The Witcher: Blood Origin Review – The Absolute Worst of The Witcher Universe

I humbly and soulfully apologize for trying to create hype for this series by writing posts such as 5 Reasons Why You Should Watch It. Unfortunately, The Witcher: Blood Origin has turned out to be not just the worst project of the Witcher franchise but one of the worst of 2022. As you may know, The Witcher book series and game series are some of the best pieces of dark fantasy content you’ll find out there. So, Netflix were pretty confident about this universe launching not just the main series but also an animated movie called Nightmare of the Wolf, as well as two separate spin-offs by the name of Blood Origin and The Rats. The latter is yet to come but if Cavill’s exit and Blood Origin are any signs, the franchise won’t survive for long. Anyways, let us talk about what went wrong with this series.

The Witcher: Blood Origin Could Be The Termination of the Franchise

Rating – ★1/2

Netflix has shown a lot of faith in Lauren Schmidt-Hissrich and so far she has done nothing but disappoint fans of the universe. The Witcher Season 1 started off on a really confusing and unsatisfactory note but a hope still existed which was brutally crushed by season 2. Not only did Witcher season 2 completely ignore the lore and drifted way too off from the books, it also couldn’t present a compelling original story. Struggling with the main series itself, someone came up with an idea to launch a spin-off series with characters no one knows or cares about. Yet they promised to showcase some important lore which included Conjunction of Spheres, Elven wars, creation of the first Witcher, etc. Sadly, Blood Origin failed on all fronts!

Starting off with Conjunction of Spheres (COS), which we were all really excited to see – even Witcher 3’s 2 minute opening told us more about it. Moving on to the Elven Wars they did show a teeny bit of conflict between the Elven clans but absolutely nothing about how humans conquered the Continent. Yeah we get it that in the final scene after COS, humans arrived to the continent but we already knew that. What we wanted to see was how they rose to prominence. Anyways, that leaves us with the creation of the first Witcher, which turns out to be Fjall. He underwent the very first method of trial of grasses and turned out to be a complete monster who was brought under control by Black Widow… oh sorry wrong universe. But felt like Marvel didn’t it? Not to mention how they totally ignored the books and the existing lore about how these events actually took place.

So, the things we were promised weren’t delivered, so now let us move on to the main plot of the show. What was it again? 7 warriors team up to fight against an evil Elven Queen and her mage (who is power hungry) in order to give food to people? Something like that. What I want to say is that there was so little plot and so many plot holes that the show made no sense. You’ll dose off numerous times in the first 3 episodes as nothing significant happens except introduction of characters no one cares about till the very end of the show. The cast did a great job but the characters were so poorly written that none of them were even slightly compelling or left any impact. Hell, I don’t even remember any of them only after hours of watching it.

The two characters I do remember are Avallac’h and Eredin who are quintessential to the plot of the Witcher books as well as the games. However, their characters weren’t just butchered, they were massacred! Avallac’h was reduced to Newt Schmander from Fantastic Beasts, whereas Eredin aka the King of the Wild Hunt was reduced to a plaything. I do not have as much problems with Netflix’s decision to make Eredin GAY than I have with making him insignificant, weak, and pathetic. It seemed like the writers neither knew anything about being Eredin or about being gay. Eredin had to be intimidating but instead he was made into a bait for LGBTQ+, who I am sure will hate his character. As for Avallac’h, he was slightly less useless than Eredin but still was butchered all the way through. And what the hell was even Dandelion/Jaskier (Joey Batey) involved in it for? He served no purpose as well.

So, after butchering two fan favorite characters, and spoiling numerous characters no one cared about in the first place, there was still damage to be done. Remember how The Witcher is about monsters or at least is supposed to be? Yeah, there are a total of two monsters in a series which claims to be about “Conjunction of Spheres”. If you are unaware, during COS, humans, monsters, chaos, and magic came into The Continent, but if you expect any of them to be shown properly, you’ll be disappointed. They did try to depict chaos magic more deeply but that had already been done in Witcher season 1 and 2. Also, the entire concept of “monoliths” is a scam and I’d like to enlighten viewers that nothing like that exists in the books or the games. Why they chose to go the Agents of SHIELD’s Monolith way is beyond me.

The good things about this show are its well designed costumes, excellent make-up an hairstyling, and praise-worthy production design. Some tolerable things about the show were its cinematography, committed performances, and a few short but cool fight sequences here and there. Aside form this, almost everything was really bad especially the writing, direction, character work, VFX, and the promises it failed to deliver.

Final Verdict – Being a big fan of the Witcher Universe, I tried to ignore the shortcomings of Witcher Season 2 and Nightmare of the Wolf. But The Witcher: Blood Origin proves that the franchise is heading towards a hole from which it’ll find it hard to claw its way out. After Henry Cavill’s exit from series and the mediocre performance of anything Witcher made by Netflix, they needed a win. Blood Origin instead is a huge loss which has triggered fans worldwide into boycotting the Netflix Witcher Universe. It is quite obviously a colored propaganda with no heart, or soul and a useless attempt to bait people of all color, gender, sex, etc., into watching this excuse of a prequel. I am sorry Netflix but a huge thumbs down to you!

If you have any questions regarding The Witcher universe, feel free to ask in the comments below. For more content, stay tuned. As usual, like, subscribe and share our articles as we here are trying to build a community of people High on Cinema!