Triss Merigold (who you might remember from “Betrayer Moon”) casts a spell that creates a bed of deadly mushrooms, which launch spores when trampled that poison the Nilfgaardian soldiers. A single direct hit would probably end the whole battle - but fortunately, the good guys have Yennefer, who manages to deflect the fireballs before they can do any real damage to the keep.Īnd with the first shots fired, Yennefer and her 21 fellow mages launch an elaborate and genuinely thrilling scheme to beat the odds - and crush an army of 50,000 - with a bevy of well-placed spells. Back at the Council of Mages, it was briefly mentioned that fire magic is forbidden, and now we see why: Generating that much power reduces each sorceress who casts the spell to ash. The battle begins in earnest when Fringilla orders the sorceresses on her side to launch massive fireballs at the castle. In scope and ambition, the Battle of Sodden Hill is fairly similar to fantasy battles like Lord of the Rings’ Battle of Helm’s Deep or Game of Thrones’ Battle of Blackwater - but things get so much nuttier when you put 22 sorceresses and sorcerers on that wall. Let’s talk about the thing the Witcher finale doesn’t skimp on: Magic. Having grown up in such abuse and poverty, Yennefer has been focused on taking as much as she can - but giving is a better look for someone with her powers, and I suspect she’ll find it more fulfilling.Īnd the timing couldn’t be better, because her skill as a sorceress is desperately needed. As Yennefer laments that the world has nothing left to give her, Tissaia de Vries flips it around, suggesting that Yennefer still has plenty left to give the world. On the eve of the battle, the odds are not looking great for our heroes, but the stakes become clearer when Yennefer makes an important philosophical shift. Even a single scene where she and Yennefer have a significant interaction at Aretuza would have made Fringilla’s betrayal play that much more clearly, and sting that much harder. I mean: What’s Fringilla’s deal? How did she get so powerful? Is all of this revenge against Yennefer for abandoning Nilfgaard for a more glamorous post, which is how Fringilla got stuck there in the first place? Was this her plan all along, regardless of where she ended up? Is Fringilla a zealot herself, or is she just manipulating zealots like Cahir as pawns in her own quest for power? Fringilla is clearly a worthy villain, but I wish The Witcher had done more to give her a real arc. There’s just one problem I have with all of this: Who is Fringilla? I don’t mean that literally - she’s been around since Yennefer’s training days at Aretuza.
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And this is also a kind of civil war, since the Nilfgaardian army is led by their fellow sorceress, Fringilla. Her season-long quest to carve out a meaningful life ends at Sodden Hill, where she and her fellow mages make a 300-style stand against the invading Nilfgaardian army, who will have unfettered access to the Northern kingdoms if they can get across that bridge. Instead, the big arc in the finale belongs to Yennefer. We get some flashbacks while Geralt is backing away from death’s door, but until the closing moments of the finale, that’s all he does in this episode. At the top of the episode, Geralt gets attacked by some zombielike monsters and spends the rest of it convalescing in a delirious haze. With three timelines viewed from three different point-of-view characters - and at least two dozen side characters operating within the scope of this immensely complicated and war-torn fantasy landscape - there was simply no way the finale was going to resolve, or even address, all the dangling threads we’ve been following throughout the first season.īut what I didn’t expect was that the witcher himself would be so irrelevant to the finale of The Witcher.
#Witcher 3 feast for crows series#
Whatever the show’s title, it has become increasingly clear over the course of The Witcher’s first season that this series is interested in a lot more than the witcher.