The Third Prequelf: The Witcher – Blood Origins

I don’t have any notable summaries for the year 2022. It was a year, it happened and is still happening to some of you as I write this. One thing of cultural note that occurred was the creation of a costly but underwhelming sub-sub-sub-genre of prestige streaming fantasy television, a sub-sub-sub-genre that I hereby name The Prequelf.

In short, a prequel is a fantasy series set in the historical period of a successful film/televisual fantasy property at a time when the elves were in charge. The big-budget prequelfs were, of course, The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon. The worrisome fans of George R.R. Martin’s world will reasonably object that the Targaryens of Valyria aren’t “elves” and if we were to map them to Middle Earth groupings they would more closely resemble Numenorians. For our purposes, they are elves though.

Scraping in as the year came to a close was a third prequelf, whose appearance confirms the straight line drawn through the points that confirms that 2022 was the Year of the Prequelf.

Three Prequelfs for the Streamers in their House of Cards! Amazon, HBO and lastly and maybe leastly, Netflix with The Witcher – Blood Origins. Only two of them have Lenny Henry in them though, so he’s not a formal requirement.

Set hundreds of years before the events of the Witcher series, Blood Origins takes us back to a previous age in which the elves are still in charge and charts the events that have been alluded to in the main series. However, Blood Origins deploys a masterful move that gives it a massive advantage over the other, better funded, prequelfs: it’s short.

Just four episodes long and in the last episode, we get right to the background set-up events of the main series. Whatever else you might say about this show, it really is four episodes and you are done. Story is over. Cosmic cataclysm done. Origin story established. Lingering plot lines all shunted forward into the main series. It’s compact, complete and no need to wonder/worry whether there will be a second series.

Aside from that though, it is not great. The best episode is the last episode which does deliver a decent finale. Yet despite being only four episodes long, it spends a long time on setting up the basic plot, including an awkward framing device in which Jaskier (the fun bard character from the main show) is tasked by Minnie Driver with learning about a heroic story from a thousand years prior.

Initially, in episode one, I was getting irritated by what seemed to be the show running headlong into modern TV epic fantasy cliches, all with a narrator trying to explain the set-up. What it is actually trying to do is a sort of classic pulp sword-and-sorcery story with all the standard beats. There’s a point where a plot cliche isn’t so much a cliche as a defining element of a type of story. In short, a band of heroes, must come together and defeat the moderately-evil queen and her more substantially evil dark magician. If that’s what you are after, it’s fine and by episode 4 it’s not bad and there isn’t an episode 5, which mitigates any further complaints.

There’s fighting, monsters, a magical swamp, Michelle Yeoh as a master swordswoman, Dylan Moran turns up in episode 4 and you get to say “oh look, it’s Lenny Henry with prosthetic ears” again.

But on to the central problem with prequelfs. The selling point for all prequelfs is the suggestion that viewers will get more of the same but with a different plot. You liked Lord of the Rings? Well, what if you could watch a different story in the same world? Loved Westeros? What if you could go back to that? Enjoyed Herny Cavill as the Witcher? Well, what if you can go to the same world but it has Lenny Henry in it?

All three mine the back story of the properties to deliver an extra hit of middle-earthy-place but that back story is about a different part of history. It would be weird to make a series about, say, the Tudors and then set a story hundred years earlier that had the same sort of world. I guess House of Dragon can not unreasonably claim that to a general audience, vaguely late medieval covers the couple of centuries involved. The Rings of Power makes some attempt to make the setting distinct from that of later Middle Earth but it only sometimes hits a mythic atmosphere. Blood Origin really only makes a token effort.

Aesthetically, this is just the same sort of setting as the main Witcher series. The world doesn’t have the signature monsters (at least not right at the start) and there are no humans. However, the lack of humans just means the same tough-talking mix of palaces and taverns is populated by the same sort of people but they all have pointy ears. The slightly mysterious and oppressed elves of the main series, are just the regular people of Blood Origin. There’s a point to that but it makes it look like the net impact of cosmic calamity and a thousand years, is that shape of ears changed.

And fair enough — how do you humanise characters that are intended to be literally not just a different species but a species that has an inherent otherworldliness to them (even if, strictly speaking, the humans in this setting are the ones from another world)? More broadly, if you rest your fantasy world on the generic faux-middle-ages Europe (even with diverse casting) then the “past” will look just the same as the present. The story has great, earth-shattering events but without a sense of historical change (not necessarily “progress” in a positive sense but change in fashion, religion, belief, politics and culture) then the world will feel static. That stasis is baked into the premise that the prequelf offers more of the same but with more elves as with the nature of history can be measured by either the ratio of elves or their relative political status.

Epic fantasy, in particular, offers the promise that the past was more fantastical than our present. The modern is mundane and the past is magical. In Tolkien’s Silmarillion, he builds in this gradient to the phases of the story. We start with abstract musical interplay with gods, then the story moves to a heaven-like world of gods and elves where the forces of corruption and pride lead to a group of elves heading to middle-earth and so on.

The only fantasy show that maybe has thought of a way around this, was Amazon’s Wheel of Time adaptation. In Robert Jordan’s setting, the magical gradient is a cycle (the literal wheel of time) and the deeper lore of the setting imagines a previous cycle where the world was both more magical and more technologically advanced. We get a very limited view of this past world on the show but what we do see is visually distinct from the main setting.

I suspect that is all the prequelfs we will be getting for the time being. None of these series were quite as bad as their most strident critics suggested and yet each had a vague air of disappointment to them.