Season 3 of The Witcher never lets Yennefer be as smart as she should be

Netflix’s The witcher has always taken liberties with the source material and changed things as the creators saw fit to create their preferred version of the story for their adaptation. Parts of the short stories were changed in the first season and a slightly new timeline was invented; a whole story was created blood lineageand Geralt is a few more heroic than its book counterpart. But for all the positives and negatives of these changes, one change has consistently frustrated the entire series: Yennefer.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for season 3 volume 1 of The Witcher.]

Andrzej Sapkowski’s Yennefer is a rare talent even among magicians. Extremely powerful, always independent and determined, she stands behind her vision to make the world a better place – or at least a little more to her liking. She’s a smart and cunning actress in a world full of such. Though she is occasionally wrong or misguided, she is never anyone’s fool or pawn, and she does not put the people she loves in danger (at least not unduly).

Netflix’s Yennefer, on the other hand, exhibits few of these qualities. She has a huge knock on her shoulder and is determined to prove herself to everyone around her, including Geralt and Ciri, at every turn. A powerful mage, she rarely gets the opportunity to use her powers for more than fleeing strikes against nameless hordes of randomly selected foot soldiers.

Even more frustrating, however, is the fact that the yen is so often made the show’s stupid wild card. For two straight seasons, Yennefer is forced to make confusing decisions with disastrous results.

Photo: Susie Allnutt/Netflix

The first and worst is her attempt to kidnap Ciri towards the end of season two. While she does have a chance to recant her betrayal over the course of this season, it’s the kind of move that on a better show should shake Geralt’s and Ciri’s trust in Yen, forcing her to constantly reconsider her loyalty and motives in question and painstakingly regaining their trust over the years.

While this is a huge change from the book version of the yen, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad one. Yennefer doesn’t have to be immune to mistakes, and adding a new dimension that complicates their relationship in the found family at the heart of the Witcher stories could have been an interesting element if done honestly and thoughtfully – especially if considering how often she just disappears from Sapkowski’s version of the story. But it’s not really treated as a new dimension to her character. Instead, the show continues in season three, with some mostly off-screen magic lessons and a brief foray into ice skating. It went from a massive betrayal to a tiny misjudgment, leaving water under the bridge.

While at first glance it might seem like the creators are simply ignoring what already seemed like an uncharacteristic mistake for Yen, after a few seasons it feels like she’s just her outlet for plot-critical missteps in the episodes she decides to turn to to urge the mages to gather in a conclave.

While the political situation in Season 3 isn’t quite as clear as in time of contempt, on which this season’s novel is based, everyone is aware that tensions between the kingdoms of the north and Nilfgaard are rising again. This is an extremely unstable time politically, and a time when kingdoms probably shouldn’t be without their mages, and all of those mages certainly shouldn’t be in the same castle together.

Image: Netflix

While this all seems obvious at first glance, Yennefer continues her plans, unperturbed by the idea that betrayal is in the air – and her fellow mages in Aretuza agree. Then she and the rest of the magicians seem shocked during the ball that wraps up the first volume of season three when Dijkstra, Vilgefortz, and Stregobor all seem to have competing conspiracies afoot. To further clarify the decision-making in the series, Tissaia, the most senior and most formidable of Aretuza’s mages, is initially skeptical of Vilgefortz in the books and immediately suspicious of his intentions, falling madly in love with him in the series.

It is an extremely disappointing situation to see these characters in a situation where they could have been among the smartest political actors on the show. Worse still, watching Yen make such a disastrous decision for the second year in a row undermines almost any credibility as to her character’s competence. The show’s creators seem to take the audience’s love and belief in Yennefer for granted. But after two straight seasons of using her character as a vehicle for all of the show’s worst decisions, how can they expect her to remain a character we care about and believe in?

The WitcherYennefer could have improved the book’s version of the character and given fantasy television an impressive new sign of powerful and interesting wizards, a role often reserved for wise old men or overly powerful bores. But so far Netflix The Witcher turned the book version of the character into one that’s a barely competent jumble of bad ideas, false instincts, and inconsequential betrayal. One of the biggest advantages of an adaptation of The Witcher has always been the range it would have against the yen; Instead, the series broke her even more than the books.