The Witcher: Origin of the Blood was intended to be the sweeping tale of some of the world’s most important moments in the universe, including the conjunction of the spheres and the creation of the first witcher. And while it’s certainly a bit about it, most of the time it’s not. However, what may shock fans more than the quality of the series is that such a massive-seeming prequel was attempted in just four episodes, the final tally for the Netflix miniseries.
That’s not too surprising since the series was originally announced to have six episodes total. In fact, so many were written and possibly shot. But while editing the series together, showrunners Declan de Barra and Lauren S. Hissrich decided they didn’t need all six to do the story.
“We could do whatever we wanted,” Barra said of the series’ broad prequel premise, speaking to Polygon. “We kind of wanted to write [a] Two-movie(ish) kind of emotional story that was self-contained.
“So since we could do anything we wanted, we shot anything we wanted. And then in the editing room we were like, ‘Okay, what’s the best version of this sandwich we can make?’ The tastiest sandwich you can make would just have you saying, ‘That wasn’t too much, it wasn’t too little. The sauce was just right.’ And we tried that.”
Unfortunately, while the team strives for “the tastiest sandwich,” the series still fails to capture the most interesting parts of the story element or origins of the universe that it’s supposed to be about. But with so much meat on the bone, it’s always possible that the Witcher universe will return to that era and maybe spend a little over four episodes there next time.
As for when “next time” might be, Netflix was a little less clear. From all we know origin of the blood is just a miniseries so we shouldn’t expect to see a second season. So any return to these characters and the time immediately following the conjunction of the spheres would likely have to come from an entirely new side witcher spin off.
