If season one was a mostly enjoyable adaptation of the books with some creative interpretation, this season was a high budget fanfic. Viewers who haven’t read the source material might still enjoy it, but for those who’ve read the books you’ll probably be as baffled as me about some of the changes they made to key characters/story arcs/relationships. Obviously some changes need to be made when moving from print to screen but (without spoiling anything here) several key moments this season were so fundamentally different that it’s hard to see how they’ll tell the Witcher story faithfully in future seasons.
A stinking mess of bad CGI and hamfisted exposition, riddled with plot holes/
average dialogue, and topped off with changes to the core values and arcs of the main characters that make them flat, boring and unrelatable. It’s not as bad as the movie but I don’t understand why it needed to be made.
Beautifully shot with solid performances from Simon Baker and Rob Collins, but I found the story a bit lacking. Most of the movie centred on Travis driving around in a black dodge with a rotating cast of passengers (I found myself wondering how he got a week of use out of it when his Holden was hotwired on night one) and I found the relationships he developed with Charlie and Emma more convenient than believable, as we were explicitly made to believe that First Nations people in town had been chronically mistreated by the cops, yet he somehow won their complete trust over the space of a few days without really doing anything more than half-heartedly investigating a 20-year old case. At the very least I felt like there could have been a more opaque juxtaposition between him and the local cops, where he proved to them that he wasn’t just another policeman coming into town to dig up some old trauma and generate some false hope before disappearing over the horizon.
Agree with duyfken, Charlie Hunnam’s accent comes out as some weird hybrid of an Aussie, Kiwi and South African with all the wrong intonation and it detracts from the experience.
The first five episodes were great, the final two weaker and a bit rushed. Still worth a watch but couldn’t help feel there was a missed opportunity here.
