The new season is also taking distinct advantage of the fact that its audience now has a grounding in this world-the characters, the setting, the basic rules, the stakes in play-and can get on with broadening and deepening those characters and their stories.
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The frantic pace eases up and the show seems to settle down, as if the creators have figured out where they’re going with the story and the characters, and how to get there without resorting to strange time-jumping shenanigans. Season 2 picks up precisely where Season 1 left off, but the change in tone becomes apparent almost immediately. The madness resolves itself at the very last shot of the Season 1 finale, when Geralt and his destined Child of Surprise Princess Cirilla (Freya Allan) more or less literally run into each other and their separate time-and-plotlines finally meet up.
For all its entertainment value, it gave me narrative whiplash now and then. Both the plot and the mood of the show jumped around erratically as a result.
The first season was a hectic, scattershot, often bewildering collision course of two (or arguably three) timelines, further muddied by two functionally immortal lead characters (Geralt and Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer of Vengerberg) whose lack of aging made it hard for the audience to grasp where we were in the timeline. The new season has a gravity and heft-and sense-to it that the previous season lacked.