The Witcher: Blood Origin
At the beginning of the pandemic my friends and I wanted to keep in touch so we started a Thursday tradition of using Teleparty to watch a show together. Three years on and the tradition is still alive. It's really the highlight of our weeks if we're honest. We've watched British comedies, animation, comic book adaptations, and then we got into The Witcher universe. Mainly at my insistence because we were wrapping up The Umbrella Academy and rumors were the new season of The Witcher was going to drop summer 2023 and I had yet to watch a single episode, I know, simply shocking. And then the new season of The Witcher was announced and we had some spare time. Not much, but just enough to squeeze in a few prequels, where in one, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, Vesemir who is played to perfection by Kim Bodnia is nonsensically voiced by Theo James and his posh accent. I won't dwell on this though because that story is best forgotten. The Witcher: Blood Origin though was surprisingly interesting. Not in the story itself, it's pretty basic, but when you get down to it all stories are basic, it's how you tell them that makes them original. And this had just enough to make it memorable. Just enough and Dylan Moran. Which, when I heard his voice from a clifftop before even seeing his face I yelled out "Fuck me Dylan Moran!" Which you can literally take both ways, because it's Dylan Moran. In fact most of this show just had me shouting declarative sentences over and over. "Damn this music sounds like someone really wants to imitate Bear McCreary's Black Sails score." Five seconds later, oh, that's because it is Bear! Following which I wanted to know why Bear doesn't do the flagship show, because come on, it's Bear people! Also despite what the internet says I swear this show had to have a higher budget, the camerawork is lush, the sets are jaw-dropping, and everything just felt more polished. But what this show is really for is answers. The flagship show is kind of vague, they don't know exactly what monoliths are for, they're not sure how monsters entered their world, they can't even make any more Witchers, which all starts to slowly tie together near the end of the second season and then in walks The Witcher: Blood Origin and they're like, you want answers? Here's some answers; Monolith's take you to alternate dimensions where the monsters AND chaos magic originate from. Elves didn't used to be oppressed, they were the oppressors, those hypocrites, the way they treated the dwarves, but then the racial genocide seems kind of cyclical. And as for the conjunction? That event which if you grew up watching The Dark Crystal you assumed was a nice planetary alignment, it was rather a smashing together of dimensions that ended up bringing humans to the Continent. I mean, realities literally crashing together! And as for the first Witcher? Well, oddly enough the magic and the commingling of the I want to say powers or possibly blood of all our warrior friends is back to the vague, with possibly a baby being the first Witcher. That was unclear. Odd given how many answers were given and the title of the show. Which means this one-off show needs a sequel. How hard could it be to green light it? We are now in the age of Michelle Yeoh after all. Minimally I need a spinoff with Meldof and Gwen.
