The Witcher Season 3 Finale Leaves Henry Cavill Fans Hanging

Warning: Spoilers follow for the first three seasons of The Witcher.

In October of last year, news broke that Henry Cavill would be departing The Witcher, with The Hunger Games actor Liam Hemsworth set to take over the role of Geralt of Rivera. In the months since, Netflix and the team behind The Witcher have been enthusiastically hyping up Cavill’s final season, assuring fans (sometimes via giant messages emblazoned across local landmarks) that the actor wouldn’t be going anywhere in the latest batch of episodes. The common presumption among fans, then, was that Cavill would be out of the picture by the Season 4 premiere, meaning his sendoff would come in the Season 3 finale, “The Cost of Chaos.” Well, that finale has just come and gone, and Cavill’s goodbye wasn’t quite as epic as expected.

Witcher Geralt spends nearly the entirety of the final two episodes of the season healing up under the care of forest dryads after being gravely injured in the explosion at the Tower of Gulls, which also left him and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) separated from their would-be daughter Ciri (Freya Allan). For the majority of these episodes, Cavill appears lying on a sickbed, clenching his jaw to convey Geralt’s agony and doing pretty much nothing else. 

This plot is in line with the one laid out by Witcher creator Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel Time of Contempt, on which the latest season is based, but that doesn’t mean it’s not disappointing. Geralt ends the season rallying himself for a battle, slowly regaining his strength in hopes of getting Ciri back. In his final scene, Cavill gets one last badass, well-choreographed fight sequence, but it’s against some local bullies, not a major villain. He ends his run by walking off into the fog alongside sidekicks Jaskier (Joey Batey) and Milva (Meng’er Zhang).

There’s nothing explicitly wrong with Cavill’s exit, and his bloody final battle feels like somewhat of a character-defining moment for the previously “neutral” hero. Geralt has spent much of this season trying to decide exactly how much he’s willing to delve into the politics of men and elves in order to keep his family safe, and it’s clear in the finale that he’s ready to get his hands dirty if that’s what it takes. But this ending still feels off. 

The common presumption among fans was that Cavill would be out of the picture by the Season 4 premiere, meaning his sendoff would come in the Season 3 finale.

For one thing, The Witcher is a high fantasy series that features appearance-altering magic, yet the episode never hints at any sort of in-narrative event that would explain Geralt’s inevitable transformation next season. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich seems to have opted to finish out the Time of Contempt plotline entirely without hinting at what’s to come, preserving the viewing experience of the first three seasons for purists before entering a new era. Still, The Witcher does seem likely to explain Geralt’s change away within the story, as executive producer Tomek Baginski previously told Yahoo that the show has “a very, very good plan to introduce our new Geralt and our new vision for Geralt with Liam.”

Whatever that plan is, viewers clearly won’t be clued into it until Season 4. In the same interview, Baginski notes that the changeover will hew “very close to the meta ideas which are deeply embedded in the books, especially in book five.” The book series’ convoluted numbering system makes it difficult to tell which book Baginski is referencing, but the 1999 novel The Lady of the Lake is often considered the fifth and final installment in the series, and it might hold the key to Geralt’s impending makeover.

Whether via a frame narrative set years in the future or some otherworldly portal travel, an adaptation of The Lady of the Lake could certainly find some way to get creative with its explanation for Geralt’s new look. But if there will be a “passing of the reins,” as Baginski referred to when speaking to Yahoo, we haven’t seen it yet.

Though it’s great to see Cavill go out swinging with one last fight scene, the book-following back half of Season 3 of The Witcher isn’t exactly conducive to a rewarding goodbye. The first few episodes of this season were the show’s best to date in large part because of the excellent dynamic between Geralt, Yen, and Ciri, yet these final episodes leave them scattered and separated. Ciri’s journey through the desert is vital for her character development, but it’s also frustrating that we don’t see Allan get a goodbye scene with Cavill. Chalotra, too, is isolated from Cavill for parts of these episodes, with Yen choosing to leave Geralt half-dead with the dryads in a scene we bizarrely don’t even get to see. Equally odd, at least two shots in these new episodes feature Cavill uttering lines while the camera stays squarely on the back of his wig-clad head, a filmmaking choice that’s often used when stand-ins are being employed or when dialogue is being changed in post-production. There’s no reason to think that the full cast didn’t shoot these final episodes exactly as intended, but if nothing else, it certainly feels like some of the impact of them got lost in the edit.

Regardless of the reasoning, the end of The Witcher Season 3 offers a staggered and strange fade-out for the beloved version of the title character, one that doesn’t build in much room for closure. “I know in my heart, Geralt, you will find Ciri,” Yennefer says in voiceover as the Witcher heads off on his mission in the anticlimactic final shot. She might be right, but the question remains: Will Ciri even recognize Geralt when he does?