that Geralt is heading toward. Meanwhile, Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) is leading her own group, trying to rally support among her fellow mages for a showdown with the show’s current big bad, a supremely powerful wizard named Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu).

Did you get all of that? It can be a lot. And listen, I know fantasy epics can get complex, and it’s not like The Witcher is meant to be a simple story. But the show has steadily been shifting its focus since season 2, moving to tell a bigger, Continent-wide story rather than focusing on its core trio of leads. And through that it has been losing what makes The Witcher so interesting and distinct in the first place. At this point you really have to squint to find what makes this different from the glut of existing fantasy shows.

When it’s at its best, the drawn-out wars and political machinations in The Witcher serve as background. They’re important, but far from the most important thing. The Witcher — and this is true whether we’re talking about the show, books, or games — is like a dark fantasy detective series, with Geralt traveling from place to place to slay monsters and inevitably getting unwillingly pulled into some sort of drama, usually of the very fucked-up variety. It provides a ground-level view of a broken world that’s often absent from fantasy. More importantly, it’s fun; violent and sexy, balancing tragedy and terror with a dry sense of humor.

But as those background elements — the political maneuvering of various countries, the logistics of war, the never-ending games of deception played by the royal elite — have moved to the front, the show has become something else. It’s bloated and, more often than not, boring.

Season 4 does have some rare bright spots. There are two great new characters — a disturbingly efficient bounty hunter named Leo (Sharlto Copley) and Laurence Fishburne as a mysterious herbalist with a dark past — and in one clever episode where Geralt and friends sit around a campfire telling tales of their early lives, each story is told in a different form, ranging from a musical to animated bloodfest. But the new characters are underutilized, and while the campfire episode is a welcome diversion, it’s not enough to cover the rest of the season, which is mostly people wandering around on a quest or planning for a big heist or battle.

The current state of the show is especially frustrating because The Witcher can be an absolute blast. The first season of the Netflix series proved this, and earlier this year the streamer released an excellent animated film called Sirens of the Deep that returned to those core fundamentals. It was sad, funny, exciting, and — just as important — filled with lots of cool monsters. Almost all of those elements are missing from or in short supply in the most recent season, which buries it all under generic fantasy storytelling. It starts out with new-Geralt slicing through a giant creature, and it all goes downhill from there.

Maybe the reason that Hemsworth’s take on Geralt hasn’t bothered me so much is that this version of the character isn’t all that important anymore. He’s still there, occasionally killing monsters, but he’s no longer at the center of this story. With its plan to turn its version of The Witcher into an expansive franchise complete with prequels, Netflix has relegated the best parts of the series to the background. And that’s not something you can blame on Liam Hemsworth.

_{Season 4 of The Witcher is streaming now.}