Inevitably, the Nilfgaardian forces break into the castle. Realizing that the battle is being lost, Mousesack creates a magic barrier to protect the castle that’ll last “as long as he does”. Back at the battle, Eist Tuirseach (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), Ciri’s grandfather, takes an arrow in the eye and is killed, meaning this is the Battle of Marnadal, a key engagement during the Nilfgaardian invasion of Cintra. Ciri is contained to the castle and has been for two days, babysat by her druid protector Mousesack (Adam Levy).
The Nilfgaardians invade Cintra in “The End’s Beginning”, and the Netflix show flexes its ample budget with a big, bloody war scene to get the point across. There’s a lesson there, and he hopes Renfri learns it, telling her to leave Blaviken and leave Stregobor alone. When asked why not just kill them, he replies that then he would be exactly what they say he is. Is she a monster by nature, as Stregobor claimed, or because of the circumstances forced upon her? Attempting to convince Geralt, she asks what he might do if they came after him for being “a monster”, though he says they already have. Everything she’s done since has been out of necessity and survival. Renfri explains what happened all those years ago, when it was to be determined whether or not she was “cursed”. Either way, the sorcerer must die, but if Geralt does the deed, it’ll save the lives of the innocents who will inevitably try and intervene if Renfri and her gang of outlaws perform the task themselves. She, too, has a proposition for the Witcher: She wants him to kill Stregobor. Cintra is on the brink of invasion by the Nilfgaardian Empire, a cartoonishly antagonistic expansionist force that will sack Cintra by episode’s end, thus throwing into motion a lot of large-scale events that we’ll learn about in due course.īefore that, though, we rejoin Geralt and his horse, Roach, in the woods with Renfri.
The Witcher Season 1, Episode 1, unlike the story it’s based on, shares space with another plot thread: That of Princess Cirilla (Freya Allan), the granddaughter of Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May), “The Lionness of Cintra”. He might not have done only good in his life, but when it comes to choosing between two evils, he’d rather not.
But Geralt only kills monsters, and he has no evidence that Renfri is one. Now, she wants revenge on Stregobor, and Stegobor wants Geralt’s protection. Turning to Stregobor for help investigating this claim, the “curse” was apparently discovered and Renfri went rogue, spending her time since living as a notorious outlaw forced to steal and swindle in order to survive (in The Last Wish she’s known as “Shrike”, though I don’t recall that coming up in “The End’s Beginning”). Renfri, as we’re told in The Witcher Episode 1, is royalty, born to a king during a prophesized eclipse that the king’s new queen convinced him meant she was cursed. This monster, though, is the worst kind - the human kind. Now occupying his tower is sorcerer Stregobor (Lars Mikkelsen), who, as Geralt figures, would like to hire him to kill a monster. But after Geralt steps through a portal into an idyllic garden tended to by naked women, he learns that Irion has been dead for 200 years. The alderman’s daughter, Marilka (Mia McKenna-Bruce), saves Geralt from harassment by the prejudiced locals - Witchers, on account of being mutants, are not well-liked - and takes him to see the local wizard, Irion. Anyone who has read Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Last Wish, the short story collection upon which this episode and several others are based, knows that the name Renfri doesn’t bode well for Geralt, but we’ll get to that in a moment. This thing is a kikimora, and it might fetch a price such is Witcher’s work, the hardscrabble living of a mutated monster hunter, which Geralt discusses briefly with the pretty woman, Renfri (Emma Appleton), whom he meets in the local tavern where he goes asking after the alderman. Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher starts as it means to go on in “The End’s Beginning”, with Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) fighting and killing a many-legged monster in an eerie woodland lake.
#The witcher episode 1 full#
You can check out our spoiler-free thoughts on the full season by clicking these words. This recap of The Witcher Season 1, Episode 1, “The End’s Beginning”, contains spoilers. “The End’s Beginning” adapts the story of how Geralt got his least-favorite nickname, as Ciri flees her home and sets out to discover her destiny.
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