The Witcher has a complex mythology filled with prophecies, monsters, mages, and mutant mercenaries. All of these fantastical elements mean that in the world of The Continent, nothing is outside the realms of possibility — a truth which also applies to fan theories about what comes next in Season 2.
In that spirit, earlier this year we presented showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich with six of the craziest Witcher fan theories we could find and asked her to weigh in and share her thoughts on their viability and the reasonings behind them. So do any of them hold water? And which theory is based purely in a production mistake? Read on to find out this and more!
Ciri (Freya Allan) is actually Geralt’s (Henry Cavill) mother. “Wow. Nope, that just blows my mind. I can’t even wrap my head around that one,” Hissrich said in response to this brain-bending fan theory. “I mean, it’s funny because as you step back and you’re like, ‘Well, she would be capable…’ But then that just — it literally makes my mind explode.”
And while time is a huge theme of The Witcher franchise, Hissrich shared that after she worked on The Umbrella Academy‘s first season she told herself, “I will never again work on a show with time travel because it makes you want to put your head through a wall.” So before you waste your energy trying to figure out what timey-wimey somersaults the series would have to pull off in order to explain how Ciri could one day give birth to Geralt, her adoptive father, you can rest assured knowing that this is one theory we can debunk right now.
Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) used to be a witcher. Despite the fact that The Witcher‘s first season documented large portions of Yennefer’s life from her adolescence through the Battle of Sodden, some fans think there’s still a big part of the sorceress’ past we have yet to see: her time as a witcher.
“How would that work?” a confused Hissrich wondered. And it’s a good question since not only would it be difficult to work in an entire period of her life as a witcher into the timeline we already know, but there’s the added complication of witchers historically being an all-male order — at least until Ciri starts to be trained as one in Season 2. “It’s hard because, of course, once you have the books in your head and so much of witcher lore is about ‘women can’t be witchers’ and how does Ciri start to factor into that? So yeah, that one’s hard for me to wrap my head around,” Hissrich said.
Cahir (Eamon Farren) was replaced by the Doppler after their fight. In Episode 6, Cahir tussled with a shapeshifter, otherwise known as a doppler. A popular theory suggests that after this fight, the Cahir we see in the show isn’t actually the Nilfgaardian soldier but the doppler who stole his identity. “Ooh, that’s interesting. I want to keep that one in my back pocket for a while,” Hissrich teased.
“It is a fun idea. It is,” she continued. “That’s one of those scenes that in the editing room, we were like, how are we going to tell the difference between the doppler and Cahir? And at the end, you really don’t care. You know, like they’re fighting, they’re just two men scrapping. Because we had, like, put a cut on one’s cheek or one always has this. But the idea is, when one of them races out, you want to hang in and go like, ‘I don’t know which one just ran away.’ So I like that one.”
Ciri’s prophecy predicted climate change. When Ciri’s powers overwhelmed her in Episode 7, she shared the following cryptic prophecy: “Verily, I say unto you the era of the sword and the ax is nigh, the era of the Wolf’s Blizzard. The Time of the White Chill and the White Light is nigh, the Time of Madness and the Time of Contempt.”
These references to blizzards and chills led some to suspect that one of the dangers Ciri’s predicting is global warming. “So I read this one too,” Hissrich said. “And I mean, like all fantasy … you can see it as an analogy for anything that’s happening in our world right now. The best fantasy … is kind of like horoscopes; you should be able to read them and apply them to yourself.”
Hissrich continued, saying that they didn’t necessarily talk about climate change in the writers’ room while crafting the first season, but that it wouldn’t be out of the question for Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski to have infused the source material with his own beliefs and concerns. “I think a lot of him is in these books, obviously, and a lot of his politics,” Hissrich said. “It’s so funny to me when people talk about not inserting politics into The Witcher. It’s like The Witcher is the most political series that I’ve ever read. I don’t agree with all of it, but I do agree with some of it. And I think Sapkowski probably has a lot more of his beliefs in there than we realized too.”
Jaskier (Joey Batey) isn’t human and that’s why he doesn’t seem to age. The first season of The Witcher covered an expansive amount of time, but since Geralt is a witcher and Yennefer a sorceress, their powers explain why they never showed the years passing by. Jaskier, however, also didn’t age throughout the first season, so could that mean he’s also more than human?
“No, that was just a mistake,” Hissrich said with a laugh. “We have this enormous timeline in our writers’ room that takes up, like, two whiteboards and it’s how we laid out the stories from Season 1, sort of tracking to make sure that everyone fits in. Jaskier was always the outlier because Jaskier would have aged a lot in that season. No, he just had great genes, you know, clearly,” she quipped.
Ciri will use her powers to fuel Aretuza so they will no longer need to turn girls into eels. The first season revealed that an unfortunate selection of Aretuza students each year are sacrificed for the school, with Tissaia (MyAnna Buring) turning them into eels. This reveal, which wasn’t in the books, was divisive among fans, which might explain this theory, per Hissrich. “You know, that theory comes from people who hate the eels. ‘Let us never see the eels again!'” Hissrich said before noting she’s personally a fan of them.
“That came from the brain of Jenny Klein, one of the writers,” Hissrich said of the eels’ origin. “You know, I have two kids. They’re huge fans of Harry Potter. So I have read, seen, done everything about magic schooling. And it was like, what’s different about Aretuza? How do we not make it just become this beautiful place where you go and you get powers and you get anything you want, because that takes conflict out of it. So it was fun to sort of watch all of these young women come together and join and feel like, ‘Oh, this is our family.’ And then some of them are, as we said in the room, eels at the end.”
The Witcher is available to stream on Netflix.
Gallery: Celebrate Better Call Saul With These Exclusive 100 Best Shows Portraits (TVGuide.com)
Kim Wexler’s relationship with Jimmy McGill on Better Call Saul has shown viewers a different side of the man they first met as Saul Goodman. “She enjoys him the way the audience enjoys him,” Rhea Seehorn said of Kim. “I mean, she finds him frightening and scary sometimes, but they’ve seen Breaking Bad. Kim has not seen Breaking Bad, thank god. … So she’s a really good conduit for the audience seeing him in fun but also more complex ways.”Read the full cover story…
As a character who isn’t seen in Breaking Bad, Kim’s open-ended future has worried fans since the beginning. “What happens to Kim Wexler?” showrunner Peter Gould asked. “Why isn’t Kim Wexler on Breaking Bad? Was she at home, waiting for Saul Goodman? Before this season that would have seemed pretty outrageous. Now, I think it’s almost an open possibility.”
“The goodwill and the focus that Breaking Bad established with its audience, and how you were rewarded for watching it, carried over big time to Better Call Saul, so that we were able to do this slow, idiosyncratic show,” Bob Odenkirk said. “The audience was there, going, ‘We trust it. We know there’s going to be a reward. Everything I’m watching is going to have meaning.'”
“The Jimmy and Kim relationship to me is super rewarding, owed in huge part to the fact that they actually allow us to evolve,” Rhea Seehorn said. “Yes, it’s fun doing the explosive crazy scenes, and they’re great storytelling, but when they let us do the really quiet small stuff, and we have to just listen, and things can change on a dime because of the way somebody said something, that is when I feel the most authentic threads of the relationship.”
Showrunner Peter Gould said Bob Odenkirk thrives on playing scenes that put Jimmy through the wringer. “He likes discomfort,” Gould said of Odenkirk. “He loves scenes where he’s in a dumpster, or he’s out in the desert and his clothes are falling apart and his shoes are falling apart. Somehow when he has those moments, you start seeing what the character is made of.”
A flashback to Kim Wexler’s childhood in Season 5 has Rhea Seehorn wondering if she should take up the cello. When young Kim was shown with the instrument on her back, Seehorn asked writer Tom Schnauz for answers. “They liked specifically that she looks even smaller next to a cello, that it makes her even tinier in the picture,” Seehorn said. “So that made sense. I don’t know if I’m supposed ever play the cello on the show, because if so, I’m going to take a lot of lessons. I do not play cello.”
When Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan first approached Bob Odenkirk about a Saul Goodman spin-off, Odenkirk gave them his trust. “The only thing I had to say about that was that you’re going to have to make him likable. They both agreed immediately that the Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad was fun to watch, but not because he was inherently a good, likable person you want to be with,” Odenkirk said. “You can watch him like you watch a car wreck. You can’t turn away. But you don’t really cheer for him. So they had to figure that one out, and they did. They invented who he was when he wasn’t Saul Goodman, and that was a likable guy who was trying to figure out his place in the world.”
“What we found out was, as the seasons went on, the thing that brought Jimmy and Kim together, that finally got them together as a couple, was scamming together,” Peter Gould said. “Kim loves doing that. Why she does, and if there’s something more to say about her past, is something that we’re still mulling over. But it gives the two of them a spark, and the truth is that that spark leads them down a dark path.”
“She really does not seem to care for people that she thinks got handed everything and people that didn’t work for what they have, to a degree that is troubling,” Rhea Seehorn said of Kim’s complicated motives for scamming. “Because what would she do to right those wrongs that she’s talking about, and where would it end if you were really to go about trying to wreak vengeance on the world about that? It could be a worthwhile fight, but I don’t know if it’s a winnable one.”
It was a moment viewers had been waiting for — or dreading — when Jimmy finally began practicing law as Saul in Season 5. “Jimmy thinks he’s found a way to be more honest about who he is by calling himself Saul Goodman,” said Bob Odenkirk. “He’s sort of being utterly honest with people by saying, ‘I’m a phony presentation. I’m one side of myself to you, to the world.'”
Peter Gould compared Better Call Saul’s shifting perspective to the way Breaking Bad’s Jesse slowly took over for Walt as the character to root for. “We start off really invested in Jimmy, and rightly so,” Gould said. “And as he becomes more Saul-ish, your allegiance subtly moves toward Kim, because she’s the one who has the most to lose.”
“I think that this is something that maybe he was bound to try — to try to be Saul Goodman,” Bob Odenkirk said. “But it didn’t work out. He was in trouble almost right away. And as we know from Breaking Bad, he gets into more trouble.”
“Kim is a person who sees herself as the captain of her own ship. She sees herself as someone who is independent, who is clear-eyed, who makes choices for reasons that she understands and thinks through,” said Peter Gould. “And I don’t think anybody’s going to corrupt her, but she could corrupt herself.”
Peter Gould praised the cast’s nuanced performances for helping to sell the show’s visual storytelling. “We can ask them to give something in a look that maybe on another show you might have to write a couple pages of dialogue to put across, and it’s tremendously liberating,” Gould said. “It lets us make the show more visual and interesting and less about explaining what’s going on.”
“Maybe last season, or maybe even after Chuck dies, I thought … if they wanted tragic, it’s not necessarily the most tragic thing for her to just be picked off,” Rhea Seehorn said of Kim’s fate. “Her being in jail, her having to run, her altering herself or revealing herself to be so different that she actually could stay and tolerate what [Jimmy] does is equally tragic.”
“Underneath all the nasty things he’s done — and it makes it sadder to me — there’s still Jimmy McGill who we first met, who just wanted his place in the world,” said Peter Gould of Jimmy’s actions as Saul. “He wants people to like him, and he wants love, and he wants all the things that the rest of us do.”
“I think it’s so smart and great that they have written, directed, and enabled this character to be someone that you have sided with in a way that you believe that she is on the right side of history,” Rhea Seehorn said of Kim, whose increasing comfort with breaking the rules has forced viewers to confront how dangerously seductive it is to take justice into your own hands. “If she’s somebody that can make people follow her, that’s quite the weapon.”
“The audience knocks me out. I mean, that they sit with us and focus and care on the level that they do is astounding,” said Bob Odenkirk. “And I’m just in the best possible place you could be. I’m going to try to enjoy it and appreciate it for as long as it lasts, which is one more season.”Read the full cover story…
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