This is a translation of Fat and Furious (https://www.facebook.com/Mmmmandm/) review, published with the permission of the author.

“The Witcher” series is so disappointingly mediocre, that against the background of disappointingly mediocre 8th season “Game of Thrones” and ninth “Star Wars” it fades and gets lost. It has neither senseless and pitiless epicness of GoT, neither a sparkle of reckless highness of SW. It’s bland even among the blandness.

Nevertheless, 93% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes compared to 48 critics’ score (and similar scores for “The Rise of Skywalker”) are like giving us a hint that the audience… how do we call it, without resorting to the word “cattle”… Here, I got a word: unqualified audience is pleased. While it’s pleased, it pays, while it pays, it calls the tune. “The plebs lap it up”.

OK, this explains why Lauren Schmidt Hissrich was not given the boot after the pilot episode: the plebs from the focus group lapped it up. But this in no way explains why she wrote — or rather, under her direction they wrote — a screenplay which even ICTV (translator’s note: about worst Ukrainian series producer) would reject if I offered it to them.

The thing is, a good storytelling does not drive an audience away. Original “Star Wars” trilogy has gained popularity not least thanks to its storytelling; the same can be said about Martin’s and Sapkowski’s books. Besides that, if you have perfected your line in storytelling, you become unable to do your job completely awful. Even with generally depressing anticlimactic narrative you will have bright, precious pieces, like in “Avengers: Endgame”. You cannot drink your mastery away (a Russian proverb).

When you have one.

Hissrich has kind of created a few episodes of a not bad series. But in “Defenders”, where she made the most of the episodes, we already can see her weakness as a showrunner that she fully demonstrated in “The Witcher”: clearly weak plot, disguised by an abundance of action and jumps along the timeline.

Well OK, Hissrich doesn’t know how to do a strong plot. But hooray! she doesn’t have to: it’s already there in the source material — Andrzej Sapkowski’s stories! Yeah, after the “Time of Contempt” Sapkowski went on a blender, the composition blurred, fillers and long digressions have crawled in, but the two initial short story books used in the first season of “The Witcher” — “The Last Wish” and “Sword of Destiny” — are really good.

But Hissrich has administered them in her own way. Every, EVERY SINGLE short story that went into the film adaptation, has its heart ripped out, its emotional and logic core. The most colorful characters are either completely removed or completely decolorized (Poor Yarpen Zigrin! Alas, Torque!) or their characters are rethought to their exact opposites (poor Calanthe and Tissaia de Vries, pitiable doppler!) And finally, the thing Sapkowski conquered our hearts with — sharp stinging humor imminent both to situations and characters — was completely expunged. Deconstruction of fairytales? Forget it.

This cannot be done by accident. Even a screenwriter that cannot write their way out of a paper bag would, at least once, at least because of laziness, save a piece. Just a little joke. Just a little scene. But we’re left with a complete impression that Hissrich hates Sapkowski’s book and does everything to make sure nothing good leaks from there into the series.

Besides, she’s not ashamed of her creative methodology. Here’s a quote from an interview: “I think what we do is we take the stories of The Witcher and then we sort of pull out the details, that are sometimes just a single sentence in a single chapter, and we bring that sentence to life and create a whole story around it as well.” So yeah, they do a sort of creative vivisection.

But Hissrich couldn’t tear away one thing: the storyline, its backbone — the story of the Witcher and Ciri, the Child of Destiny.

Let’s start ab ovo. Here’s how Sapkowski evolves this story: during the engagement party of Pavetta, Geralt saves her fiance Dani and takes his promise to give “What you already have yet don’t know” — the “Question of Price” story. It turns out Pavetta is pregnant from Duny. Geralt, who believes he had dodged the price question in a smart-ass way, has now called a child on his head, connected with him by a Destiny. But Geralt doesn’t believe in the Destiny, or rather, doesn’t want to accept the fact that he cannot control his fate. He declines the child (the “Something More” story), and tries to avoid coming back to Cintra. The central, axis event is a random (but actually predetermined) meeting in Brokilon forest, where the witcher was sent on a mission by the king of Brugge (the “Sword of Destiny” novel). Geralt grows attached to the girl during the several days of shared adventures, and then he finds out that she is the Child of Destiny, Duny and Pavetta’s daughter. But Geralt refuses to take her again. In a few years (the “Something More” short story), Cintra is attacked by Nilfgaard. Geralt believes the girl has perished and curses himself. Desperate, he asks a merchant that he saved from a night monsters, to give him the same oath: “Give me what you already have yet don’t know”. The merchant agrees but tells the witcher that he shouldn’t count on a child: his wife cannot have children after her second son. Though, he’s fine to give Geralt one of his present sons to fulfill the oath. When they get to the merchant’s home, his wife says she has sheltered, without letting him know, a girl of a Cintrian refugees. This turns out to be Ciri. The witcher accepts his destiny and adopts her.

Well, this key story that Hissrich decided to base the series’ plot on (because on what else?), had its heart, its logic and emotional core ripped out. That is — Geralt and Ciri’s meeting in Brokilon.

How can you do this? — would ask the people who have read the book. Everything is built on this! Geralt grows sympathetic towards this pert girl, he saves her life, and the main thing — gets a good kick in the butt from the Destiny after the Brokilon water trial. How can you get around this?

Like this! — Hissrich tells us. Deal with it. Geralt comes to Cintra, demands the child, he goes to prison, escapes during the Nilfgaardian assault — he kinda missed his Destiny. Thus, there is zero emotional connection between them. Ciri will drop by Brokilon, but without Geralt and heck knows why. The sense in drinking Brokilonian water is lost in the series too: the girl just got a little high, and that’s it.

WHAT! THE! F*CK!

Hissrich, at the same time, decided to play “Like, I am kinda Nolan”. There are three different plot lines in the series, with different timing and pacing, which converge in the end.

The first line is, naturally, the witcher’s line. It starts umph-teen years before Ciri’s birth. The second — Yennefer’s line, it starts several decades before Ciri’s birth, and third — Ciri’s own line, it starts with Cintra’s fall and lasts for a few days (weeks?) before Ciri and Geralt meeting.

This is the most boring and useless line in the series. Freya Allan, for sure, fits Ciri’s type perfectly, and, possibly, can act, but she has absolutely nothing to play. She rushes about, bug-eyed, doing some jerky motions. To add some suspense, she’s being constantly hunted by Nilfgaardians, they set off a doppler upon her, but she shows neither ingenuity nor a regular common sense (it’s a bad idea to start a campfire in a reeds!) trying to get away from the chase. She takes no decisions, but plods following the circumstances. We should, generally, feel sympathy for her, but kinda no.

That is, please hear me — now the problem is not in the series having moved away from the text — after all, the deeply loved by people “Sherlock” and “M.A.S.H.” have deviated much farther from their sources. The problem here is in a plain shitty storytelling, when the hero is not a creator of their own fate, but a reed shaken by the wind. And, as a consequence of a shitty storytelling — inevitable boredom.

Yennefer’s line is a bit more interesting. We see the origin story of a magician. Yennefer goes a long way from a tiny hunchback to a mighty sorceress beauty. This line is created precisely by the recipe described above: let’s pull a single sentence from a story (“The Last Wish”, in this case), and develop it into a story.

This story has no problems with the hero’s goals and actions — but it has some with general pacing and logics. After the character’s transformation into a beautie (after she had her uterus literally ripped out) they had a fantastic opportunity to show a political scene of Northern kingdoms. But no, instead we see her escape from a radroach, which pushed her away from involvement in a big politics, and the decision to become an independent businesswoman. As such, Yennefer no longer does anything significant, “one passion holds her e’er in thrall” (Translator: M. Lermontov, trans. by I. Zheleznova): to bear a baby.

We must admit, Hissrich is faithful to the source here, where she could really step away from it. In his early creative period, Sapkowski was a hidden misogynist, and has only introduced Yennefer to the narrative with a single goal: to be the object of Geralt’s love interest. To add some internal conflict to her, he didn’t give himself the trouble, and resorted to the little traditional thing — “strong woman actually feels bad without a husband and babieeees”. We should give him his credit, in the further novel, he started to fix it and introduced Yennefer as a political player, who, moreover, holds her own line.

You could think: take these pieces from the book, develop them as you like, show Yennefer’s service at the court of the kings of Aedirn, diplomacy, mixed with spying and magic. Instead of it, Hissrich takes a ready-made misogynic cliche from Sapkowski. Humor, allusions, coloring are thrown away, but a misogyny is happily picked up.

Anyway, we’ll give the series’ misogyny a touch separately.

When Yennefer crosses paths with Geralt, the pacing of her story changes. For two series, she plays a role of a love interest, after which the screenwriters cannot invent a thing to do for her, and a row of a incredibly idiotic episodes ensues, when she palms of a piece of grass to Aretuza students, and takes them to see a shiny fish pond. As if she had nothing to do.

And, finally, the Battle of Sodden Hill, incredibly badly staged by itself, where Yennefer is used in an incredibly dumb way. After which she disappears. Finita.

Geralt himself. Let’s set aside, for a time, the fact that mr. Henry Cavill, with all my love to his curves, lines and voice, is a mr. Miscast. His plot line follows the stories the most closely, but, because the heart of the stories is ripped, he doesn’t have much to play. He grunts, curses, hisses, grumbles and mumbles, makes a sage face, does his best to play a jerk with a heart of gold, but in the episodes 1–2 it’s completely unclear why should we sympathise with this jerk. Sapkowski creates the characterizing moment in the very first “Witcher” story: it’s a man able to chop three gangbangers just to make a statement, but ready to risk his head for a child that was turned into a monster. A multi-dimensional personality, shortly speaking.

But this moment was moved into the third episode, while the first was made of “The Lesser Evil” story, running it in parallel with the Cintra’s fall.

I can understand this parallel: Renfri, of which we don’t know if she’s a monster or a morally crippled person, and Ciri, with a concealed monster potential. Two exiled princesses, forced to wander a very hostile world. But because the screenwriters wanted to pay a screen time to both of them, Renfri’s story was crumpled, and the conflict level was lowered a lot. In the source, Geralt not only has to kill a woman he had sex with and who he sympathizes — he also does this for his friend, alderman Caldemeyn, who is powerless against Renfri because Renfri has a letter of protection from the king, and the king won’t have mercy for the alderman for his favorite’s demise. This is the reason the alderman expels Geralt from Blaviken. Except for a dead love, this story has also a dimension of a killed friendship (which might pair up with the obtained friendship with Dandelion in the next episode… but no). Renfri herself fell a victim of this series’ tradition to flatten and simplify female characters: in the source, she didn’t take children as hostages. Seeing that her cause is lost, she stood up to fight the witcher, knowing that her chance to win tends to zero. Even though he gave her the chance to escape.

What was this replaced with? The battle for Cintra, directed so awfully… alright, this deserves a separate word.

The removal of an alderman led to one more idiotism in the plot: now Geralt finds out about the possible market massacre… from a dream.

In general, idiotisms and alogisms are a curse of Geralt’s line, and each time they are a consequence of one character’s removal or an addition of another. Remove the The Queen of the Fields from a second episode — and it becomes unclear why the heck the elves let Geralt and Dandelion go, and even compensated for the loss of the lute. Stuff Triss Merigold into the third episode — and we get an immediate question, why such a strong magess didn’t manage the striga by herself, she’s a resident mage, it’s on her job description. In the fourth episode, Dandelion manages to sneak Geralt onto Calanthe’s feast for some reason. Where’s the logic? Why can an invited bard bring someone over to a royal feast? Why couldn’t you leave the original plot: Calanthe hired Geralt to kill Urcheon? In the fifth episode, it’s unclear why did the djinn pester Geralt? Originally, Geralt clenched a seal in his fist and pronounced a certain, er, exorcism, which the djinn took for a first wish. There are almost zero alogisms in the sixth episode, but they threw away the funniest and intriguing part: the fight between all the parties wishing to kill the dragon, during which Yennefer and Geralt make peace. In this episode they do the opposite. The seventh episode is a pure pain: instead of meeting in the Brokilon forest, Geralt impertinently shows up at Cintrian court: “Go hand me the Destiny Child!” And, naturally, gets into gaol. Then it’s Calanthe’s turn to act like an idiot: for reasons unknown, she doesn’t understand that Nilfgaard is at the gate and the witcher would be the best bodyguard for the princess. The last episode, probably, is the one closest to Sapkowski, but not without idiotism as well: why would Yurga the merchant in a dangerous place do such a hopeless thing as burial? In the source, he broke a wheel and his coward servants ran away from the undead. Here, why does he hang around with the deceased? What was the screenwriters’ problem with the wheel?

The series is full of such a silly little things along all the three lines. One gets a complete impression that the screenwriters of a different episodes never met and didn’t even exchange an email, the editor signed the screenplays off without reading them, and the showrunner herself never bothered to verify the sequence. For example, Yennefer is declared to be a strong portalmaker, able to jump to a different continent with a snap of a finger. But by the Battle of Sodden everybody forgets about this, Yennefer never tries to bolt into the middle of Nilfgaardian army, burn everything to crisps and teleport back into the fortress. In the first episode, Mousesack sends Ciri with a trusted knight to go around the enemy army. Well, maybe Mousesack doesn’t know how to make portals — in Sapkowski’s lore druids have their own special magic. But in the seventh we find out that he does know! So why the heck didn’t he transport Ciri to a safe place — the capital of Redania, or to Skellige? In the fifth episode, doppler claims he copied even the memory of Mousesack — but in the sixth, Ciri manages to expose him by asking a question that only Mousesack knew the answer to. That’s a lot of Taco Bell!

One more thing that spoils the remaining pleasure of watching it. The series look cheap. Barring the fact that each episode’s budget is 10M (more than “The Game of Thrones” had during the first season!), it doesn’t show at all.To say more, my experienced screenwriter’s eye sees all the tricks that colleagues do to make the filming cheaper: more open-air, less decorations; saving on characters, and on crowd scenes, and even on CGI, and the battle scenes… it’s a freaking shame, not a battle scenes. Should this thin black line on the horizon symbolize a war machine of Nilfgaardian army? The king and the queen fight on foot? The citadel of Cintra is shot at with a fire arrows, and Mousesack holds them off with a magical barrier? Why doesn’t Nilfgaardian army have catapults (in the last episode it, suddenly, does)? Are the ruins of Ogrodzieniec supposed to depict the strategically important Sodden fortress? Is it so busted because of its strategic value? Mr. Alik Sakharov, please share your valuable experience from “The Game of Thrones” with your colleague Marc Jobst: if you cannot stage a battle scene — don’t stage it. Let the battered queen be carried into her chamber, let’s have a flame glow behind the windows, let a stone from a catapult break the shutters and thrash a fireplace. The audience will very well understand that there was a battle and it was lost.

Sure, if we talked about a Ukrainian or Russian series, I would say the money was mostly swiped. But this is Netflix!

We must give the credit to the series: the sword fights are staged well. Sure, why the heck does he drop his sword all the time? Well, whatever.

Now, finally, let’s talk about the misogyny.

I don’t know if it’s conscious or not, but Hissrich and her screenwriting team push the idea: “Woman + power = evil!” They sacrifice Tissaia de Vries and Calanthe to this idea. The former turns from a good educator and a deeply decent woman, thanks to the works of screenwriters, into a crappy educator whose method is: “Everyone, do this… Whoever didn’t drop dead, consider that you got a good mark” — and a cold-blooded killer. The latter turned from a smart queen implementing a policy of tolerance, into a gangbanger doe and the inceptor of a genocide of elves. Renfri, as mentioned before, got exacerbated. Fringilla Vigo became a bloody serial killer. Nameless rich woman who had sheltered Ciri is horrible with her dwarven servant. The conditionally-good women are mostly powerless: all than queen Kalis and her newborn can do is die, Triss is unable to remove a spell from a striga, Ciri sorta has the power but uses it unconsciously and not on business. The queen of dryads also doesn’t do anything important.

The authors kinda try to give us more strong women — but they better not have done it. For example, we got a generous portion of sorceresses in the last episode — but the watcher doesn’t have the time to know them better and feel compassion for them. So, when they suffer a tragic and cruel demise in a battle against Nilfgaard, we have neither the time nor the reason to feel sorry for them.

Sapkowski, when he understood that female characters don’t play well in his books, tried adding the priestesses of Melitele in an enclosing novel “The Voice of Reason”, and their boss Nenneke, colorful like Olenna Tyrell. Guess what, did they make it to the series? Correct. No.

Except for that, compensating the lack of women in the short stories, Sapkowski gives us a whole bouquet of beautiful and smart ladies in the following books. That’s where the series got Triss Merigold, Fringilla Vigo and Tissaia de Vries. But why not Philippa Eilhart, king Vizimir’s advisor? Not Sabrina Glevissig and not Keira Metz? Francesca Findabair? Not the Black Rayla, at least as an episodic character? Why the screen time when they could introduce these characters is pissed away for Aretuza students smoking a joint?

In the end, as it was explained to me by a representatives of the plebs that lop it up, they watch the series as an industrial novel about a laborious working days of a tight-assed witcher. Itsy-bitsy rigger crawls up from city swamp, down came the witcher and rigger chomp-chomp-chomp — why, are you bored? Hey, what do you think you are asking for — timing, pacing, logics, characters… it has 93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes — eat this, smartasses.

Alright, I have put out there everything I have been holding inside. Next time, I will tell you how much “The Mandalorian” is better.

Oh, yeah. Last thing. These series will give you an earworm. If you are brave enough to watch it after this.