How The Witcher: Blood Origin sets up The Witcher season 3
The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich tells RadioTimes.com exactly how Blood Origin sets the stage for the the next season of the original series.
As The Witcher season 2 came to a close, many questions were on fans' minds - who was that mysterious group of riders? What are these mysterious monoliths that Ciri is somehow connected to?
While it’s clear The Witcher is setting the stage to introduce some key characters from the books, this diversion from the novels’ storylines raised many questions not only for fans, but also for spin-off Blood Origin’s showrunner.
Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich revealed why it felt like the right time to tell the Conjunction of the Spheres: “It’s something that’s gravely important to us as we started to explore the Wild Hunt which is big in the series.
"The Conjunction of the Spheres is one of those things we obviously hear about as the origin of this world, with the arrival of humans and monsters, but Sapkowski doesn’t go into it much.”
The Witcher: Blood Origin showrunner Declan De Barra recalls the origin for the conception of the show came when he and Hissrich were attempting to map out Geralt and Ciri’s journey moving forward.
"We were trying to figure out a story point going forward, but we couldn’t answer it without knowing what happened before the Conjunction of the Spheres – we needed to know what the elves wanted. So, I did this big murder board of what it looked like beforehand, and that ended up becoming the basis of the show.”
It’s evident that both Hissrich and De Barra have enjoyed creating this standalone prequel to The Witcher, and with rumours of another spin-off in the works focusing on youth criminal gang The Rats, there may be a bright future for more Witcher stories on Netflix.
De Barra added: “Sapkowski is the king of the closed ended story, the more we read of his books, the broader the tapestry of the world. So that’s the advantage of doing all these – they might be standalone pieces, but they paint another side to this world and expand it outward. That’s the fun part.”
The Witcher: Blood Origin arrives on Netflix on Christmas Day 2022. Sign up for Netflix from £6.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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