The Witcher Midseason-Finale Recap: Having a Ball

The Witcher Midseason-Finale Recap: Having a Ball,The reveals in the midseason finale would be more fun if they weren’t blatantly obvious. A recap of “The Art of the Illusion,” episode five, season three of Netflix’s “The Witcher,” starring Henry Cavill.

The Witcher Midseason-Finale Recap: Having a Ball

Season 3 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating2 stars **

Photo: Susan Allnutt/Netflix/Susan Allnutt/Netflix The Witcher has rarely been subtle, but I’m not sure this show has ever tipped its cards as completely as it does in this midseason finale. As the bard Valdo Marx entertains the crowd at the ball, he belts out a song with this refrain: “All is not as it seems.”

The odd, perhaps needlessly convoluted structure of this episode — something of a Witcher trademark at this point — means that we hear Valdo Marx sing this line roughly 8,000 times before the credits roll. As earworms go, it’s no “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher,” but it does hammer the audience over the head with the episode’s main idea: Almost nothing we’re seeing can be taken at face value.

It’s a lesson Geralt learns early at the party, where the caviar is an illusion, the wine is laced with aphrodisiacs, and sorceresses like Sabrina Glevissig and Marti Södergren decide to spend the evening conjuring up smutty illusions to flirt with the Witcher. It’s also, just as unsuccessfully, a trick the show attempts to play on the audience by showing us a scene from one perspective before rewinding to give us extra context.

This would be a fun trick if the twists weren’t so obvious. At the center of the dance floor, Geralt and Istredd have a full-on schoolboy-style brawl over which of them is better for Yennefer. Later, we revisit the scene with some new context: Geralt and Istredd have staged the fight as a distraction while Yennefer sneaks into Stregobor’s office to hunt for evidence that he’s the one bankrolling Rience. It would be a fun reveal if it weren’t blatantly obvious upfront that neither Geralt or Istredd would ruin Yennefer’s fancy party unless it was part of the plan all along.

Much of the episode proceeds in this fashion — not clever enough for a plot structure that’s too clever by half. Geralt has vague, ominous conversations with Dijkstra and Vilgefortz; Yennefer has vague, ominous conversations with Artorius and Philippa. There’s some pretty bad music, some pretty good dancing, and a lot of armchair philosophizing about which side to pick in the war to come, if any at all.

But that’s all preamble to the big, Hercule Poirot–esque main event when Geralt and Yennefer gather all the suspects in the drawing room and lay out the case against Stregobor. To be fair, the evidence is pretty damning. His safe contains a list of “half-bloods” that includes Teryn, the girl Geralt saved from the castle; a necklace and a mirror that belonged to his victims; and the Book of Monoliths, which Istredd has been hunting for all season and which could at least theoretically be used to banish elves from the Continent for good.

Everyone is convinced. Stregobor, as usual, is a smarmy ass the whole time, which doesn’t exactly help his case. He’s hauled off to be imprisoned until a trial can be conducted, everyone goes back to celebrate at the party, and Geralt and Yennefer consummate their success with a night of passion. We even get a bathtub scene for old times’ sake. And with Stregobor busted like so many Scooby-Doo villains before him, Ciri is safe at last, and everyone gets to live happily ever after.

Okay, okay, that’s obviously not where the episode ends. But it isn’t until the following morning that Geralt and Yennefer have the good sense to realize that pinning the whole thing on Stregobor is a little too convenient. The culprit, they finally logic out, is … Vilgefortz! Congrats to anyone who figured it out faster than they did.

So: Now that the evil sorcerer has finally been unveiled, let’s count the ways this reveal is underwhelming. Despite a hasty attempt to give him some shading in his conversation with Geralt earlier in the episode, Vilgefortz is a character we barely know anything about, so his betrayal doesn’t really sting in a way that, say, Tissaia’s or Triss’s or even Istredd’s would. Stregobor was too obvious a red herring, which ensured no viewer would think he was responsible. But the big clue pointing to Vilgefortz — the scarlet gemstones on Tissaia’s bracelet, which match Lydia’s earrings — was far too oblique to be something any casual viewer would pick up on.

What does this actually mean? Vilgefortz has a grand plan, and Geralt has very little time to stop it. But before he can confront the sorcerer, he’ll have to deal with the Redanians, whose own schemes are finally coming into play. As the episode ends, Dijkstra stands with a knife to Geralt’s throat while screams echo from down the hall. “Should have chosen a side, witcher,” he muses.

It’s a tantalizing cliffhanger that promises, at last, to kick season three’s fairly labyrinthine and talk-y main story into a higher gear. We’ll just need to wait a month to see it.

Stray Arrows

• No Ciri and no Jaskier in this one!

• Geralt tells Yennefer he loves her. I guess that’s not a surprise, but it does drive home just how little The Witcher did to convincingly mend their relationship in season three. Geralt forgiving Yennefer was basically condensed into a montage right at the start of the season, and the cute scene in “The Invitation” where Jaskier and Ciri imagine what Geralt and Yennefer are saying from afar also, conveniently enough, saved the writers the hassle of actually writing a scene that would lead Geralt and Yennefer to a kiss.

• So much fiction hinges on the belief that getting older means getting wiser, so I’ve always loved The Witcher’s conceit that the vast majority of the show’s mages, with their unnaturally long lives, have only grown pettier, more self-absorbed, and more hedonistic with the extra time they’ve been given.

• I also like that Stregobor’s office is protected by a butterfly that warns him when Yennefer enters. Too few fantasy stories take the opportunity to get really weird with their magic, but I guess you can count on the show that ended one of its early episodes by revealing that failed students were transformed into electric eels to power a magic tower.

• Geralt on Aretuza: “A den of nymphomaniacs.” They should put that in the new student handbook.

• That’s a wrap on the first half of The Witcher’s third season! I’ll see you back here for the last three episodes on July 27.

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