The Witcher Season 4 Is Going to End In a Dark Place

The following article contains major spoilers for Andrzej Sapkowski’s penultimate The Witcher Saga novel, The Tower of Swallows.

Netflix’s high fantasy series The Witcher has plenty of dark elements: Terrifying monsters, deadly magic, and humans who are often more dangerous than any beast. (And that’s not even counting Witchers themselves, who are essentially born via a horrifying series of alchemical mutations.) But despite the many dangers the series hero, Geralt of Rivia, and his various companions have faced over the course of three seasons to date, the show has tended to wrap up each outing on a fairly positive note.

The series’s main trio of characters may be separated, and they might each have serious challenges ahead of them, but for the most part, there’s a sense of hope that things are moving in the proper direction. Apparently, that’s not going to be the case in season 4, and this penultimate batch of episodes may well end with one of the darkest moments in Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels.

Now that filming has officially wrapped on the show’s fifth and final season, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich sat down for a lengthy chat with IGN to discuss what’s ahead in The Witcher’s final two seasons. And apparently, there’s going to be quite a bit of trouble ahead for our faves — of a sort that can’t be entirely resolved in one season.

“We wrote both seasons back to back, we filmed them both back to back,” Hissrich said. “They’re coming out as two separate entities, but they really are one long story.”

The Witcher’s third season concluded with the series’ primary trio separated across the Continent. Badly wounded, Geralt (Henry Cavill, soon to be Liam Hemsworth) is on the hunt for the missing Princess Cirilla of Cintra (Freya Allan), his beloved Child of Surprise and a young witcher in training. Having done her best to heal Geralt, Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra) is off to rally the sorceresses of Aretuza to face off against the dark sorcerer, Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu). And as for Ciri, she’s once again on the run, hiding under the assumed name Falka among a group of young thieves known as The Rats. 

“Organically, this is where the stories were heading, no matter what,” Hissrich said. “We knew that by the end of season three that Ciri, Yennefer, and Geralt were each going to be on their own paths. They had to separate. That is what happens in the books. It just felt like the natural step for our show, too.”

But according to Hissrich, fans shouldn’t expect a family reunion between the three this season. In fact, it sounds like we’d better start preparing ourselves for some significant emotional trauma. 

“What was interesting for us is that most seasons end on, seasons one, two three, they end on an up note. You finally have the family reunited. We made a choice at the end of season four to have it end on quite a downbeat, to put people in this position where things have almost never looked worse,” she said. “Because for us, that was the only way to split this journey in half. And then in season five, start Geralt up again. Because really, once you start season four, it’s all about reuniting this family, and it takes 16 episodes to get there.”

Now in the world of The Witcher, the idea of our characters finding themselves in a position that’s somehow worse than anything they’ve ever faced leaves a lot of room for horrors of various stripes, considering this is a show that has included everything from simple torture to mass infanticide. But, if you’re at all familiar with Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher Saga, you might have an idea where at least one of these plot threads is likely going. And, unfortunately, our Lion Cub of Cintra is probably about to go through it once again, in large part because of an evil bounty hunter named Leo Bonhart (Sharlto Copley). 

A mercenary who casually sports an assortment of medallions he claims he got from the witchers he’s killed, Bonhart is a straight-up monster. In the penultimate Witcher novel, The Tower of Swallows, he takes Ciri prisoner and traumatizes her even further by forcing her to watch as he tortures and kills several people she cares about. It’s a gruesome sequence and the lowest of low points for our heroine, which means it’s also a perfectly bleak place to leave things ahead of her inevitable rise and triumph in the show’s finale. But while it’ll undoubtedly be great TV just… can this poor girl ever catch a break?

The Witcher season 4 premieres October 30 on Netflix.