What’s that you say? This fantasy show that has already featured one main character permanently physically transforming herself will find a way to explain an actor change in-universe? It may not be a surprise, but it’s certainly a relief to hear that the handover might be smoothed out by the show’s narrative. According to Baginski, the writers even found a way to do so that stays pretty consistent with the books.”Not going deeply into those ideas because this will be a huge spoiler,” he noted, but the recast plot is “also very, very close to the meta ideas which are deeply embedded in the books, especially in book five.”
Fans of Andrzej Sapkowski’s book series will no doubt start theorizing about what this could mean immediately, but the saga’s somewhat convoluted numbering system could help protect the big spoiler from getting out. While the fifth novel in the series is technically 1999’s “The Lady of the Lake,” Sapkowski has also written short stories that make “Time of Contempt,” the book the latest batch of Netflix shows is pulling from, the fifth book by some measures. Volume 1 of the new season ends on a famed plot point from “Time of Contempt,” but judging by Baginski’s assertion that the narrative choice is “meta,” he may well have been talking about the “The Lady of the Lake” after all. That book includes a framing narrative in which a character looks back on the story of Geralt and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra in the adaptation), now a historical legend, as it was told hundreds of years earlier.