Everything to remember before The Witcher season 3

Netflix’s The Witcher is back for (half) of its third season on June 29, with the second half starting July 27, but even fans of the show might need a little refresher before returning to The Continent. After all, it’s been nearly two years since season two came out, and season one did all of that complicated Dunkirk-style timeline twisting, to say nothing of the fact that a spin-off prequel was released on Netflix since we last saw Geralt Of Rivia. That means there’s a fair amount of stuff worth remembering, so we’ve put together a handy guide for you.

Of course, if you don’t know anything about The Witcher, you should probably start with the first episode. That’s generally how television works. Or, if you’re in no rush, go read Andrzej Sapkowski’s original books. They’re great! Or go play CD Projekt Red’s video games, one of which is really good—though, standard disclaimer, the games take place after the books and break the canon a bit, but the show has played pretty loose with the canon already, so just do whatever you want. Anyway. Here’s what you need to know:

Season 3 is all about family

In the lead-up to the release of the new season, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich explained that the “theme” for the next batch of episodes is that “family is worth fighting for.” That may seem obvious to us regular people, but let’s not forget that Henry Cavill’s Geralt Of Rivia began this series as a solitary grump who killed monsters for money and hated any implication that there was some larger force at work in the universe—like destiny. But then he met Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer, made a wish to a genie that inadvertently bound their souls together, and realized that she was actually kind of important to him.

Destiny also bound Geralt to a little girl named Ciri (Freya Allan), rightful heir to a kingdom called Cintra, after her parents died under mysterious circumstances and her homeland was sacked by the army of a nearby empire called Nilfgaard, which had aspirations of world domination. Season two involved Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri coming together as a little family, with Geralt teaching his adopted daughter about the joys of killing monsters for money while Yennefer—a sorceress—passed on a few ill-advised lessons in magic.

And while not technically part of the family, there’s also Joey Batey’s Jaskier, who writes jaunty ballads about Geralt’s adventures. In season two, he was also involved with helping elf refugees, who are being persecuted due to a rising swell of pro-human, anti-elf sentiment in The Continent from the various ongoing wars and the elves’ annoying insistence on “defending their homeland” and “living.”

As it stands, most of our heroes are together and on good terms with each other by the start of season three, but it shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that might not last too much longer. After all …

Everyone is after Ciri now

Season two ended with a big reveal that the books dragged out until the very, very end of the saga: Ciri’s father didn’t die under mysterious circumstances; he faked his death to hide the fact that he’s actually Emperor Emhyr var Emreis, leader of Nilfgaard, and he really wants his daughter back. In the books, it was assumed that he wanted her so he could legitimize his claim to Cintra, her kingdom, after annexing it as part of his empire—though there was at least some indication that he just wanted his daughter back. We don’t know Emhyr’s specific reason for wanting Ciri in the show, but he has some competition.

Geralt wants to hold onto her, naturally, since he loves her and has more or less accepted her as his daughter at this point. There’s also Francesca, an elven sorceress whose miracle elf baby was murdered by Emhyr’s agents. She learned at the end of season two that Ciri has the “Elder Blood,” which is to say that she’s a descendant of the ancient golden age elves who lived in peace before humans and monsters showed up (more on that in a minute), so she might be the key to saving elf society.

Finally, there’s the Wild Hunt, a supposedly mythological group of undead horsemen who were briefly glimpsed when Ciri accidentally tapped into an alternate universe. The show didn’t say much else about them, but prequel series Blood Origin quietly revealed where they came from and introduced their leader, Eredin, commander of an elf army who was flung into a different dimension before a major event called The Conjunction Of The Spheres.

The Conjunction Of The Spheres will play a big part

This is as impenetrably nerdy as the Witcher saga gets, so it’s weird that Netflix has made it a big part of the show rather than letting it sit in the background as a nonsensical bit of world-building, but here we go: The Conjunction Of The Spheres happens at the end of Blood Origin, and it was when various worlds of the multiverse—the worlds of elves, humans, and monsters—all essentially merged together into what we know as the world of The Witcher, where humans and elves and monsters live together in total disharmony.

The main events of the show take place more than a thousand years later, but the aftermath of the Conjunction Of The Spheres will still be felt now that Ciri is tapping into her own magical powers and mysterious figures like the Wild Hunt and a time-traveling/dimension-hopping elf named Avallac’h (introduced as a side character in Blood Origin) are hanging around.

…as will Ithlinne’s Prophecy

Oh sorry, we take back what we said about the last thing being the most impenetrably nerdy part, because this is up there. In the Witcher lore—the books and the games and the show—characters regularly refer to a doomsday prophecy made by someone named Ithlinne. The full text is never revealed in the books, but the short version is that there will be a terrible war that kills off almost everyone followed by a devastating winter that kills almost everyone who is left, and if anyone survives it will be because of someone with the Elder Blood—like, say, Ciri.

Blood Origin revised this somewhat to make it more explicit that the prophecy is literally about Ciri, instead of just a vague jumble of words that can mean whatever you want it to mean. On the one hand, this is another destiny thing, which this series loves to play with, but on the other, this reduces what makes Ciri special. It’s funny that Geralt is just a tool of the invisible hand of fate because he hates it and because it undercuts his stubborn refusal to accept that he’s a traditional fantasy hero. It’ll be a bummer if Ciri is a tool of fate because it takes away some of her agency and it means that the various factions vying to control her are actually right.

Geralt is changing

Finally, let’s not forget that Geralt will be going through some changes. Henry Cavill stepped away from the role, possibly because he was hoping to play Superman again (which didn’t work out) or because of some not-so-secret issues he had with the direction the show was going in (Cavill, a big nerd, famously loves the Witcher books), and he’ll be replaced in The Witcher’s fourth season by Liam Hemsworth.

Executive producers Steve Gaub and Tomek Baginski have promised that there will be a “flawless” transition between the two actors and that it will be “very, very close to the meta ideas which are deeply embedded in the books.” For the record, there is no point in the books where Geralt totally changes his face or de-ages by almost a decade, buuut Baginski does note that it would be a “huge spoiler” to say exactly how they swap out the Geralts and he teases that it has something to do with “book five”—presumably referring to The Lady Of The Lake, the canonical final novel in the saga (the actual final book, Season Of Storms, is a standalone prequel of sorts).

To say much else probably would be a big spoiler, but we will point out that we have used the word “multiverse” a few times already, and that’s a thing that comes up in that book, so anyone placing bets on how they justify it might want to start thinking in that direction.