By now, fans of The Witcher know that Season 2 offers viewers a lot of cool stuff. We’ve got plenty of new characters, some even scarier monsters, Geralt / Ciri bonding time, and brand new songs from our favorite bard, for starters. But, there are some big moments in the new episodes for Ciri, and now The Witcher’s showrunner, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, has revealed which of those scenes she’s “in love” with.
Young Cirilla did a very good job in Season 1 of The Witcher when it came to running, hiding, and generally evading Cahir and the other Nilfgaardian forces who were on the lookout for her after Cintra was sacked. But, a lot of that had to do with both her powers (which surprised her every time they showed up) and her getting a lot of help from Dara and other kind people along the way. Now that she’s with Geralt, he’s helping her become an active participant in keeping herself safe, and teaching her to fight instead of just run. And, it turns out that showrunner Lauren Schimdt Hissrich is a big fan of those training scenes. She told TV Insider:
I am in love with Ciri’s training sequence at Kaer Morhen. It’s the first time that we see Ciri really planting her feet and starting to fight back against all of the forces in her past. Freya [Allan] herself just kicks ass through that sequence. She could not wait to begin training, to get a sword in her hand, and to do most of it herself, which is incredible.
And fight Ciri does. Geralt doesn’t waste much time when it comes to delivering his new charge with a training sword of her very own, and begins to teach her how to handle it within a few days of their arrival at Kaer Morhen. Ciri is driven by her desire to get revenge on Nilfgaard (Cahir especially), so by the next time we see her, she’s been in full training mode for a while and taken to the challenging tasks maybe a bit too well.
But, it’s not until Geralt briefly leaves with Vesemir that fellow Witchers Lambert and Coën, who have their doubts about Geralt's attempts to train an exiled princess) introduce Ciri to an obstacle course that’s capable of delivering more than a few bumps and bruises. Luckily, Ciri eagerly rises to the occasion. And, as Schmidt Hissrich noted, Ciri’s portrayer, Freya Allan, does go through the long sequence and kick ass by doing a lot of her own stunt work.
While the scene is impressive, and it does show how gloriously bloody-minded and determined Ciri has had to become in a short time, that doesn’t mean that putting that sequence together didn’t give the cast and crew some of their own challenges to overcome. Schmidt Hissrich continued:
We had to stay on our home sets in London, and we’d made a couple of local trips, but it doesn’t look like that. The obstacle course was shot on our backlot in the dead of summer. A lot of that structure existed through what our production team built, but all of the backdrop is VFX. In that sequence alone there are 123 VFX shots. It is the largest that we did.
It’s wild that there are more visual effects in that one shot than in some of the ones with actual monsters in them, but the good news is that it works seamlessly to help us see that Ciri won’t be easily broken by the rough road ahead.
When you’re done with The Witcher Season 2 ending, check out the 2022 TV premiere dates while you wait for the death and madness to come in Season 3!
