If you haven't gotten through at least episode four of Netflix's new Witcher series and want to avoid spoilers, turn back now—because it's around episode four that it becomes clear the series' three main protagonists' stories are taking place across three separate timelines. It's something that's never explicitly hidden from the audience, but comes into focus when in that episode, Geralt helps unite Ciri's parents in their home kingdom of Cintra, when already in the first episode of Ciri's timeline, her parents were MIA and Cintra was destroyed. In a recent interview, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich revealed that the decision to tell the story across three timelines was inspired by Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk.
The roots of the dilemma that the Dunkirk-inspired decision helped solve are in Hissrich wanting to adapt storylines from the first Witcher book, The Last Wish, in which Ciri is absent. It makes sense to want to include both some of protagonist Geralt's formative moments, as well as Ciri as a primary character, due to her importance to the larger narrative told by The Witcher. So Hissrich simply started Geralt and Ciri's stories off at different moments in time.
Dunkirk too alternates between three stories. One takes place over the course of an hour, another a day, and the third a week. Not only does taking a similar approach to The Witcher solve the Ciri issue, but allows Geralt and Yennefer's magic-enhanced lifespans to be represented across larger periods of time, in contrast to the young Ciri, who is only ever a child through the show's first season. Hissrich specifies that Ciri's season one story takes place over about two weeks, Geralt's across about 20 years, and Yennefer's around 70 years.
Additionally, this approach helps to accommodate a variety of Witcher viewers. A slower start, rooted primarily in The Last Wish might have satisfied fans of the book series, but would have left those who have only played The Witcher 3—a sizable portion of Witcher fans—wondering just when their favorite characters would enter the picture.
All eight episodes of the first season of The Witcher are available now on Netflix.
Source: IGN