Everyone who loved The Witcher after watching Season 1 has been waiting a very long time to get their thirsty eyeballs on the second season. It will be nearly a full two years when the show finally returns to Netflix on December 17, meaning that when the full trailer dropped a few days ago, fans were delighted and eager to pick over all of the details that could be found within. But, even with The Witcher Season 2 over a month away, the showrunner is already teasing “death” for Season 3, and I’m not quite sure what to do with that!
Listen, The Witcher is a big, ol’ fantasy show with gobs o’ fighting. The Henry Cavill-led series also features a number of scary monsters, a massive war, and, therefore, lots of death. So, for showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich to tell us that death is coming in Season 3, is...well, a given. Meaning, this death (or deaths) must be pretty big, right? Shockingly, while appearing at a panel during the Lucca Comics & Games 2021 festival in Italy (via ComicBook), Schmidt Hissrich actually went ahead and gave some info on Season 3, and said:
What I will say about the third season, the writers are back in Los Angeles diligently working while I am here getting to do this, so I'm grateful for them...It's a really fun season, and it follows a particular book very closely, has a lot of action, some death...some death.
You guys? WTF is happening?!?! For those of you who don’t know much about how this TV business works, it is very uncommon for a showrunner (or, in fact, anyone involved in the production of a television series) to tease events that are coming in a season which is not the most recent one. It would make all kinds of sense for Schmidt Hissrich to tease death in the second season, because that’s the one that’s finally coming around the bend at us. But, teasing The Witcher Season 3? That seems like a clue that something major is about to go down.
Alright, many of you will now be wondering who will be involved in this (probably pretty major) death. Obviously, with much of The Witcher Season 2 still a mystery, there’s no way to know. As Schmidt Hissrich noted, though, Season 3 (which must be at least a year away from hitting our screens) is already being planned to follow one of The Witcher books “very closely,” which is why this death is so important. Now, I’m going to get into some possible SPOILER territory, so look away if you want no hints at what might be upcoming!
Ready?
Here we go. In Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Lady of the Lake, Geralt heads back to Rivia, but eventually finds himself in the middle of an all out riot between humans and the non-humans they’ve begun randomly killing. During the riot, Geralt is impaled by a pitchfork, leading to his apparent death. I say “apparent” because it’s way more complicated than that, but the trailer for Season 2 hints at exactly that moment. So, who knows?
END BOOK SPOILERS!
OK, I have my doubts that the events of Season 2 will fully lead us to such a big moment in Season 3, but stranger things have happened. Also, it’s possible that Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and her team could be taking the basic elements of this death from the book, and then twist things so that even people who've read all of the source material will be surprised.
Basically, we are going to have to put a Cavill bicep-sized pin in this conversation until we’ve all seen The Witcher Season 2, so that we can better understand where all of this Season 3 death talk may be going. Until then, see what else you can watch now with our guide to the 2021 fall TV schedule!
